Last Wednesday, a new piece of mine was premiered at the Royal College of Music under the baton of the fabulous Michal Oren. Fruits Of Their Labour is scored for mixed wind and brass quintet: clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet and bass trombone.

It is a piece that deals with unfolding, unfurling, unwinding. The music is centred around experimentation with viscosity: melodic motion is stretched and contracted; tightly organised sections are balanced by moments of aleatoricism; and density of material is continuously altered, as if a camera lens is always either being zoomed in and out. The performers’ airflows are subjected to different degrees of physical obstruction to create sonorities varying in viscosity: perhaps most notably through the addition of water to the brass instruments, but also by means of mutes and tonguing techniques. The ensemble works as a dynamic unit; every effort of the particular has consequences for the collective, with individuals pulling the mass this way and that, each time slightly reconfiguring the course of the music. Everything is in a state of closing in and opening up, of pulsating and blooming.

You can read a review of the concert here.