The Harp of Wales

I Fear The Joy Of Digital Transcendence

Performed by La Filharmonie and Camerata Strumentale "Città di Prato", conducted by Nima Keshavarzi. 

This piece won First Prize at the Dante 700 Orchestral Composition Competition. I think it's a really beautiful performance and this was - hands down - one of the most positive, exciting, professionally-assured, and warm experiences of my career. Wonderful from start to finish!

Also, double props for the superstar trumpet player getting those high notes around 5:30.

The waves I ride have never yet been crossed

This is a fun piece for solo ukulele. It's tough!

SCHOLASTICS | solo ukulele

Performed at the Tanglewood Music Centre / Summer 2022

2022-08-13 1100AM CD1

Every Montage in the Universe

Performed at Seiji Ozawa Hall at the Tanglewood Music Center by the amazing 2023 Tanglewood Music Center Double Bass Fellows and Armand Birk (conducting).

THOUSANDTH HYMNAL was commissioned by the Tanglewood Music Center with the generous support of the Merwin Geffen M.D. and Norman Solomon M.D. New Commissions Fund. It is dedicated to John Metcalf (with additional thanks to double bass players Ashley John Lewis and Callum Duggan).

2023-07-08 0600PM CD1

THOUSANDTH HYMNAL for seven double basses

Performed at the Mostly Modern Music Festival by the American Modern Ensemble. Generously support by a Mostly Modern Fellowship.

Summer Classic | Chamber Ensemble

Eternal Branching is a piece for solo electric guitar. It is developed from my concerto The Curse of the Bedroom Guitarist - written for the wonderful CoMA London during my time as Composer in Residence - and requires the performer to make use of a delay effect (alongside chorus and reverb)
to create a seemingly endless pattern of repeating pitches from each note the guitarist plays (the titular eternal branching). There are plenty of examples of this in popular repertoire, The Temper Trap's fantastic 2008 one-hit wonder "Sweet Disposition" being mine. 

Reverb and chorus can give an ambient, blurred sheen to the resultant rhythm created with the delay and the challenge for the guitarist is to maintain a strong and clear staccato throughout most of the piece - providing the sonic space and strength for the relatively simple arpeggiated patterns they must play to be heard. In the final bars, I manipulate the dotted quaver pattern of the delay to create a metric modulation. This is something that will be heard and performed very different depending on the performer's delay - a fun dice roll to close the piece.

ETERNAL BRANCHING for solo electric guitar

Performed by the Orion Orchestra at Cadogan Hall, February 2018. Commissioned by Dyson and the Orion Orchestra.

Acoustical Anatomy

An excerpt taken from the final movement of True Great. A piece of music about growing up in South Wales.

Performed by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales (https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcnow) as part of Composition Wales 2019, conducted by B Tommy Andersson.

True Great (excerpt taken from movement 3)

Roche - Wind Of God

Waves Of Love (for orchestra)

www.davidjohnroche.com

David John Roche’s music is direct, determined, and loud. Strongly influenced by heavy metal, lush orchestral music, and his working-class Welsh background, he has been marked out as a “clear-minded and class-conscious artist” (Culture Matters) and “one of the most energetic, driven, and successful of Wales’s millennial generation of composers” (Tŷ Cerdd). David’s work has been described as “exquisite” (Adam Walton, BBC Introducing Wales), praised for its “ingenious scoring” (The Arts Desk), and complimented for its “passages of intense expressive power” (Thomas Adès). His compositions have been broadcast, televised, and written about internationally to millions of people.

A string of international performances and commissions form the backbone of David’s work: BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, Florence Philharmonic, Zhejiang Symphony Orchestra, Tanglewood Music Center, Psappha Ensemble, and the Solem Quartet, among others.  David has been nominated for an award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been the recipient of an Arts Council England Developing Your Creative Practice Grant and a Lithuanian Arts Council grant. He has just completed an electric guitar concerto for Sean Shibe, Sinfonia Cymru, and Britten Sinfonia, and he is currently finishing his first symphony-length work for orchestra, funded by Aberystwyth University, Tŷ Cerdd, and the Arts Council of Wales.

davidjohnroche

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