Performed by Current Resonance Ensemble, 29 May 2022

Confluence: A Love Song, mvts 1 and 2 (Performed by Current Resonance Ensemble, 29 May 2022)

The composition and performance of this piece was made possible thanks to generous financial support from the Vaughan Williams Foundation (https://vaughanwilliamsfoundation.org/funding/postgraduate-bursaries/).

Performed by RNCM Brand New Chamber Choir (conducted by Stuart Overington). Recorded at Royal Northern College of Music, 11th December 2023.

This is a study for a planned larger piece, inspired by my experiences of vocal feminisation therapy, the essay ‘My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix’ by Susan Stryker, and the character of Olimpia in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann.

Vocal feminisation therapy is a process through which transfeminine people whose vocal folds have thickened during puberty can learn to modulate our voices in order to sound more traditionally feminine. At its best, the process can be positive and even liberatory; at its worst, it can help to enforce misogynistic standards of how women ‘should’ sound and behave. I hoped to examine the effect of this enforced normativity on a subject, and explore the ways in which it can change one’s relationship to one’s own wants and desires. My first wish for this study was to explore the effect of this normativity through the choir, and through individual singers’ relationship with one another, themselves and the conductor within the performance.

In parallel, Stryker’s essay, a transfeminist reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, examines Shelley’s creature as a powerful metaphor for the trans subject, created and subsequently shunned by its creator. I wished to draw a similar parallel with Hoffmann’s Olimpia, a fictional doll, constructed with no agency or interiority in the image of a real-life woman, as a joke at a man’s expense (if Hoffmann’s friend and fellow writer de la Motte Fouqué is to be believed). I felt compelled to read Olimpia as a character with more agency and interiority than the narrative afforded her, and tried to read her as a character in her own right, rather than as a thin reflection on the protagonist’s neuroses and preoccupations. If Olimpia could dream, what would her dream-song sound like? My second wish for this study, then, was to compose this dream-song.

In this piece, many separate voices explore two sets of aleatoric material, as a hocketed ‘melody’ weaves through the different sections, at time coming to the fore and at others ebbing away. The piece begins freely, and incorporates more restrictive notation and input from the conductor (a metaphor here for the pressure to perform normative gender roles, as described above) as it progresses.

Doll Study

The composition and performance of this piece was made possible thanks to generous financial support from the Vaughan Williams Foundation (https://vaughanwilliamsfoundation.org/funding/postgraduate-bursaries/).

Performed by Ark Ensemble (conducted by Rob Buckland). Recorded at Royal Northern College of Music, 1st December 2023.

This piece attempts to suggest the weirdly specific erotic energy that outsizes the purpose and traditional function of a DIY store. As is the case with some of my other music, this piece is more generally an exploration of the relationship between people, environments and objects, and the way in which people can use environments and objects to make sense of themselves and each other.

A customer idly daydreams about screwdrivers, power drills and allen keys; concurrently, the shop itself attempts to dream a landscape outside itself that it has never seen, and tries (and fails) to imagine a role for itself beyond utility.

Hand Tools, for Ess

This piece is a retelling of ‘Bisclavret’, a 12th Century lai by French poet Marie De France. The poem tells the story of a man who is betrayed by his wife after he reveals to her that he is a werewolf. He is eventually taken in by the king, who realises that he is an intelligent being capable of thought and compassion.

‘Bisclavret’ is often read as queer, particularly given the relationship between Bisclavret and the king. I wanted to examine the ways in which the characters’ relationships could be different if they had all had the time and space to become something else, and I tried to explore this transformation through music. What begins as a series of relationships and dependencies based on tradition and obligation dissolves into five characters losing themselves in a forest of abstraction borne out of their respective sets of musical gestures. I also wanted to explore the relationship between breath, phrase and time, and test the limits of connectivity between disparate material in an ensemble.

This piece was composed for the final of the 2024 RNCM Gold Medal Award, and was performed by Naomi Robinson (fl.) as Bisclavret, Emma Chan (ob.) as the wife, Cara Smith (cl.) as the knight, the wife's lover, Toby Johnson-Jones (hn.) as the king, and Connor Huss (bsn.) as the king's court.

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