Compositions

Choral Compositions

A voice Is heard In Ramah

Love; an ever fixed mark (Sonnet 116)

Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott is a novella written to comment on the hierarchy of Victorian culture. The book depicts a two-dimensional world filled with two-dimensional people and because of this has been used, notably by Carl Sagan, as an allegory for examining and explaining extra dimensions.

In Sagan’s metaphor an anthropomorphic square who lives in Flatland is visited by a three-dimensional creature that proceeds to knock the square out of two-dimensional Flatland and into the three-dimensional world of ‘up-down’. The square later floats back down to flatland, affected by his experience, but not quite sure about the place he was just in.
 
twodimensional replicates this idea of being confined to a limited number of dimensions by restricting the use of all but one pitch class, and instead exploring the different ‘dimensions’ of timbre and articulation.


twodimensional

Shine out, fair sun

Charles Baudelaire’s Châtiment de l’Orgueil was the inspiration for this piece. The text comes from his well-known Les Fleurs du Mal and tells the story of a person of high standing who, after grasping too high in a prideful manner, fell from grace to become the lowest of the low. The music attempts to mirror and enhance this sense of culmination of effort followed by collapse. In the opening the strings build a texture of interweaving harmonics that increase in rhythmic and harmonic complexity, this is followed by a brief moment of implied respite, which turns sour and marks the beginning of the chaotic descent. From this moment the strings and percussion break off into a fast paced contrapuntal web culminating in a repetition of the initial material, this time somewhat faulty and with less precision than before, this fades, leaving the voice to finish alone.

Throughout this piece I have made use of the Infinity Series. This was discovered by Per Nørgård in 1959 and is in essence a method of creating an infinite, non-repeating series based off of the skeleton of any mode or scale

Like one who has clambered too high

A setting of Eli Carvajal's Willow-dreams at dawn for vocal trio 'III'.

Willow-dreams at dawn

Kantos Chamber Choir
28th May 2016
Chorlton Central Church
Chorlton Arts Festival

Recording ® Sam Gee 2016

Rory Wainwright Johnston - Love; an ever fixed mark

Performed by Firecrest vocal trio - Lizzy Humphries, Jocelyn Coates and Anna Rea - on May 16th at King Charles Court in Trinity Laban.

I cannot go

This setting of the well known Marian antiphon Ave Regina Caelorum (Hail Queen of Heaven) takes its inspiration from Renaissance metrical equivalence and Medieval hocketing. The opening of the piece takes the two latin words Ave, or ‘Hail’, and Gaude, or ‘Rejoice’, and juxtaposes their character with the jovial Gaude bounding forwards with energy, and the more firm salutation of Ave gradually getting closer until we get the full force of its character the first time we hear the entire phrase Ave Regina Caelorum, cementing it’s majestic presence. The music then moves into a more introspective moment with the text ‘Salve, radix, salve porta – Ex qua mundo lux est orta’ before the choir then break out again into the rhythmic and excited material from the opening, but this time superimposed with the harmonies of the ‘Ave Regina Caelorum’ motif.  This movement finally arrives at its harmonic resolution but the metre is keeps pushing, unrelenting to the end.

Performed by Ad Solem in the New Music North West Festival 16/11/17, conducted by Robert Guy

Ave Regina caelorum

O sacrum convivium

This piece was inspired by the work of Jurg Frey and utilises meandering non-functional chord progressions and silence to achieve a texture that is static, but always moving; atemporal, but everlasting.

Performed by Kantos Chamber Choir, conducted by Ellie Slorach

Willow-dreams at dawn

rorywainwrightjohnston