Symphonies
Symphonies are like stories. I’ve always liked that about traditional classical music, that it has ways of building a kind of narrative, so it’s not just about capturing a mood, it’s about taking you along a path from place to place. Beyond that, I want make beautiful, exciting, interesting and entertaining things that people will enjoy. And as far as possible, things that are playable: no special techniques, no crazy fast stuff, give everyone a share in the playing, make the journey worthwhile. Classical music forgot about that long ago, when it fell in love with its own ‘importance’.
The audio files posted here are not played by human beings (except where indicated). They are computer mockups intended as demos for the players to get to know the music. But I take a lot of care over them, and you’ll find they sound pretty close to the real thing.
Each piece comes with a little title or description. How seriously should you take them?
It’s pretty rare for me to set out to write music with a particular image or story in mind. The starting point is most often something very technical – a challenge I set myself to write in a certain mode, a certain texture, write in strict rhythm or be rhythmically fluid, to present a melody, or to avoid ‘themes’ as building blocks. And then, as the piece begins to grow, I listen to hear what story I think it’s trying to tell, and start pushing it in that direction. That’s when it begins to be ‘about’ something, and sometimes very intensely so.
The ‘stories’ I imagine in the music have something in common with dreams – they have the same metaphorical logic, the easy equivalence of things that we normally count as distinct. And that’s a good reason not to take my stories seriously at all!
Don’t you hate it when people tell you their dreams? You know they say things like, “I had this dream and there was this man and he was my father. Oh no wait he was my uncle! No wait he was my father. Wait I’m not sure.” And you say, “Please don’t tell me your dream!” But they go on anyway, “Yes I think it was my father and he had this bloody severed head.” They’re telling you the dream like it’s a movie you might want to see sometime and not something that’s happening only in the back of their own head. (Laurie Anderson, Landfall)
On the other hand… I don’t think music speaks for itself. Ultimately the idea is that listeners will find their own dream-narratives in the music – that’s kind of what music is good at. But in the meantime a new piece of music can be a bewildering experience. Why is it like this? What is the point? Where is it coming from? Why should I care? And that’s when some information about the composer’s thinking is as good a way as any to find one’s bearings.
4th Symphony (2025)
On one level this symphony is about following threads. I challenged myself to do without the usual chugging strings and chord patterns for energy and movement, and instead propel the music forward with counterpoint – the interweaving of different melodic lines. On another level, the music felt to me, from very early on, to be trying to tell a story about life-forms in the natural world: wriggling, floating, stamping, soaring, flourishing, dying. Striving; evolving.
• 1st mov: ‘Under the sea’. Imagine a tiny plankton propelling itself, then falling back, then pushing up again. That’s how the start of this movement feels to me. By the end of the movement, the creature has evolved, but all that has really changed is the scale. Still reaching upwards, driven by its own inner necessity.
• 2nd mov: ‘Trees’. The life cycle of trees, from bleak winter, the first tentative shoots of spring, lush summer, fruitful autumn, and back to winter again.
• 3rd mov: ‘Feet’. Animals on the land, small and large, running, falling, scurrying, pouncing.
• 4th mov: ‘The mountain and the lake’. At last: human beings. A group of adventurers tramp up a mountain, and stumble upon a hidden lake, serene and beautiful. Then they have to find a way back down again.
More…
The lake is something like Hermann Hesse’s, from his fairytale ‘Faldum’:
On the summit of the mountain, no man had ever stood. But many claimed to know that up there at the very top was a small round lake in which nothing had ever been mirrored except the sun, the moon, the clouds, and the stars. Neither man nor animal had ever looked into this pool which the mountains held up to the heavens, for even eagles could not fly so high.
Though I think my lake isn’t quite at the top; there are no plants around; perhaps something lives under the water, to give the lake that extraordinary colour. And in my version, human beings intrude; the beauty of the lake isn’t ‘for’ them, but they witness it, impotently. I hope, as they descend clumpily to the bottom of the mountain to become themselves again, that no damage has been done.
If pushed, I would say a consistent part of my musical aesthetic is a love of clarity and empty space. This symphony as a whole has a lot of counterpoint in two parts – even when most of the orchestra is playing, they often divide up into just two lines. Writing in two parts is light and unfussy, and you can follow everything that is going on; and the harmony is understated, implicit.
3rd Symphony (2018)
More ambitious in scale than my first two symphonies, the thread running through this symphony is propulsion and momentum.
• 1st mov: A big machine… the loud ‘kick start’ on the front falls flat, but somehow the gears do engage and the music whirrs and clicks forward.
• 2nd mov: ‘Rapids’ – a slow movement is sucked into a fast movement, and after a rocky ride is spat out at the other end.
• 3rd mov: A sea voyage, lost wanderings, and return.
• 4th mov: A journey as if by train, that starts in a tunnel of confused noise, and sweeps us lickety-split to our destination.
More info…
I began the third symphony with a number of thoughts: I’d already written two quite easy, ‘happy’ symphonies, and felt like doing something different: something in the minor mode, not to be doomy and tragic, but just to see what I could do with it; and larger in scale. And I had the idea of starting with loud tutti chords as a private whimsy – a nod to other third symphonies, Beethoven’s, Nielsen’s, and Tippett’s.
The music is ‘traditional’ in the sense that it declares melodic ‘themes’, which it then proceeds to distort, dismantle and recombine as a way of embodying longer term dramatic objectives. I have some fun with misdirection (e.g. the broken thumps at the start become the key idea of the whole movement; the recapitulation in the second movement isn’t really the tune you heard at the beginning), and I ultimately I think ‘themes’ are an overhyped way of building a sense of coherence – it’s much more about texture, speed, types of gesture, an idea I take furthest in the third movement.
Christmas symphony (2015)
Numerically my 2nd symphony, this one is about Christmas in a secular sense – ‘christmassy feelings’:
• 1st mov: Advent. Glitter and good cheer as the winter nights grow longer – the high street glows and brass bands play.
• 2nd mov: Wrapping on Christmas eve. Late on Christmas Eve, exhausted parents wrap presents and put them under the tree, before crawling off to bed.
• 3rd mov: Magic and dreams. Deep into the night, the house is asleep. A mischievous waltz and dreams of sleigh-rides across snowy landscapes.
• 4th mov: Christmas morning. Brightness, optimism, and a heady mix of anticipation and fulfilment.
1st Symphony (2013)
Short and sweet – think Haydn rather than Mahler – this symphony features the fuzzy diatonic harmony and off-kilter rhythms that are still basic to my style.
• 1st mov: if the music is about anything, it’s about ‘courtesy’, even as it staggers around skipping beats.
• 2nd mov: a crackling scherzo, simpler in rhythm, but revelling in diatonic dissonance.
• 3rd mov: a birth-to-death arc, starting warmly, ending forlornly
• 4th mov: more good-humoured rhythmic madness.