The winners of the 2016 British Composer Awards were announced last night at a ceremony at BFI Southbank, London. Here’s the complete list, with information about each piece and, in some cases, audio links.
(All information from the BCA website)
AMATEUR OR YOUNG PERFORMERS The Monster in the Maze by Jonathan Dove
Commissioned by London Symphony Orchestra, Berliner Philharmoniker and Festival d’Aix-en-Provence within a series of children’s operas led by Sir Simon Rattle and Simon Halsey, The Monster in the Maze is an opera designed to celebrate an arts organisation’s relationship with its community. The opera is scored for professional musicians with amateur singers (adults, children and young people) and young pre-professional instrumentalists. The three productions in summer 2015 involved over 700 local participants.
It received its UK premiere on 4 July 2015 at the Barbican performed by the LSO conducted by Sir Simon Rattle and Simon Halsey.
To find out more about the work CLICK HERE
CHAMBER ENSEMBLE Freezywater by Leo Chadburn
Imagine yourself at the centre of a circle, sixty kilometres in diameter. Starting from the most Northerly point, a disembodied voice names places and topographical features including waterways, streets, farms, wooded areas, and a naturist camp.
The voice makes its way around the circle, until it arrives back where it started. Each utterance prompts a chord or phrase from the musicians, gradually augmenting and diminishing. Like an uninterrupted motorway journey, the landscape changes incrementally, but the hum of the engine remains the same.
Freezywater connects to the ideas of psychogeography and Nick Papadimitriou’s ’deep topography’, wherein drifting from place to place might provoke an intellectual, behavioural or emotional response.
Commissioned by Wigmore Hall with the support of André Hoffmann, President of the Fondation Hoffmann. Freezywater is for ensemble and pre-recorded voices and was premiered by Apartment House at Wigmore Hall, London on 27 February 2016.
To listen to Freezywater CLICK HERE
CHORAL Ave Verum Corpus Re-Imagined by Roderick Williams
William Byrd’s Ave Verum Corpus is a piece that I have known since my days as a treble chorister and I grew up in awe of its carefully measured harmony and effortless counterpoint. Like any choral singer, I have my favourite moments within the piece – the scrunching false relations, the question and answer exclamations, the mournful coda – and so I sought to write a piece that would focus specifically on these highlights and expand upon them. Its composition is an act of homage to a masterful composer.
This work was commissioned by ORA and Suzi Digby OBE as a reflection on the Kyrie Eleison from William Byrd’s Mass for Five voices. It received its UK premiere at the ORA Launch Concert at the Tower of London on 9 February 2016.
To listen to the work in full CLICK HERE
COMMUNITY OR EDUCATIONAL PROJECT Into the Light by John Webb
Into the Light was commissioned by Aurora Orchestra and Buckinghamshire Learning Trust Music with funds from PRS for Music Foundation.
It received its UK premiere on 29 April 2015, performed by 1800 children from Buckinghamshire (voices and mixed instruments), members of the Aurora Orchestra and conducted by John Webb. Held at Royal Albert Hall.
Into the Light started with some questions – how do we celebrate the world? How do we create a celebratory piece? How can some of the KS2 performers who will sing it feed their ideas (both words and music) into the piece?
After pondering for some time, we decided that it’s easier to celebrate the world if we first pretended that we couldn’t see it, that the world was in darkness. When, finally, light appeared and we saw everything for the first time we would be completely awestruck at the wonder, beauty and diversity of the planet on which we live. And so the bare bones of the piece was born.
To listen to Into the Light CLICK HERE
CONTEMPORARY JAZZ COMPOSITION Karembeus Guide to the Complete Defensive Midfielder by Joe Cutler
Karembeu’s Guide to the Complete Defensive Midfielder was a commission from the 2015 Cheltenham International Music Festival for Emulsion Sinfonietta/Food.
Although the piece is predominantly fully scored, I treat the additional duo Food (Thomas Stronen and Iain Bellamy) rather like that of the “floating” role in football, where a midfielder is given a free position with a set formation, moving between defensive, midfield and attack.
ORCHESTRAL Alba by Rebecca Saunders
alba
L. fem. of albus “white,” from PIE root *albho- “white”, albe OE.
In painting the most extreme bright and light achromatic colour to the point of absolute luminosity. Devoid of shade and greyness, white is notably ardent, the colour of fury.
Alba is the final work in a series of three concertos – Still, Void and Alba. Each title defines a condition, or state, of absence in relation to sound, to space and to colour, respectively, and each refers to a text of Samuel Beckett.
Taken from the collection Echo’s Bones, Alba is an intensely lyrical poem. Beckett weighs each and every word and it’s shadow, it’s echo. This poem ends looking forward to the short and intense prose texts written at the end of his life – his profoundly reduced, almost skeletal, prose, both mercilessly direct and yet exquisitely fragile.
Commissioned by Bayerischer Rundfunk, Musica Viva and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Alba received its UK premiere on 26 November 2015, performed by Marco Blaauw (trumpet) and BBCSSO, conducted by Ilan Volkov at City Halls, Glasgow.
SMALL CHAMBER A Day at the Spa by Oliver Leith
The title came before the piece that might be obvious. I thought I might try and write a piece akin to those relaxing piped tapes but apparently I couldn’t. I had not been to a spa when I wrote the piece but have since been to one – Rudas baths in Budapest. My piece, as it turns out, is not at all like a spa other than that, at times, it sounds like water.
Commissioned by City Music Foundation, A Day at the Spa received its premiere performance on 7 July 2015. Performed by Kaleidoscope Saxophone Quartet, at St Martins in the Field.
SOLO OR DUO Five Memos by Mark Bowden
I took Italo Calvino’s series of Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, as a starting point to create a five-movement work for violin and piano. My ambition, to create musical responses to the artistic virtues Calvino held up as being of particular importance for writers, and artists, of the future.
In ‘Lightness’ Calvino discusses the concept of balancing an inner rhythm against a frantic spectacle. He contemplates grace, light, veils of particles and the fine balance of the physical forces holding matter together. He contrasts these images with heaviness and savage, brutal horror. In the music, I have sought to find a driving rhythm in the piano, propelling itself ever forward as the violin floats above escaping the tonal force of gravity of the piano’s harmony as though it is a neutrino, wandering free since the beginning of time.
In ‘Quickness’ Calvino describes how seemingly disparate narrative events can be connected through repetition, rhyme and rhythm. He talks of continuity of form, discoursing and the idea of festina lente, or ‘hurrying slowly’. In the music I created contrasting musical gestures for the violin held together by common intervallic materials whilst exploring different perceptions of motion and speed within the piano part.
Calvino contrasts the notion of ‘Exactitude’ against Vago – an Italian adjective meaning ‘attractive’ or ‘wandering’, as well as ‘vague’. He contemplates the idea of night, darkness, obscurity and depth, and talks of the simultaneous evocation of fear and pleasure that true infinity induces in those who contemplate it. In the music, a simple cycle of chords is treated to what could become an infinite process of repetition and change. The violin’s melody, always smooth and simple, undergoes an exact and meticulous unfolding of pitches against a more wandering, or vague, harmonic exploration in the piano music.
In ‘Visibility’ Calvino discusses how a writer can conjure images in the mind of the reader, bringing into focus that which is unfocussed or unseen. He also grapples with the swarming multitudes of possibilities available to the novelist when creating a literary work. In the music, a kaleidoscopic tumult of fantastical material unfolds, each gesture containing the possibility to develop into a work in its own right. But, instead, new material keeps emerging until a cascade of arpeggios in the piano brings us back to somewhere near where we began before finishing with an inconclusive, uncertain coda.
The final chapter of Calvino’s book addresses “Multiplicity’. He considers how even the smallest starting point can spread to encompass ever-vaster horizons. He explores the possibilities implicit in unfinished literary fragments, comparing them to ancient ruins. He points to the networks of relationships in the works of T.S. Eliot and the ‘systems within systems’ buried in the writings of James Joyce. Finally, he reconnects to his first topic – lightness – creating interconnected pathways across his own set of essays. In the music, a tiny generative motif taken from the first movement is the source of all the material of an intricate toccata, interrupted briefly by a slower and more lyrical section, that bustles and ripples along creating networks of relationships between the piano and violin. – Mark Bowden
Commissioned by London Music Masters Five Memos was premiered on 10 May 2015, performed by Hyeyoon Park (violin) and Huw Watkins (piano) at Newbury Spring Festival.
SONIC ART Sonorama by Claudia Molitor
Located on the train journey between London St Pancras and Margate, Sonorama is a major new audio work by composer Claudia Molitor that offers sounds and voices for the otherwise silent view from the train, downloadable as an App for listening with headphones.
Imagining the journey itself as the ’score’ Molitor has composed a cycle of works and collected interviews, readings and original archival material which respond to the social history and present of the route. With each track relating to a different point or area along the train line, the work has been informed through a collaboration with historian David Hendy and the British Library. The tracks imagine topics as diverse as visio-centricity, Roman history and hop-picking with a corresponding variety of contributors such as flautist Jan Hendrickse, poet Lemn Sissay, saxophonist Evan Parker and writer Charlotte Higgins.
The Sketch of the Score for Sonorama, exhibited at Turner Contemporary, is a graphic score of Molitor’s reading of the journey and underpins the thinking behind the compositions and the selection of the other materials that make up Sonorama, acting as a companion piece to experiencing the main work on the train.
In developing the Sonorama I set out to intermingle my perception of the journey with some socio-cultural memories and contemporary concerns, in a way that does not merely present these notions/viewpoints but complicates rather than simplifies the way we might conceive of the journey. Listening to Sonorama whilst looking out of the train window in turn invites the audience to reflect on their own relationship to the journey and their experience of ’being in the world’. – Claudia Molitor
See my own piece about this work, here.
STAGE WORKS Between Worlds by Tansy Davies
Commissioned by the ENO and the Barbican, London, Between Worlds received its UK premiere on 11 April 2015. Performed by English National Opera conducted by Gerry Cornelius at Barbican Centre, London.
The opera involves five key characters. The JANITOR (baritone) should have left before dawn, his cleaning job done; but today he stays on for the extra pay. So he’s there when four further characters arrive early to view an unoccupied office high in the North Tower, the shining city all before them: an OLDER WOMAN (mezzo), the realtor; an OLDER MAN (bass/baritone) who runs the company; and a YOUNGER WOMAN (soprano) and YOUNGER MAN (tenor) who work for him. Once the plane has hit, these characters quickly realise they’re trapped; their desperate need is to speak to their loved ones, one last time; the OLDER WOMAN wants to speak to her CHILD, the YOUNGER WOMAN to her LOVER, the YOUNGER MAN to his MOTHER, and the OLDER MAN to both his mistress and his wife. In these last words, they try to express their most profound feelings – their fear, their courage, their loss, and above all their profound sense of love.
To view the ENO trailer CLICK HERE
WIND BAND OR BRASS BAND Just a Vibration by Shri Sriram
This is a project that was about bringing Indian melodies and classical concepts to Brass band. The line-up features brass band, sitar, bass, drums, Indian flute and Indian tabla vocalisation.
This was Sriram’s first time at composing for brass band and they have been lauded for bringing in a very fresh perspective to the UK brass scene, drawing from Indian classical tabla, sitar and drone instruments, jazz, dub-step, club music, ambient and drum’n’bass.
Commissioned by Drum The Bass and developed and recorded with Hammonds Saltaire Brass band with conductor Morgan Griffiths it received its UK premiere on 5 September 2015. Performed by Shri and Skelmanthorpe Brass Band at Freedom Festival in Hull 2015.
To watch part of the work performed at the London Jazz Festival 2015 CLICK HERE
BRITISH COMPOSER AWARD FOR INNOVATION Jennifer Walshe
BRITISH COMPOSER AWARD FOR INSPIRATION Simon Bainbridge