King Krule - Baby Blue Cover

Serial Procrastinator

A recording of my composition 'Into the Void' from a workshop with the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra, 10th February 2018. Conducted by John Traill.

Into the Void

A performance of my piece 'Flight' by new music ensemble Baker's Dozen, conducted by Harry Baker. Recorded live at the Jacqueline du Pre music building in Oxford.

M@SH Marathon

Flight

A recording of my piano sonata, played by Jonathan Powell at St Anne's College, Oxford.

Piano Sonata

This three-movement orchestral work began life as the standalone piece Into the Void, written for a composition workshop and subsequently selected for a public premiere by the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra. On completing this piece, I felt that its ending left something more to be said, as if the music was creeping across the final barline and inviting me to further explore the ideas presented there. On receiving a commission from Fantasia Orchestra for a new composition, I jumped at the chance to expand upon Into the Void, reorchestrating this short piece and fashioning it into the first movement of the larger-scale Visions of Odysseus, conceived as a form approximating an instrumental sonata yet not quite carrying the weight of a fully-fledged symphony. The titles of both the entire work and the first movement are a sort of inside joke referring to the manner in which they were composed; whilst on the surface they both refer to romantic ideas of voyaging and travelling into the unknown, they are in reality more earthbound in origin. Indeed, Visions of Odysseus is a reference to sirens, both in the mythological sense but also more literally in the everyday noise of our towns and cities: one of the fundamental motifs throughout the work’s three movements originated in the sound of clashing sirens ringing across Oxford.
	The first movement opens with a slowly pulsating dissonant texture, from which a searching clarinet melody emerges, the main theme of the movement. This theme is interrupted three times, each time gaining in energy until the culmination, a soaring melody and a full orchestral tutti, is reached. As this dies away, a new fast idea is introduced, moving the music forward in nervous intrepid energy. This reaches a climax once more, and the opening material emerges transformed. The movement dies away in whispers of the faster material from the central section. The second movement, a cross between a scherzo and a slow movement, opens with a mysterious oboe solo over a shimmering carpet of fast-moving strings. This melody returns continuously, but appears lost, unable to burst forth and instead speeding up until it is silenced. After this brief moment of peace, a violin solo introduces a slow, thoughtful melody, but this too accelerates and is cut off. A hurried fugue ensues to continue the scherzo element of the movement, but the music begins to collapse under its own weight, growing more and more grotesque until the opening material bursts through. A brisk final flourish closes the movement. The final movement begins with an expansive, bleak soundscape, slowly thickening in texture until a lone cello begins to sing a mournful tune. Hints of life begin to appear, with a more animated figure appearing in the violins and subsequently passing through the strings, and the music appears to be growing towards a jubilant finale. This soon gives way, however, to a reprise of the sounds of the opening of the first movement, and the ending collapses into a desolate closing chord, with detuned cellos and basses rumbling in the depths.

III. Largo

II. Allegro

I. Into The Void

The inspiration for this piece came whilst on a sailing holiday in the Aegean sea. The sea has been a source of inspiration for many composers in a variety of ways, but what was particularly striking for me was the transformation that occurred as night fell. Water which, during the day, had been a shimmering azure, suddenly took on an inky quality as the sun dipped below the horizon, turning the waves beneath our boat into a sunless void. Swimming by night gave our pale bodies the appearance of ghostly apparitions suspended in this blackness, unaware of what could be lurking below the surface. Dark Water paints a series of pictures of the sea’s transformation from evening until sunrise, exploring the way in which an idyllic moment can be re-framed with the passing of time and the changing of the tide. The cycle of alternating light and dark touches upon moments of joy but also those of despair, each knowing that the other is always inevitable.
Dark Water is arranged as a series of five connected movements, each progressing without a break. The first, ‘Evening’, begins with an expansive sound, each player joining one by one on a single note and gently ebbing and flowing as if with the tide. From this texture, a more lively rhythmic figure begins to take shape, accompanying a long melody starting in the violas and subsequently taken up by violins. After reaching a climactic chord, the music begins to die away, and the double basses play a chiming pizzicato figure that brings in the next movement, ‘Dusk’. The music takes on a more shadowy hue here, and a violin solo floats atop the delicate texture before the music disintegrates further to a halt. The chimes are heard again, and an ominous fast figure in the cellos starts the next movement, ‘Night’. This figure is transformed into an agitated section crudely evoking dance-like music before once again subsiding. A lone violin cadenza ushers in ‘Dawn’, interrupted by the sporadic sounds of nature which soon give way to ‘Sunrise’. From here, an ostinato pizzicato pattern in the lower strings drives the music towards its conclusion: the chimes being heard one last time before the final chord.

Performed by The Ripieno Players at St Philip's Cathedral, Birmingham, 2 February 2019, conducted by Joe Davies.

Recording courtesy of Patrick Case.

Dark Water

Unplugged started life as a fascination with the late piano sonatas of Alexander Scriabin, whose harmonic language in these works has often been described as an alternative approach to atonality, distinct from the school of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. Scriabin’s harmonies float on the edge of atonality, not as dissonant as his Viennese contemporaries, yet equally unsettled in their ever-changing directionlessness.

With Unplugged, I wanted to capture this idea of spiralling, boundless flux. The piece uses only a very small number of motifs, each stretched and amplified to their maximum throughout the course of the piece, being reimagined and re-framed amid a wash of floating harmonies. Colours slide, transform, and melt together, sounds constantly changing pace and beginning anew. A climax is eventually reached only at the very end, as these ideas solidify into a grotesque march before fading away once more, leaving us back in the realm of the uncertain.

Unplugged

Composer and double bassist based in Birmingham. Studying a master's in double bass performance at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire.

Richard English

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