Across the Boundary (2024)

Vignette for Symphony Orchestra

As part of the City of Sheffield Youth Orchestra’s first ever composition challenge, I wrote this short piece and attended a workshop day to hear this piece performed and developed. It is about a single event from which the ripples can be felt in all directions. The composition process started with the image of looking out to sea at something approaching. It is ultimately about facing fears, and crossing into a state of acceptance. It’s really about a metaphorical leap of faith. The strings begin with a stable chord which undulates between players. This is almost immediately disrupted by various ideas based around harmonic and instrumental texture. These ideas add colour to and change each other, perhaps beyond recognition, through the duration of the music. What’s left is something new that was somehow always there.

Score and parts available on request.

Shining Dawn (2023)

Fanfare for Symphony Orchestra

I was honoured to be commissioned to write this fanfare for Hallam Sinfonia's (an orchestra I play in myself) 50th Anniversary Celebration Concert on 14th October 2023. This is the software 'mock-up' of the sound, and can certainly not do justice to the fantastic performance by Hallam Sinfonia on the day! The piece is a joyful and hopeful fanfare which draws on the idea of things coming together, forming and crystallising - and then celebrating. I hid the number 5 in it in a variety of ways, and wanted to suggest the idea that 50 years is only the beginning of something greater.

Score and parts available on request.

String Quartet No. 1 (2022)

Written as part of my final submission for my MA in Composition from the University of Sheffield, this string quartet is intended to include contemporary thinking in a piece which doesn’t require the ensemble to be professionals or virtuosos to play. Score and parts are available on request, and more detail about this piece can be found in the blog post here.

Score and parts available on request.

An Endless Sea - with Sanyukta Srivatsa (2021)

For Voice and Violoncello

This piece was written and performed alongside Sanyukta Srivatsa at DINA, Sheffield on 7th December 2021 as part of a collaborative project. The cello part interacts with the vocals, sometimes supporting and sometimes working against them, to create a conversational yet lyrical song which explores how two voices can interact both sonically and creatively. I had so much fun working on this, and it was great to play live once again!

The Hollow Island (2021)

For Symphony Orchestra

This piece was premiered on 5th December 2021 by Sheffield University Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Dr. Cayenna Ponchione-Bailey.

View the score here.

Programme Notes:

‘The Hollow Island’ explores a musical landscape of natural disagreement and forced ideas. It explores the fragile, hollow nature of a need to be great and to be in control. It explores the defences we build in order to appear impenetrable. How must this landscape appear to an observer on the outside? To somebody who has no choice but to become part of the system we have created?

Isle of Chair (Ivyy CHen): Original Soundtrack (2021)

For Violoncello, Piano and Electronics

As part of an academic assignment, I produced an original soundtrack (and effects and foley) for a beautiful film called ‘Isle of Chair’ by Ivyy Chen. I don’t own the film, but this version of the soundtrack is entirely my own, and features my very own cello playing. This is a film full of different metaphors with many ways to interpret the meaning. I hope the music inspires you to experience the film in your own way.

A Moment In Twilight (2021)

For Symphony Orchestra

An orchestral miniature written to portray a brief moment as the sun sets over a view of the hills in Sheffield. The piece contains shades of light and dark, unease and beauty. The clarinet takes a lead role, anchoring the piece in the centre-ground of the orchestra while also pushing and pulling at the edges of its range. Everything in the piece is initially derived from the same group of five notes.

(Note: the sound file is a midi recording - please excuse the inconsistencies in dynamics and general sound quality!)

A Sculpture in Breaking Glass (2021)

For Flute, Bassoon, Bass Drum, Glockenspiel and Viola

This piece explores the dispersion of a simple melody line into complex fragments, and aims to ask the question of whether unity occurs when all of the instruments in an ensemble are playing the same thing, to the same ends, or whether an ensemble is perhaps more unified when each player has a different goal. It also includes a type of ‘spectral counterpoint’ in which the partials above each note in the melody are used, moving one step up the list of partials each time, and changing above each note of the melody.

Resonance (2020)

For mixed instrumentation including Violoncello, Piano and Virtual Instruments

My second album project with a slightly more relaxed, reflective feel. Listen to a track from it below:

A Dream From Before (2019)

For mixed instrumentation including Piano, Electric Guitar and Virtual Instruments

A first album project of electronic-based tonal music, which was just a lot of fun! I imagined a narrative running through the album, exploring dreams, reality, and where the line is between both. Have a listen to one of the tracks below:

Suite for Solo Cello (2018)

For Violoncello Solo

I composed this piece as part of an academic project, basing some of the material on the ways in which Bach and Britten wrote their classic solo cello music, while also including newer musical styles - all through my own voice as a composer. Click the first button to download the score and the second button to have a listen to the first performance of the first version:

I Spread Without Harm (2017)

For Piano, Electronics and Electronic Recording

A longer electroacoustic piece whose structure is inspired by trees! The piece features live acoustic performances of a specially written piano piece based around the pitch sequences of a) the first piece of music ever written down and b) the first piece of music ever recorded, and each ‘branch’ of the piece allows a certain element of music to be explored and to grow (e.g. pitch or rhythm etc). The piece goes around in cycles, with each branch growing more on each repetition and finding new areas of interest to explore. The listener gradually zooms further and further out until the original theme is revealed. Everything is at once old and brand new. Have a listen below!

Decomposition No. 1 (2016)

For Electronics

An early electroacoustic piece of mine which explores the soundscapes around me during a strange year. It struck me that there is little difference between creating and destroying something sometimes (e.g. to make this piece, I had to manipulate and cut up lots of other different sounds). It was initially conceived around the sounds of people eating, but eventually grew into something a bit more wide-ranging. Have a listen below!