TOMB!

Winner of the 2024 RPS Award for Chamber Scale Composition

Winner of the 2024 Ivor Novello Award for Chamber Ensemble Composition

Description:

TOMB! Is one continuous movement – a tombeau – lasting 20 minutes. It is, like any tombeau, written with great admiration and affection for older music. But it is also a piece that recognises and questions the morbid obsessions of heritage culture.

The tombeau is a strange custom, whereby a living artists honours a dead one by impersonating their voice. In her essay, Outside the Tomb, Carolyn Abbate recasts the tombeau as a mechanism that reanimates the voice of the dead artist from within, as if by magic. This beautiful and grotesque idea – of homage becoming necromancy – was the starting point for TOMB!

TOMB! contains many lifeless forms from musical history: fugues, gigues, passacaglias and things like that. All of these objects appear in a state of decomposition. Some are jolted into life, like frogs at the end of battery cables; others are worn like glove puppets; others rise slowly to their feet and lurch around, as if under a spell. Occasionally, things appear in their pure, calcified form: frozen, like fossil, at the moment of expiry.

Full scoring:

Violin x6
Viola x3
Cello x2
Double Bass

Bass Drum
Timpani
Roto-toms
Thai Gongs
Steel Drum
Xylophone
Glockenspiel
Almglocken
Castanets
Guiro
Vibraslap
Flexatone
Heavy Metal Chain
Metal Bucket

Piano