String Quartets featured highly in my first year at Trinity. I'm satisfied with the clarity of idea and development in Flint and Spear Part II.  It has a Stravinskyan way of regurgitating almost the same motif quite repetitively without blunting the impact; and locks into very potent rhythmic patterns that allow for lyricism in the melodic lines that accompany it.
Written in 2008-2009

03 Work Without Hope

Year 1 Compositions

Flint and Spear Part II

Flint and Spear Part I

This is was created with some wonderful colleagues at Trinity Laban between 2010-2012

Piano Trombone Trumpet Trio Improvisation Session 1

Piano Trombone Trumpet Trio Improvisation Session 2

Mynydd Hyddgen

Music: Aled Idris Start (2009)
Text: Julian Turner

ca. 5-6 minutes


PROGRAMME NOTE
This piece was first written as part of a collaborative project bringing composers and poets together as part of Leeds Lieder+ Festival 2009. I was excited to work with Julian Turner due to his fascination with Welsh culture, his father being a scholar of ancient Celtic languages, and his style of writing. His poetry had a uniquely British energy; reflective, dark and pessimistic. I felt this would convey united Wales, fighting off the incessant yoke of English rule, a justice that other poets could not achieve.
His work did inspire me to write a piece infused with modal references to Celtic music, and to give it a narrative character that is not so present in my other works. 
It was written with Gordon Waterson specifically in mind as the counter-tenor.
The piece has gone on to be selected for re-performance at the University of Leeds Festival of Contemporary Music in April 2010 and will be arranged for soprano on this occasion.

Mynydd Hyddgen

words: Samuel Taylor Coleridge
music: Aled Start
Work Without Hope
   

Lines composed 21st February, 1825

All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair - 
The bees are stirring -birds are on the wing - 
And Winter slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!
And I the while, the sole unbusy thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.

Yet well I ken the banks where amaranths blow,
Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow.
Bloom, O ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may,
For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away!
With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll:
And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul?
Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And Hope without an object cannot live.           


Programme Note
Work Without Hope is a musical realisation of Coleridge's poem. It is based on the words not dictated by them. On occasions the piano and voice work congruously and in other places the two create contrasting colours, as in the stacatto piano finale. The repeated rhythmic patterns in the piano part represent the 'chugging away' of nature's unending 'work'.


Work Without Hope

Convergence performed by the Raw Stories Collective.
Big up Pat Thomas who-because this was close micd (at a concert at TrinityLaban) last year sounds louder than anyone else. No bad thing. An interesting recording. Enjoy!

Convergence

for 15 musicians (Trinity College of Music Contemporary Music Group)
Performed at the Great Hall, Blackheath Halls 2 February 2012 as a shortlisted composition for the Daryl Runswick Prize.
Conducted by Gregory Rose (http://www.gregoryrose.org/)

Programme Note

Having spent some time deconstructing Nancarrow scores with Andrew Poppy, I was drawn to the effectiveness of the techniques he used and decided to take a little foray into the enchanting world of multi-tempi. Bryan Appleyard’s book ‘The brain is wider than the Sky’ was also an inspiration in seeking to convey the inherent complexity of biological systems. As the title suggests this music refers generically to the double helix, but could be transported to any situation, my main point being that the music should convey more than the sum of its parts. I have also sought to musically convey aspects of chaos theory, namely that although there are some logical, causal sequences which immediately make sense to the ear, the way in which they play out in reality is far more complex and unpredictable than we would like to think.


Helix

This draft composition was created to accompany I'm Fine, a podcast dedicated to Mental Health for young people and produced by students at School 21, Stratford. 
www.school21.org.uk

#I'm Fine Initial Composition Sketch

Performed by The Raw Stories Ensemble at Trinity Laban's Rude Health 2011 Concert which I co-curated.

Canon

This was performed by Trinity Laban Orchestra in 2011 and was my first piece for full orchestra.
The piece is inspired by Charles Le Gai Eaton's book King of The Castle: Choice and Responsibility in the Modern World

Unreal Cities

Programme Note
I wrote this piece as a contemplation of geometric stained glass windows that I have seen in the Muslim world, most strikingly at the Alhambra and in the old city of Sana’a, Yemen. There are numerous rhythmic gestures that are symmetrical, and through the stasis of the harmonic material I wanted first of all to pare our hearing down to the uniformity of those notes and their overtones, then magnify and alter that perception through rhythmic inflections. The juxtaposition of lush melodies against unyielding rhythms draw our ears to a kind of the unity of opposites.


Piecing together stained glass

Aled Start (b. 1988)

Runner-up, Ty Cerdd Young Composer of Wales 2014
Finalist 2012 Daryl Runswick Prize. 
Overall Winner, 2010 Young Composer of Dyfed
Winner, 2009 Trinity College of Music String Quartet Composition Competition 
Age group category winner, 2009 Young Composer of Dyfed

Works have been performed by the Alba Brass Quintet, O Duo, Vardanyan String Quartet, Lunar Saxophone Quartet, Trinity College Early Music Ensemble, Meridian String Quartet, John Richards’ Dirty Electronics Ensemble, The Orion Orchestra, Contemporary Music Group (CMG) at Trinity and several other chamber ensembles.
Aled graduated from Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in 2012. He studied / took seminars with Donnacha Dennehy, Lynne Plowman, Paul Barker, Graham Fitkin, Mark Lockheart, Edward Jessen, Heiner Goebbels, Tristan Murail, George Fenton, Michael Finnissy, Christian Wolff and Dominic Murcott. His tutors were Stephen Montague, Errollyn Wallen, Deirdre Gribbin and Gwyn Pritchard.

His past interests were dominated with opera and setting texts to compositions, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Work Without Hope which received several performances in London, to Leeds poet Julian Turner’s Mynydd Hyddgen for Leeds Lieder Festival 2009.

Starting in 2009, Aled organised several concerts and was bandleader, organiser and composer for The Raw Stories Collective (www.therawstories.co.uk); a new music group blurring scored and improvised compositional techniques comprising 10 musicians including acclaimed violinist Satoko Fukuda, avante garde pianist Pat Thomas and counter tenor Gordon Waterson. The libretto is supplied by American poet Daniel Moore. 

His current interests are pared-down ensemble sizes and working with singers, percussion and string timbres.

Aled has keen and broad interests including travel, philosophy and cycling. He is fluent in English, Welsh and Arabic.


Aled Start

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