Composed in 1996. 
Dedicated to Anton Lukoszevieze.
Studio recording made in 2004.
Apartment House: Andrew Sparling (clarinet), Anton Lukoszevieze (cello), Sarah Walker (electric organ).
From 'Chamber Works 1992 - 2009' (Another Timbre at74x2)

Chamber Works 1992 - 2009 [Disc 1]

Riis

Live performance

Ekmeles, directed by Jeffrey Gavett
Moore Musical Arts Center, Bowling Green State University, Ohio
22 November 2021

Madrigal book in 31-TET (2012-16) after Nicola Vicentino
Texts adapted from Jacques Arcadelt's Primo Libro de' Madrigali (1539)

Primo Libro

'It is the evening hour' is performed in this recording by Liam Bonthrone (tenor) and Laura Roberts (piano), the fifth song of a cycle of John Clare Settings, 'Love Songs for Mary Joyce'.

On the 20th July 1841 poet John Clare escaped from High Beach private asylum in Epping Forest and with the help of gypsies, walked over four days back to his roots in rural Northamptonshire. Travelling virtually barefoot, with little more than a crust of bread or even grass to eat, Clare was desperately searching – in part for his lost childhood, but more importantly for his first love, Mary Joyce, the poetic muse of these troubled later years, whose memory inspired Clare to produce a substantial body of lyric poetry, despite his ever deteriorating mental state.

Clare captured his experience in an extraordinary autobiographical account, Recollections of Journey from Essex, powerful for its unremitting and harrowing honesty. Love Songs for Mary Joyce is the first in a series of creative responses, which renders six of Clare’s Mary poems as a cycle, mapped out against the events of his Journey from Essex, which become an underlying narrative frame. 

Four of the six Clare poems chosen were clearly conceived as words without songs and the approach here has been to suspend them on musical lines, which respect the clear surface patterns of the lyrics while exploring the irregularities that lie beneath.  In these ‘songs’ – numbers 2, 3, 4 and 6 – the tenor voice follows his line as Clare followed his road, embedded in musical landscapes that shift and change like the weather. 

Songs 1 and 6 function more as art songs – Say What is Love declaring the cycle’s subject as a kind of preface. Song 5, It is the evening hour, is perhaps the most ‘sophisticated’ of the six poems, and the musical response is closer to German romantic song, haunted by the uncannily close contemporaneity of Clare’s Mary poems with Schumann’s year of song (1840) in which the Heine Liederkreis op 24 was completed.

Real-time events intrude just once: in song 3, where the three stanzas of I sleep with thee, and wake with thee are broken by two prose fragments from Clare’s ‘Recollections', describing a troubled night of sleep on the 20th July 1841. Here Mary Joyce is referred to as Clare’s ‘first wife’, Clare wrongly imagining that he’d married her. His actual wife, Patty, was to find her husband at the end of his journey on the 23rd July, crippled and scarcely able to walk, taking him back in her cart to their cottage in Northborough. There Clare found no trace of Mary Joyce, unaware that she had perished in a house fire on the 14th July 1838.

Love Songs for Mary Joyce is dedicated with affection to my dear friends Felicity Edholm and Jeremy Macdonald; it was commissioned for tenor James Gilchrist, by the Wigmore Hall with the support of André Hoffmann, President of the Fondation Hoffmann, a Swiss grant-making foundation.

'It is the evening hour' from Love Songs for Mary Joyce (2016)

General rehearsal for my master recital,
J.Lallo conducting the Strasbourg Saxophone Ensemble, 
Cité de la musique et de la danse, 
Strasbourg, June 2014

Récit (based on Sequenza IXb) for Alto sax solo and Saxophone ensemble - L.Berio

In Situ - II. (after Locke)

Composed in 2019
Live recording by Apartment House at Cafe Oto, London
18 January 2019

Piano Quintet No. 2

Pieces About Art was commissioned in 2014 by EXAUDI vocal ensemble supported by Britten-Pears Foundation and is dedicated to James Weeks, EXAUDI's director, and to all the singers in the ensemble. The work consists of two movements of roughly equal duration, which in this recording are performed without a break.

In my previous music for voice I had always written or compiled the texts myself but for this work I decided that I wanted to set words that had been written by someone else. A friend drew my attention to a text by a famous American artist, written in 1968; the artist had engraved the words directly onto a steel sculpture. I liked the repetitive and minimal nature of this text and I also liked the fact that the words had been written specially for use on a sculpture. I thought that the text would work well in my piece, so in July 2014 I set about trying to get permission from the artist to use the text. After several false starts, I ended up contacting the Artists Rights Society in New York, who handle these matters for the artist. Eventually I received an email refusing me permission to use the words. I then decided to write a text loosely based on the email received from the Artists Rights Society; this is what I set in Artist Refuses Request, the first movement of Pieces About Art.

Later that month I had lunch with the writer Michael Bracewell, a friend of many years. He alluded to some of the problems of writing about art. I asked Michael if he would allow me to set a piece of his prose writing and he agreed. A substantial proportion of the words that I set in the second movement of Pieces About Art - which is titled Writing About Art - are taken from Michael's essay on the work of the British artist John Stezaker. Originally written for the catalogue of Stezaker's 2011 retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, the essay is also reproduced in Michael Bracewell's collection 'The Space Between', published by Ridinghouse.

Both movements of Pieces About Art have a narrative about some sort of struggle. In Artist Refuses Request it is about the quest to get permission to set a text. In Writing About Art, the words that I have written myself, and which I set alongside extracts from Michael Bracewell's essay on John Stezaker, hint at a loose narrative about the struggle to write effectively about art. 

This performance was one of four given over the course of two weekends in July 2017, in Hull and London, which comprised the 2017 New Music Biennial, presented by the PRS Foundation. 

EXAUDI, conducted by James Weeks
Hull
1 July 2017

Pieces About Art

Live recording by Orkest de Erepris, at Theaterzaal Gigant in Apeldoorn, 22-02-2013.
Singers: Gosia Stencel and Ginette Puylaert.
Conductor: Rob Vermeulen

This piece was part of the Young Composers Meeting 2013. During one week, young composers had the opportunity of working together with orkest de erepris and singers from the Royal Conservatory of Den Haag, under the mentoring of the following teachers: Louis Andriessen, Martijn Padding, Richard Ayres, Carola Bauckholt and Dmitri Kourliandski.

The poem of my piece was written by Friedrich Daumer (1800-1875); the English translation is found in the Liebeslieder Waltzer by Johannes Brahms:

A little pretty bird took flight
Into the garden fair, where fruit was plentiful.
Were I a pretty little bird,
I'd not delay, I'd do the same as he.

Treacherous lime trap lies in wait;
Poor little bird could not escape.
Were I a pretty little bird,
I'd think again, not do the same as he.

The bird it came into a maiden's hand,
And there was safe, the lucky one.
Were I a pretty little bird,
I'd not delay, I'd do the same as he.

A bird in the garden (for orkest de erepris and two female voices)

Julian Philips, Varjak Dreaming

Born in Wales in 1969 and brought up in Warwickshire, Julian Philips studied music at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and is one of Britain’s most versatile composers. His music has been performed across the world at major festivals and venues including the BBC Proms, Tanglewood Music Festival, Welsh National Opera, Glyndebourne and Wigmore Hall, by international artists including Gerald Finley, Dawn Upshaw, Sir Thomas Allen, the Vertavo String Quartet and BBC orchestras.
With a particular affinity for music for voice, Philips has been critically acclaimed for song settings of Emily Dickinson, e e cummings, Dylan Thomas and Langston Hughes among others, most recently a new cycle for baritone, cello and harp, Turning Fifty (2019) based on the poetry of Judith Wright. Love Songs for Mary Joyce (2016), commissioned by Wigmore Hall for tenor James Gilchrist and pianist Anna Tilbrook, sets a series of late love poems by John Clare. His choral music is similarly celebrated and is included in the Choirbook for the Queen (Church Music) as well as being commissioned for the BBC Proms (Sorrowfull Songes).
As Glyndebourne Opera’s first ever Composer-in-Residence, Philips completed two chamber operas in 2006-9: Followers, a site-specific promenade opera with a libretto by Simon Christmas, and The Yellow Sofa with a libretto by Edward Kemp, subsequently featured in Glyndebourne’s tour and shortlisted for a British Composer Award. The year-long development of Knight Crew was filmed by BBC Television and the resulting series, Gareth goes to Glyndebourne, aired in June 2010. Philips’ opera How the Whale Became, a collaboration with Edward Kemp, was based on Ted Hughes’s The Dreamfighter and other creation tales, and was written for the Royal Opera House’s Christmas 2013/14 season. His most recent full-length opera, The Tale of Januarie, was staged by the Guildhall School in Spring 2017, boasting perhaps the first libretto in Middle English by Stephen Plaice, and based on Chaucer’s The Merchant’s Tale. A new primary school children’s opera, Henny Penny (2021), offers its participants an immersive experience both in music and modern language learning, with versions in French (Cocotte Chocotte), German (Hennig Pfennig) and Spanish (Pollita Chiquita).
Ballet and opera are natural progressions for Philips, who already has an impressive track-record in composing for the theatre and has written two full-length ballets for choreographer Michael Corder and English National Ballet; a ballet based on Les Liaisons Dangereuses was followed by The Snow Queen in 2007. Symphonic works also form Philips’ oeuvre with All that remains commissioned to commemorate the centenary of the beginning of World War I receiving its world premiere by the National Orchestra of Belgium. Ballades Concertantes, for solo viola and double bass with chamber orchestra, premiered with Virginia Slater, Stacey Watton, and the Orchestra of the Swan in 2017, conducted by David Curtis.
A vital force in education, Philips is the Head of Composition at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama where he was made Honorary Fellow in 2007, and conferred a Professorship in 2014. He was responsible for the creation of both a new Masters Programme in Opera-Making & Writing and a Doctoral Composer-in-Residence scheme in association with the Royal Opera House.
Recent projects include a new oboe quintet, Through Silence (2020) for Wigmore Hall, and a set of folk song creative transcriptions, Melodys of Earth and Sky (2021), for violin and clarinet that draw on the two books of fiddle tunes collected by poet John Clare. The work was released on NMC Recordings in March 2022, reaching no 10 in the classical charts. In October 2022, The Country of Larks for tenor, horn and piano – a setting of Robert Louis Stevenson – receives its third performance at the Oxford Lieder Festival.
In August 2022, Julian Philips was featured composer at the Presteigne Festival, with six works featured including Barcarola for solo piano, Divertissement for chamber orchestra (based on his ballet score for Les Liaisons Dangereuses) and Looking West – a large-scale dramatic cantata for voices, actors and ensemble, (libretto by Rebecca Hurst), commissioned to mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of Ralph Vaughan Williams.
Other recent works include A Series of Strange Encounters for marimba and wind quintet, premiered by Evelyn Glennie at the Lake District Summer Music Festival in July 2023. Current projects include a series of John Clare settings for the vocal ensemble Exaudi and ongoing collaboration with the New London Chamber Ensemble, celebrating their 25th Anniversary, with a series of chamber works.

'It is the evening hour' from Love Songs for Mary Joyce (2016)

Julian Philips Composer

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