pf. Ensemble Modern
cond. Enno Poppe
premiere, Frankfurt, March 2020
contains a field recording by Vincent Duseigne of veal calves being separated from their mothers 
(2015, https://archive.org/details/aporee_30571_35170)
art: Egon Schiele, "Sawmill" (1913)

We are all okay

Inspired by the number of years it takes for each planet in our solar system to orbit around the sun, I transferred each planets’ approximate orbit into a material framework that served as the foundation of piece – chords that invert at different rates according to which planet the chord corresponds to, creating an iso-rhythmic effect. The framework then became the impetus to create additional textural layers, giving the piece small changing and alternating gestures.

Performed by The Spaceship Ensemble (NL)

Conductor: Hardy Li
Piano: Ivan Pavlov
Percussion: João Pedro Borralho
Celesta: Leo Lehtinen
Harp: Liucilè Vilimaitė/Maria Palma
Harpsichord: Christina Kwon
Accordion: Kaat Vanhaverbeke
Guitar: Antonio Peršak

Recorded by Eric Moser and Li Moonyoung

Within an Orbit (2019)

performed on October 21st, 2021 during Bowling Green State University's New Music Festival by the BGSU New Music Ensemble

flute - claudia aizaga
clarinet - abby cline
violin - malika lauren brower
cellos - anthony marchese & otávio manzano kavakama
pianos - humay gasimzade & jorge potyguara de freitas
vibraphone - nicholas fox
harp - shelly du
accordion - pablo gómez estévez
conductor - chloe calvino

Openwork, knotted object... [2019] | BGSU New Music Ensemble

stepping on stones
sore feet
shoes, float away 

    Whitstable, July 2021


Written for the Britten Sinfonia Opus 1 Scheme 2021

With thanks to Marcus Barcham-Stevens (violin), Bridget Carey (viola), Oli Pashley (clarinet), Sarah Burnett (bassoon) & Rachel Wilkinson (Britten Sinfonia administration team), Dobrinka Tabakova and Joe Cutler (tutors)

shoes, float away

Georgimorphosis is an attempt to sonically mimic the effects of Escher's transformation prints. In pieces like Metamorphosis 1, Sky and Water and Verbum (Earth, Sky and Water), visual objects tessellate and seamlessly transform into others: fish into birds, birds into squares, people into houses. After composers like Adès, Kurtag and Finissy, who have notably used found objects 'quotations' in their own ways, I asked myself, would it be possible to use the methods of Reich and Donatoni to transform quotes by different composer Georges into each other?

Why Georges? Well the piece started life as a baroque flute piece written for Rosie Bowker but it kept getting out of control! When the piece was still for baroque flute, I looked closely at the Telemann Fantasias. Telemann's first name is Georg (Georg Philipp to be precise), and so materials transform banally between Telemann to Ligeti to Enescu to Haas to Benjamin to Gershwin to Handel (although not directly in that order). The point, if there is any, is whimsy.

It may also be evident that a couple of non-George-ian figures sit at the heart of this piece as well. The recurring harmonics trills and multiphonics refer to the sounds found in Sciarrino's Let me die before I wake (1982) and clearly I've learned from his Anamorfosi (1980). I felt the influence too of Robin Holloway, a mentor of mine who I am hugely grateful too, who's Gilded Goldbergs (1992 - 7) and Silvered Schubert (2013) do much more than I ever could. Thank you Robin, without your tutelage I would not compose now.

Thanks so much to Raymond Brien, the clarinettist in this recording! Raymond's put so much effort into this recording. He is gifted beyond words in musicality, technique, imagination and kindness! Sitting in his flat with a cup of tea working on these agonisingly small details must have been very tiresome for Ray, but for me the time was always incredibly heartening. Here's a link to Ray's soundcloud, he’s a composer too:

https://soundcloud.com/raymond-brien?utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

Thanks also to Professor Julian Anderson CBE and Malcolm Singer for your encouragement and advice, without which I'm not sure I'd ever have conceived of trying to do anything like this before.

The quotations:
Ligeti - 6 Bagatelles (1953)
Ligeti - Violin Concerto (1990, rev. 1992)
Benjamin - Into the Little Hill (1996)
Enescu - Symphony 5 (1941 - 46)
Haas - Finale (2004)
Telemann - Fantasia 2, 3 and 5  (1725 - 1733)
Handel - Messiah (1741)
Gershwin - Rhapsodie in Blue (1924)
Handel - Fireworks Music (1749)

Georgimorphosis - for solo Clarinet

Lesson 1: General Relativity
Lesson 2: Quantum Mechanics (3:45)
Lesson 3: A Brief History of the Universe (6:36)
Lesson 4: The Standard Model (8:35)
Lesson 5: Theory of Everything (10:52)
This is a live recording from the BBC Radio3 Hear and Now broadcast of the premiere by the Piatti Quartet at the 2017 Cheltenham Festival.
To view the full score and a note on the science behind each movement which is the result of a collaboration with physicist Joe Davighi, visit: https://issuu.com/darrenbloom/docs/five_brief_lessons_full_score

Five Brief Lessons on Physics for String Quartet

Lines between for piano, cello and clarinet. This live performance was given on 06/02/18 by the Tritium Trio.

Lines between

The work is in two movements - Fraying and Prolonged. The first presents a sonic object that gradually disintegrates. The second reframes this object and slows it down, so that the process of decay is frozen, and the object appears almost immortal. The work grew out of reflections on 1 Corinthians 15 and Jiang Zhi's Love Letters (2014). In Jiang Zhi's photographs, flowers are on fire, but are not harmed by the flames.

Alto Flute - Isobel Doughty
Oboe - Caitlin Heathcote
Clarinet in B flat 1 - Heather Ryall
Clarinet in B flat 2 - Julia Raga Pascual
Horn in F - Karen Starkman
Trumpet in B flat 1 - Catherine Pollit
Trumpet in B flat 2 - Thomas Thornton
Tenor trombone 1 - Samuel Dye
Tenor trombone 2 - Jake Jones
Harp - Teresa Raff
Piano - Ábel Misha Gille Esbenshade
Violin 1 - Kanon Miyashita, Tilman Fleig, Yuriko Matsuda, Zora Orfgen
Violin 2 - Camille Saïd, Anastasia Egorova Wise, Zoe Hodi
Viola - Michaela Bartošová, Jeremy Tonelli-Sippel
Violoncello - Lucy Neil, Pieter-Jan De Smet
Double bass - Jess Martin, Cole Morrison
Conductor - James Hoyle

Recorded in October 2018.

Reframe (2017)

I'm moving to bandcamp, follow me there: https://wmarsey.bandcamp.com/follow_me

Recorded live 15 Feb 2019 at Sage Gateshead, played by Lars Vogt and the Royal Northern Sinfonia chamber orchestra, broadcast on BBC Radio 3.

"a vivid musical portrayal ... a gem" -- Gavin Engelbrecht, The Northern Echo

"vividly portrayed" -- Janes Shuttleworth, Bachtrack

https://www.wmarsey.com/music

The Sea

After Images was re-mastered and issued on the following album:

https://oneglasseye.bandcamp.com/album/nms-presents-lockdown-listening-all-proceeds-to-help-musicians-uk-charity?fbclid=IwAR0w68y__CZM0S1LKnHXNksAv0aEGiXcIXGLN9rZBH02csQjF7qn7iRCTHc

'If discoursing on a difficult problem were like carrying weights, when many horses can carry more sacks of grain than a single horse, I would agree that many discourses would do more than a single one; but discoursing is like coursing, not like carrying, and one Barbary courser can go faster than a hundred Frieslands' - Galileo

The idea of writing a piece that works with speed illusions was sparked by reading the above quote by Galileo in Calvino’s chapter on Quickness in his Six Memos for the Millenium. The piece gives the illusion of constant acceleration – which is impossible, especially since electronics are excluded from the work’s instrumental forces. I chose the title After Images because many fictional characters, such as Asterix and The Flash in popular culture, are shown to be able to move so fast that they leave a trailing or blurry image behind them. This blurring occurs in real life and can be demonstrated by holding a pencil at its middle, and wobbling it. The pencil does not just blur, it also appears to bend – an optical illusion. The bending pencil demonstrates that when an object is moved at high speed its image distorts to create an illusion. The first films achieved the same illusion of movement by flipping through still images at high speed. Our eyes are fooled, and the illusions successful, because they perceive fast moving images as a continuous blur. Hence the title also puns on the fact that we are living in a “post-still-photograph era” – after the invention of film, photographs and drawings can be made to move, and are no longer just still images.

An After Image is ‘a visual which stays present even after a stimulant [an image] ceases or is taken away… It occurs due to a receptor [the eye] and neurological activities that are subsequent to the ceasing of the stimulant.’ As a result the perceiver continues to see the image even after it is no longer present. The closest auditory equivalent of the optical illusion is perhaps the echo: a sound is heard as having been repeated, even though the sound source that originally made that sound has ceased sounding. Although After Images does not use literal echoes, it does use the eye’s perception of an After Image as a formal conceit: the piece’s formal shape consists of a series of variations, and each variation is a faster variation on the last. The listener might perhaps think of each variation as a distorted echo of the previous variation: a sonic image is presented, and then progressively distorted by speed.

After Images was written for the Guildhall New Music Society and was premiered in November 2017.

Performers:
Flute/picc/alto - Fiona Sweeney
Oboe/Cor A - Caitlin Heathcote
Clarinet/Bass - Isha Crichlow
Bassoon - Sarah Sesu
Horn - Millie Lihoreau
Trumpet - Patrick Wilson
Trombone 1 - Jake Jones
Trombone 2 - James Graham
Percussion 1 - Hugh Padmore
Percussion 2 - Charlie Hodge
Piano - Jason Gong
Violin 1 - James WIcks
Violin 2 - Victoria Farrell-Reed
Viola 1 - Katherine Clarke
Viola 2 - Hannah Gardiner
Cello - Peter Davis
Bass - Patrick Phillip
"Conductor" - Alex Tay
Post production - Mark Bowler, One Glass Eye Records

AFTER IMAGES (re-master)

(WE'VE GOT) HONEY LOVE

written for EXAUDI as part of my Masters at GSMD

recorded by EXAUDI with James Weeks 06.10.20

(WE'VE GOT) HONEY LOVE

Composer based in UK
More recordings and videos on Youtube.

www.robertlaidlow.co.uk

Lines between

Robert Laidlow