Written in a single night for a workshop with Scottish Opera, and performed at sight the next morning by some incredible musicians.
Words by Caroline Campbell.

Manny the Mannequin

(AKA "A Song for Someplace")
Performed on the 1st of April 2015 by Spectrum for the 2015 Carlaw/Ogston Composition Award

This piece uses material originally composed as a movement of a piano quartet which focused on the development and simultaneous variation of a few melodic fragments - but then re-worked in new ways and incorporating an entirely new section based on my first experiment with spectral composition - prompted by discovering the music of Gérard Grisey and Tristan Murail.
Spurred on by a sense of "how hard could it be?" I decided to try my hand at spectral composition, and obtained the spectra of a soprano voice, and various percussion instruments. I then proceeded to try and orchestrate them for the forces available - while also trying only to select partials of the spectra that would allow them to match the colours of the rest of the piece. 
The result is a piece of music in three sections - The two outer sections that focus on the rhythmic interplay between the instruments and the interactions between the different melodic fragments, and then the middle section where the music seems to open itself up into a series of resonances, and explores the interactions between singular notes and timbres as the spectra are allowed to develop in the surrounding acoustic.
One day I will learn how to write music that's easy to perform.

Interplay

Chasing Mavericks

Evermore (Mockup)

Cooper Square

Choral setting of Carol Ann Duffy's 'War Photographer' in four movements. 

Conductor: Andreas Stensholt 
Choir: Aberdeen University Chamber Choir

Recorded in Aberdeen on 24/09/15.

Text: War Photographer (Carol Ann Duffy)

In his dark room he is finally alone
with spools of suffering set out in ordered rows.
The only light is red and softly glows,
as though this were a church and he
a priest preparing to intone a Mass.
Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh. All flesh is grass.

He has a job to do. Solutions slop in trays
beneath his hands, which did not tremble then
though seem to now. Rural England. Home again
to ordinary pain which simple weather can dispel,
to fields which don’t explode beneath the feet
of running children in a nightmare heat.

Something is happening. A stranger’s features
faintly start to twist before his eyes,
a half-formed ghost. He remembers the cries
of this man’s wife, how he sought approval
without words to do what someone must
and how the blood stained into foreign dust.

A hundred agonies in black and white
from which his editor will pick out five or six 
for Sunday’s supplement. The reader’s eyeballs prick
with tears between the bath and pre-lunch beers.
From the aeroplane he stares impassively at where
he earns his living and they do not care.

War Photographer

A Better Tomorrow

Winning track from the 2018 Marvin Hamlisch Film Scoring Contest for Emerging Composers. Fun fact, the ticking at the start is from my Grandmothers old clock!

War Photographer

Benjamin McMillan

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