Hollie Harding What was scattered

What was scattered, gathers. What was gathered, blows away.

This piece explores a number of different vitalities from effervescent shimmering, to erratic, sighing, tripping, rumbling, violent, frenetic, unfurling, stretching into sustained, vibrant phrases that eventually flicker and fade.

Completed during a particularly difficult part of lockdown, there is an underlying sense of longing and searching colouring the piece, as it coloured the world around me at the time.

What was scattered was commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society (RPS Composition Prize) and was first performed by Philharmonia Orchestra who recorded it for release on NMC in 2022. 

Laurence Crane See Our lake

See Our Lake was written for IXION, at Andrew Toovey’s request, and composed between July and September 1999. It is scored for alto flute, clarinet (doubling bass clarinet), violin, cello and vibraphone and consists of two short movements of similar duration.

The work was first performed by IXION at The Warehouse in London on 30 September 1999, as part of the first concert in the BMIC’s first Cutting Edge series.

Lucy Cooke Mechanics of the Mundane

Mechanics of the Mundane (2025) is an examination of the everyday; scrutiny of its subtleties. A miniature musical patchwork combines fragments of text found everywhere – from children’s fiction and articles about railway engineering, to graffiti on telephone boxes and snatches of conversations in the street. The piece is a celebration of the whimsical intricacies of everyday life, shared with the listener in the hope of highlighting what can be found when you look (and listen!) a little closer.

Jacob Cavendish Light and Magic

Light and Magic is a flute concerto written last year for Lara Aisha. Scored for a small mixed ensemble, the work explores the flute’s light, agile character through shifting colour and texture. Unusually cast in two movements, it features a recurring bell-like motif, introduced by celesta and tubular bells, which gradually assumes a structural and expressive role.

Richard Baker Breaking the Ground

Breaking the Ground (2003) is a ten-minute piece in one movement for solo piano, written at a time when I was trying to re-learn how to write for the instrument. As in several other pieces I wrote in this period, I was interested in long-range harmonic processes, and in projecting harmony at different levels in the music. It takes its title from a seventeenth century English variation technique, as described by Christopher Simpson in his 1659 treatise The Division Violist. The piece is built from two interleaved sets of variations — one based on an iambic melodic line, the other on a harmonic sequence – which occasionally interfere with one another, but the material of each theme is not heard in its simplest form until the end.

Breaking the Ground was commissioned by the Warwick and Leamington Festival with funds generously provided by West Midlands Arts. It is dedicated to Howard Skempton.