Willem Buurman Device

Device is named after the novel This Is Memorial Device by David Keenan.

The piece explores abrupt and gradual changes in texture and arrangement. When composing the piece, I enjoyed thinking of each part as its own ‘device’, capable of being switched on and off in a variety of combinations. The piece alternates between presenting sounds as unified objects and distorting them to reveal the composite parts from which they are made.

After numerous attempts of trying and failing to come up with my own variation on that title, I ultimately decided it was best left as merely Device.

Molly Arnuk Piece in 4 sections

Piece in 4 Sections was written on my sofa. The section titles come from a list of things in my line of sight where I sat, chosen for likeness with the music they represent. The musical material comes from transcriptions of/responses to the phone ringing, the fan whirring, knitting needles scraping and clicking, and the neighbours’ muffled talking.

Lucy Holmes Silkworks

Silkworks is an abstract piece inspired by shapes from Thomas Saraceno’s Hybrid Webs, a series of sculptures he created with spider webs. I am also interested in similar structures such as neural networks, roots, nerves and blood vessels, and how these complex networks of many lines often form overall rounded shapes. As these networks build over time they tell stories, leaving clues of memories of past events. The music is formed from distinctive, intricate strands which become interwoven in the texture, and is guided by the evolution of these shapes, developing organically. It focuses on the gradual build-up of complex layers as a much in the same way as the spider webs in Saraceno’s sculptures.

André Serra and this is what it is like

and this is what it is like takes its title from the final lines of Words, Wide Night by Carol Ann Duffy. I have not tried to depict the poem itself but rather respond to the feelings of fragility and tenderness the poem leaves behind. The piece unfolds as a slow, chorale-like meditation on intimacy, shaped by a continuous interplay between distance and unison, as though each instrument is reaching out toward another without ever fully arriving.

Ultimately, the piece is concerned with the inadequacy of music before love, and the attempt to communicate something that exceeds language itself.

Emily Pedersen Manta Movements

Manta Movements opens inspired by the bio-acoustic soundscape of a coral reef. It then invokes the mating dance of reef manta rays, which involves a female manta ray leading series of dance-like movements which are copied by a chain of male manta rays hoping to win her approval. When she finally chooses a suitor, they meet at the surface before slowly drifting downwards together.

Yuyang Li The mischievous machine and its insides

This piece is an instruction manual for a Machiavellian, cunning, scheming, treacherous machine. Luckily it carries out all its schemes and treacheries in jest and doesn’t really mean anything by them. It’s the type of individual that says: “oops I didn’t mean to drink your milkshake honey”. We observe its inner workings, with its strange mechanistic components working together cohesively, like a well-oiled machine (oh). Eventually, you will come to appreciate its motivations.