A short, cheeky homage to Henry Purcell, commissioned in the year of his 350th anniversary.  Also celebrating the 40th anniversary year of the Fitzwilliam Quartet who commissioned it and have given it many performances since then.  

Fantazia

This first movement was written in parallel with a beautiful short poem by John Kinsella, which makes a perfect epigram for the music:
        The growth of ancient stone at twilight
	is sensed by one whose sight
	is honed by the pulse of the river,
	math of bridges, microcosm of pasture.


String Quartet I Spacious

A movement from Ouija, where the solo violinist is a spirit medium, communing with invisible voices from the past.  Here they try singing a line into the void, and soon find themselves buoyed and soaring among a whole crowd of voices singing similar lines, like swimming in the midst of a shoal of fish. 
Played by Peter Sheppard Skaerved.  

Among Voices

A movement from Ouija, where the solo violinist is a spirit medium, communing with invisible voices from the past.  Here s/he discovers a vast crowd of all those who have played, listened to and loved Bach's music for solo violin - the sound of the innumerable voices of this crowd is like a reverberation of Bach, in which the soloist can lose themselves. 
Solo violin: Peter Sheppard Skaerved.

Under The Shadow Of Wings

For me, those two words side by side – search / engines – conjure up powerful images. There’s not only the vision of new machineries, but also a sense of aspiration, of deep enquiry. In the background are legendary forebears: Stevenson’s Rocket, Babbage’s Calculating Engines, the Hubble space probe, among many others. ‘Search engine’ was an artful choice of name for today’s explorers of the worldwide web, resonating with the imagery found on many web browsers –glimpses of the infinite recesses of outer space; search beams scanning across the darkness, probing the myriad pinpoints of distant light.

Together, the two words suggest voyages of discovery, pioneering and even heroic, through territories at once spatial and mental, technological and imaginative. It’s these evocative images that form the starting-point for my piece.

Search Engines

These haunting words by Emily Dickinson vividly convey the exhilaration of a great challenge, and at the same time, courage in the face of the unknown, and mortality.   I chose to set them for voices, unaccompanied, opening up the tiny, self-contained form of the original poem (two short stanzas) by combining it with verses from two other poems. In writing the music I have tried to evoke both the changing moods of a real seascape and something of the poetry’s emotional charge. The piece is dedicated to the memory of Jo Campling.

Exultation Is The Going

In March 1818 Keats was haunted by a nightmare. His thoughts and moods were invaded obsessively by sudden visions, in brilliant and unwanted clarity, of the remorselessly savage cycles of the natural world – what Tennyson later called ‘Nature, red in tooth and claw’. I chanced across Keats’ ruminations on these terrifying and melancholic visions in a strange, rambling verse letter he wrote to his friend J.H Reynolds, and soon found myself wanting to set them to music.

Unbidden Visions

This short piece is embroidered around a song by Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300-1377), a virelai for which he wrote both words and music.  My piece re-presents the melody, and evokes the spirit of the poetry too, perhaps, on modern instruments (flute and piano) and refracted through a vastly different, twenty-first-century sensibility.

Jeremy Thurlow

Virelai

Written for the six outstanding players of Endymion in partnership with two renowned Indian musicians from the Raga tradition, Endlessly enmeshed weaves together their sounds and their musical imaginations into a complex and intimate intertwining.

Endlessly enmeshed

Imagine notes reproducing like cells, one by one at first, til they gain a critical mass and become a seething swarm, an organism, driven by the collective 'will' of its own cells.  A solo piano piece for virtuosos only.

The will of the tones

ultradian rhythms

The sea takes back the coast, and Orfordness Lighthouse with it

Light - dark - sea

height and depth, weight and lightness, density and void, near and far, mind and emptiness

Dr K sextet

Elephant of the clouds

Ladder of the escaping eye

Sea-Cradling

Stephen Romer's soul-searching poem from 'Set thy love in order', set for six voices with alto flute and harp.

Over the frost

Like Under the Shadow of Wings, this is another tape piece made entirely from violin sounds.  But the effect is completely different (and while the source of the other piece was Bach, this one is made entirely of Paganini's Caprices).  Together with Under the Shadow, it's part of a 5-movement piece for solo violin and tape called Ouija, which I wrote for the fabulous violinist Peter Sheppard Skaerved.  

jeremythurlow

Popular tracks