Composed and performed during a Creative Weekend at Birmingham Conservatoire as part of the Young Composers Project, July 2016.

Caged Bird (YCP New Voices 2016)

Trio For The Hills - piano, flute, clarinet

Original composition for piano, flute, clarinet, violin and cello (2018). Performed by musicians from CHROMA Ensemble in the Holywell Music Room, Oxford, conducted by Dr John Traill.

Idyll - for Ensemble

Performed by pianist Richard Casey at Oxford Music Faculty (November 2019).

My primary focuses in this composition, which began as a piano improvisation, relate to form, gesture, and intervallic content. I was interested in exploring how the shape of the piece could be driven by the generation of material based on the pattern of the very first motif – initially heard as a nebulous, floating phrase, built around intervals of a tritone and perfect fourth. I have suggested the title ‘Constellations,’ because I was inspired by the idea of finding patterns which connect an individual thing to a larger complex, and in how beauty can be found in one small part of a pattern as well as the whole.

Constellations - for solo piano

My setting of Psalm 13 (KJV), sung by choral scholars from Oriel College Chapel Choir, directed by Dr David Maw.
Image: Oriel Chapel by Marcus Peel.

This piece is a musical response to the Biblical text, which expresses a deep sense of abandonment by God, and yet continues to trust in God for salvation. The sense of desperation in the insistent questioning of the first two verses is conveyed by the bleak G minor mood and the frequent, increasing dissonance of the semitone interval (D-E flat, G-A flat, and C-D flat). These dissonant notes represent antagonistic points of torment, which do not resolve in a satisfactory way, heightening the tension and conveying the psalmist’s discontent. The turning point of the fifth verse (pivoting on the conjunction, ‘but’) suddenly changes the tone of the psalm, as the psalmist declares they have put their trust in God. As such, there is a shift from the dissonant opening towards a more florid and joyful A flat major section. Formally and symbolically the key of A flat major is significant – the dissonant A flats of the opening (e.g. the A-flat against G in bar 7) have been recontextualised and no longer pose a threat, but in fact unlock a new musical and emotional space. The final cadence onto G major (instead of A flat major) concludes this harmonic discourse, implying that the psalmist has found peace and solace in God, not by overcoming their troubles but in the midst of them.

How long, O Lord? (Psalm 13) - for choir

Performed by the Kreutzer Quartet at Oxford Music Faculty (February 2020).
Image: National Portrait Gallery, NPG 58. John Keats by Joseph Severn. Oil on canvas, 1821-1823.

Inspired by John Keats' poem of the same name, Ode to a Nightingale expresses the poetic voice's deep longing to transcend the reality of his suffering through intoxication, imagination and the immortal beauty he finds in the Nightingale's song. The piece begins in a world of intangibility as the poetic voice, listening to the bird's song, longs for oblivion. This is portrayed by floating, high-register harmonics, tremolo, trills and falling fifths. A darker sonority of stacked fourths seeps into this, as the poetic voice is weighed down by sorrow and a profound awareness of his mortality. The pizzicato section which follows this recontextualises the falling thirds of the Nightingale's song, playfully evoking a forest world of 'faery lands', lightness and ease. However the heightened sense of instability and urgency of the harmonic shifts suggests a growing sense that all is not as it should be. This gives way into an animato section leading up to the moment of breakthrough in the poem; the stacked fourths are transformed into resonant open fifths - a fleeting moment of release before the violin's ecstatic cadenza. The moment is shattered however and the music returns to where it began with the Nightingale's song left unresolved as Keats wonders, 'was it a vision, or a waking dream?'

Ode to a Nightingale - for string quartet

Performed by Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Dr John Traill, at the Jacqueline du Pré Music Building in Oxford (February 2020).

Kaleidoscope is inspired by the principle of the 'infinity series,' discovered by Danish composer Per Nørgård. I was initially fascinated by this mathematical sequence because of its balance between repetition and variation, predictability and chaos. Musically, I think this holds great potential as it generates pitches which tend to spin outwards in alternating directions and by gradually increasing increments away from a central point, producing a fractal web of melodies where familiar patterns continue to emerge in new contexts. However, while Nørgård’s use of the sequence embraces microtones, my intention was to explore it within a more tonal framework. The infinity series is present in different forms throughout all three movements - at times strange and unsettling but reaching a triumphant climax in the finale which is much more celebratory in character.

Lauren Hill

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