I - distant, with a slowly building yet restrained intensity

Performed by Ensemble neoN at MATA Festival, NYC.
Commissioned by MATA.
3 minute extract of a 15-20 minute piece for sextet (Bari sax, percussion, piano, violin, bass guitar, soprano). 
The piece mixes fully notated passages with cueing instructions/cueing games in different sections of the piece.

Splinter - Extract

Synth demo of a spoken word piece based on a poem by Ali Naqvi - hoping to re record this with live strings and the poet himself reading it!

Ramo Osmanovic (demo version - poem by Ali Naqvi)

Peter Kramer, piano 
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YYpggo0Dpg
Artwork: Louis Finson, Allegory of the Four Elements, 1611

JS Bach - French Suite No.3 in B minor (Sarabande)

Commissioned by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in celebration of their 50th Anniversary as part of their 2023/24 Season' Grand Tour of Scotland with principal conductor Maxim Emelyanychev. Premiered at Perth Concert Hall and Theatre on 27th September 2023. Recored live at Glasgow's City Halls on 29th September 2023.

The Origin of Colour takes its inspiration from a short story in Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics series called Without Colours, which tells a surrealist tale of the creation of colour on Earth. In the beginning, the world exists in whites and greys where objects and people are shapeless entities bumping into each other in translucent static hues. Suddenly a meteor rips through the sky illuminating the world for the first time highlighting purple chasms and orange mountains; earthquakes emit blue fluids to form the first oceans; the violet Sun sets for the first time; the first black night reveals the stars; newly formed pink clouds unleash golden lightning; post-storm rainbows appear and now the world is full of blue skies, yellow fish, green trees and red fires. Calvino’s story is, above all, a love story between two characters who find and lose each other in the chaos of the Earth’s formation of colour. The dazzling quality of these new colours leaves one particular character in fear of this chaotic new world, and they decide to hide in a cave where colour did not reach. One final earthquake collapses the entrance to the cave leaving them isolated from their lover and the colourful new world on the other side.

This new showpiece for Chamber Orchestra attempts to capture Calvino’s creation story in a musical journey that maps the creation of colour on Earth from the hollow, translucent landscape described by Calvino to a kaleidoscopically vibrant world which is both beautiful and terrifying in equal measure.

Thumbnail: From 5 panels of artwork inspired by The Origin of Colour by artist Kirsty Matheson

The Origin of Colour for Chamber Orchestra (Live Excerpt with SCO & Maxim Emelyanychev)

Commissioned by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra as part of their 21/22 Season. Premiered by Scottish Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Sir James MacMillan on 11th November 2021 at Queen's Hall, Edinburgh. This excerpt was recorded and broadcast by BBC Radio 3 and performed live by Scottish Chamber Orchestra, conducted by SCO Principal Guest Conductor Andrew Manze on 1st November 2024 as part of the Nordic Music Days Festival 2024 at City Halls, Glasgow.

Death in a Nutshell is inspired by Frances Glessner Lee’s “Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death” which are a series of 20 re-creations of real-life crime scenes that she intricately fashioned in minute detail within dollhouse-sized rooms. These macabre miniature death-scenes were painstakingly handcrafted by Lee throughout the 1940/50s as a learning tool in forensic and crime scene investigation, and often depict a domestic scenario furnished in 1940s décor in which the body of a doll (or dolls) can be found. Each diorama presents a set of clues regarding the events that led up to the doll’s demise including witness statements and important details about the time of year and even the temperature of the room; all of which offer clues to the solution of a puzzle that can be solved from the objects found within each room. These studies have proved so successful that they are still used today and are housed at the Maryland Medical Examiner’s Officer in Baltimore, where the true solutions are kept firmly under lock and key.

This piece focuses on 6 of Lee’s grisly Nutshell Studies in an attempt to represent 6 different crime-scenes as musical miniatures that hint at a variety of elaborate clues and evidence which form their potential solutions. The work is constructed like a house in which we promenade from room to room, starting in the parlour and wandering all the way to the attic, where we find a deceased doll (or dolls) in each room as well a new mystery to be solved. This morbid tour unfolds as follows:

1. Malleus Dei (in the Parsonage Parlour)

2. The Colossus (in the Kitchen)

3. A Drowned Sorrow (in the Dark Bathroom)

4. Interlude pour l’esprit de l’escalier (on the Stairs)

5. The Family Plot (in the Three-Room Dwelling)

6. Hanging upon your every word (in the Attic)

Leave no stone unturned, no note unscrutinised, “convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell”, in this macabre collection of miniature pieces inspired by a dollhouse unlike any other.

Death in a Nutshell for Chamber Orchestra (Excerpt) - 1.Malleus Dei (in the Parsonage Parlour)

16 players & fixed media
fl(=picc & alto).ob.cl.bsn(=cbsn) – perc(2) – pno(=cel) – hp – str: 1.1.1.1.1
20′
2024

Immense Bleak Electric Advertisement of God has not yet been publicly performed, but was workshopped by Octandre Ensemble with the help of artistic directors Jon Hargreaves and Christian Mason and the musicians listed below.

RECORDING
From a workshop by Octandre Ensemble, Milton Court Concert Hall, September 2024

MUSICIANS
Cond: Jon Hargreaves

Flute: Noemi Gyori
Oboe: Anna Durance
Clarinet: Adam Slater
Bassoon: Patrick Bolton

Horn: Julian Faultless
Trumpet: Shane Brennan
Trombone: Raph Clarkson

Percussion 1: Calum Huggan
Percussion 2: Angela Wai Nok Hui

Harp: Anneke Hodnett

Piano: Jo Havlat

Vn I: Mandhira de Saram
Vn II: Rosie Kennally
Va: Chihiro Ono
Vc: Corentin Chassard
Cb: Rosie Moon

Immense Bleak Electric Advertisement of God

Nexus (for accordion and electronics)

9’56''

Introductory note

‘in my maze’ is an independent sound composition based on a walk-in 3D installation that I developed in Second Life in 2024. It was inspired by my many years of work with the Avatar Orchestra Metaverse. To me, Second Life is not a game, but rather an artistic medium — a walk-in chat room complete with spatial stereo sound and 3D video. As a composer, builder and performer, I utilise its immersive capabilities in ways that transcend the concepts of commercial metaverses.

Avatars traverse my semi-transparent sound labyrinth, activating location-based sound objects and generating sound sequences that emerge from the situation. Their paths are an expression of their individual freedom to create sound in digital space. As with simultaneous chats, streams and background processes, time becomes fragmented and runs in parallel. Sonic coherence emerges through movement and interaction. 

Transformed swallow calls (natural sound), glockenspiel notes (human musical instrument) and modulated sine tones (digital world) intertwine to form a new tonal topology. Above a fundamental tone of 200 Hz, I construct pure minor thirds (6:5) that do not form octaves, producing audible beats. This is accompanied by my whispered text, 'Ancestralities' – a multilingual, poetic, fragmentary exploration of origin, inherited patterns, and emotional ambivalence towards one's own ancestry. 

By encoding interactive spatial structures as multi-layered sound forms, my maze subverts conventional listening experiences and deliberately sets transgressive impulses in motion. Rather than presenting 'internet music' as an aesthetic of permanent streaming, the composition offers an acoustic cartography of a metaverse in which the perception of time, identity and space can be experienced in sensual, fragmented and ambivalent ways. 

I 'play' my original Second Life installation as though it were an interactive instrument. Its spatial arrangement forms the tonal basis of an original fixed media composition. The labyrinth structure is translated into a rhizomatic network architecture comprising branching paths and an open form with no linear dramaturgy. Like the labyrinth itself, the text fragments reflect inner and genealogical turmoil.

A performance video by the Avatar Orchestra Metaverse documents the audiovisual context of my 3D installation in Second Life (https://youtu.be/4CRTNbabxw4?si=m6OJsFsW7oPFxEeA&t=1255, from 20:08). All the sounds you hear were played in real time by the avatars in Second Life during the performance. This is not a recording or post-production soundtrack.

in my maze (2025)

RegularMusic_Smith

University of York Chamber Orchestra, conducted by John Stringer.
I - distant, with a slowly building yet restrained intensity
II - with more warmth (2:43)
III - dry (7:02)
IV - more unified (9:34)

trees and paths I loved fade

A setting for solo voice and piano of text by Alfred Noyes, performed by Simone Ibbett-Brown – Mezzo-Soprano & Frances M Lynch - Piano
Recorded individually in the musicians homes during the Covid-19 Pandemic and first performed for a Soundings from Essex event in August 2020 https://www.electricvoicetheatre.co.uk/

“I cannot tell why,
But the rustling of grass,
As the summer winds pass thro’ the fields where I lie,
Brings to life a lost day, 
Long ago, 
Far away,
When in childhood I lay, 
Looking up at the sky, and the white clouds that pass, 
Trailing isles of grey shadow across the gold grass,
O, the dreams that drift by,
With the slow flowing years, hopes, memories, tears
In the rustling of grass.”

The Rustling of Grass by Avril Coleridge-Taylor

Composer currently based in Manchester, UK.

trees and paths I loved fade

Benjamin Gait

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