Angelus Novus (2024)

Instrumentation: solo electric violin and live electronics
Duration: c.14’
First performance: Martin Suckling (electric violin and live electronics) at The Crescent, York, 11 December 2024.

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Angelus Novus

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Walter Benjamin, from “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940)

Etude: 'Orrery' (2021)

Commissioned by Luxembourg Philharmonie for Tamara Stefanovich

Instrumentation: piano solo
Duration: c. 3’
First performance: Tamara Stefanovich (piano), at Luxembourg Philharmonie, 20 January 2021

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Etude: ‘Orrery’

Models of the movement of celestial bodies have long served as the basis for musical explorations, and vice-versa.  The Pythagorean tradition of the Harmony of the Spheres, in which planetary orbits, human emotions and the practice of music are all connected through sounding number is well-known, though I make no claim for the occult efficacy of this little etude! Rather, the orrery – a clockwork model of the solar system demonstrating the changing orbits of planets around the sun – is simply a useful way of visualising the musical situation: a series of more or less imperfect ‘clockwork’ mechanisms rotating harmonies around a central point. Each pitch-satellite has its own orbital period and the changing rhythmic patterns thus generated result in the emergence of hidden melodies; sometimes the mechanism catches and a particular pattern gets stuck in a loop.

The harmonies are all derived from a cipher of the dedicatee’s name: T(e)-A-M(i)-A(#)-R(e)-A(b) – this, along with the mention of ‘hidden melodies’ perhaps suggest occultism is not as far away as I might wish to maintain. . .

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Photo by Ross Sneddon on Unsplash

these bones, this flesh, this skin (2020)

Commissioned by Scottish Ensemble

Instrumentation: Solo violin (multi-tracked and processed) with dancer and film
Duration: 21 x 4.5’ films

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Developed in collaboration between Scottish Ensemble and Scottish Dance Theatre, these bones, this flesh, this skin is a digital work for solo violin and solo dancer by composer Martin Suckling, choreographer Joan Clevillé and cinematographer Genevieve Reeves. Through a bespoke online platform, the audience is invited to combine different audio and visual layers to decide how they want to experience the work in multiple iterations.

Born out of a unique period in our lives, the piece explores how heightened attention can reveal different experiences of time in our bodies and the environment around us. This layering of simplicity and complexity also manifests in the way that you are invited to make decisions. With every new iteration you can discover new perspectives, new nuances waiting for you in the spaces in between music, cinematography and dance, between the traces of our own memories and the aliveness of our attention.

View online: http://www.thesebonesthisfleshthisskin.com/

Image: still from film by Genevieve Reeves

Lieder ohne Worte (2010)

Commissioned by John Reid with generous support from the RVW Trust.

Instrumentation: Piano solo
Duration: 10'
First Performance: 19 September 2010. John Reid (with Nicholas Mulroy, tenor).

perusal score

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Lieder ohne Worte

I. Der Dichter, als Prolog
II. Mein?!
III. ...mein Herz ist zu voll

These three short piano pieces are reflections on Schubert's cycle. In their way, they are songs too: the first, a recitation; the second, port-a-beul (dancing nonsense rhymes); the third a long lyrical aria.

Der Dichter, als Prolog borrows its title from the first of Müller's Die schöne Müllerin poems (which Schubert chose not to set). Like Müller's text, it presents an external speaker introducing the world of the song cycle, the forest, the brook, and distant horn calls.

The second piece continues directly from the triumphant Mein!, the over-exuberant repetition of key phrases from this song perhaps suggesting that the miller's cry, "die geliebte Mullerin ist mein! ist mein!" is more a delusional demand than a celebratory acknowledgement.

In Pause, the tenor sings “Ich kann nicht mehr singen, mein Herz ist zu voll” (I can sing no more, my heart is too full). The third piano solo, which follows immediately, takes this line as its basis: the idea of a heart filling with song to the point of overflowing.

Lieder ohne Worte are dedicated with great affection to John Reid, and their commission was generously supported by the Ralph Vaughan Williams Trust.