'A Seductive Event' is not actually one event but rather sixteen events - sixteen miniatures (in a structure lovingly stolen from a famous romantic piece) that together tell of a contemporary queer romance. 
 
Ubu and David-David (very much in love) are looking forward to a night of passion, pleasure and pain (very much consensual) but first, they need to make sure they are ready, prepared and above all - safe.

Music by Mark Bowler
(inspired by Robert Schumann, György Ligeti and Gerald Barry)
Words by Gareth Mattey 
(inspired by Alfred Jarry, Heinrich Heine and William Bolcom)
Countertenor: Nathan Mercieca
Tenor: Louis Hurley
Piano: Mikey Pandya

Characters:
Narrators: peering into these private queer lives
Ubu: delightfully, delectably dominant – leave the decisions to him
David-David: remaining in a position of inferiority throughout and loving it

First performed at Wigmore Hall as part of Guildhall School of Music & Drama Voiceworks project, 7th June 2018

A Seductive Event - Wigmore Hall

Collaboration with choreographer Ben Todd-Jones

Bostrom's Argument

Performed by EXAUDI vocal ensemble at Milton Court Concert Hall, London, on 22nd March 2019.
Mark Bowler - music       Gareth Mattey - words

1. Anxieties, memories and options the night before
2. An attempt on the day
3. Maybe after all

Programme note:

To get married, to make such a lasting commitment to another person, is a significant and powerful gesture. It is also one fraught with doubt and worry - how can you know for certain the decision you are making is the right one?

For this piece, the ensemble is a single person - writing their vows the night before and lost in memories, questions and uncertainties. We follow them to the next day, into the necessary public declaration of love, pride and commitment. But, no matter how honest and heartfelt, the promise made isn't free of the same creeping doubt.

Promise, Promise, Promise?

Joanna Twaddle - cello
Victor Braojos - piano

First performed 3rd May 2019 at Silk Street Music Hall, London.

Composer's note:
In October 2018, the World Wildlife Federation published The Living Planet Report, which contained a bewildering fact: humanity has wiped out 60% of mammal, bird, fish and reptile populations worldwide since 1970. That figure is an average; for south and central America the figure is 89%. A 60% decline in human population would be the equivalent of emptying North America, South America, Africa, Europe, China and Oceania. Even with a human-based comparison, the scale of this decline is difficult to comprehend.

Theme & Transformations contains a reductive structuring principle, informed by the Living Planet Report statistic, which plays out over seven movements: a theme and six transformations. Each transformation contains 60% fewer notes than the previous movement but is otherwise near identical. The removal of notes forms the basic transformative process, but as the piece progresses, some pitches are transposed by octave and the duration, articulation and dynamics of other notes are altered. The first movement is energetically polystylistic and contains over four hundred and fifty notes. Any inherent stylistic plurality dissipates as the piece progresses, and by the sixth transformation only two notes remain.

This piece is not programmatic nor a direct political statement, but a creative exploration through which I gained a clearer understanding of how a rate of change of this magnitude can affect a musical environment.

Theme & Transformations

To stand in the middle of Millennium Bridge is to feel at the centre of historical and modern London. This, the most juvenile of the central London bridges, connects the megalithic architectural wonders that are St Paul’s Cathedral and Tate Modern and offers views of Tower Bridge juxtaposed against the steel and glass of the City, The Shard and, in the distance, Docklands. It is the bridge that dared to wobble, and its structure will soon be adorned with one of Leo Villareal’s artworks.


Where to begin when considering a piece of music to accompany the artwork on this bridge, surrounded by the enormity of the ages of London? This was the question I had to grapple with when I was offered the opportunity, through Guildhall School of Music & Drama, to compose a piece for Illuminated River.

Bridges imply dyadic relationships: when crossing a river they connect two banks and their reflection in the water they span offers an illusory sense of an above coupled with a distorted below. Once illuminated, the above-below layers of Millennium Bridge will become very apparent, the varying flow of the river and its traffic affecting the distorted texture of the reflected structure. I wanted to bring the idea of layers and paired relationships into the music I would write and began by choosing to utilise two options that were offered to all the composers involved in the project.

We each had access to the Guildhall Session Orchestra for thirty minutes, just about enough time to rehearse and record a four-minute piece of music. Alternatively, we could produce our own recording of a piece of music of similar duration. I decided to write a collection of very short orchestral ‘samples’, which I would then arrange into an electronic composition. This felt like a way of embracing the old and the new: composers have been writing for orchestra since before St Paul’s was conceived, but the technology and software I would use to put together the final piece of music are only about as old as Millennium Bridge.

I wanted my piece to have a sense of above and below, foreground and background, and so chose to write two distinct types of musical materials with contrasting textures. The first texture would be smooth and sustained and its volume would either be constant or would swell and then diminish; this layer would be akin to the river, ebbing and flowing, always present. Above this would sit a pointillistic, staccato texture, very short bursts of sounds clustered together; this representing the illuminated bridge, the above.

Once the raw materials had been recorded, I took them into my home studio and began the process of composing the final piece of music. Each of the orchestral samples lasted between 5 and 10 seconds and I thought of them as building blocks, but blocks that could be stretched, warped and distorted, much as the river will do for the reflection of the illumination. I gave myself two constraints: first, to use a specific chord structure, one which uses each major and each minor chord once only in a specific order, all the colours of musical tonality set against Leo’s monochrome lighting design; second, to use only the musical materials I recorded with the orchestra.
I had to keep one eye on the bridge and began looking at various time-lapse and hyper-lapse videos that helped to highlight an aspect of time that can’t be otherwise easily grasped. In the videos, throngs of people mill around and over Millennium Bridge, river traffic wends beneath, and the bridge sits proud and staid, of relative youth, part of a deeper time that exceeds our human lifespan but that contains the buildings and infrastructure that we each rely on day-to-day. I began to shape the piece to reflect these two types of time: short bursts of sound scurrying amongst and over the slower, more stable materials, together describing the overarching harmonic structure of the piece.

Illuminated River (Millennium Bridge)

Premiered by Harry Polda on 26th March 2019 at Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

Words by Gertrude Stein.

If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso

Commission by Samuel Lom for his Music on the Mind recital, 4th June 2019.

Based on the letters of Emma Hauck.

Samuel Lom, baritone
Matthew Gemmill, piano
Elin Samuel, harp
Ben Tarlton, cello

Komm

Composer.
Performer.
DJ.
Guildhall School of Music & Drama.

Mark Bowler

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