A Midsummer Night’s Dream - Incidental Music (2009)
Duration: 25’00” (music alone)
Instrumentation: voices, C-trp., string quartet, 2 perc. (sus-cymb. (with bow), 2 almglock., 9 button gongs, 2 log dr., 2 w-blk. rin, 2 flex., 2 whirling tubes, glock., crot., mark tree)
Text: Williams Shakespeare.
Songs: The Ousel Cock so Black of Hue (tenor, string quartet, crot.), You Spotted Snakes (2 m-sop., 1 ten., string quartet) and You Spotted Snakes (SATB, string quartet).
First Performance: 2009-10 Third year theatre students, Felicity Hindle (perc.), George English (perc.) and Lazaro String Quartet; Silk Street Theatre, Guildhall School of Music & Drama; 30th November 2009.
“A truly interesting example of compositional eclecticism: part pre-recorded electronics, part live acoustic instruments, part deconstructed Tudorbethan dance, part 1940s salon-chic... It very effectively created an other-world for the fairies that, as it happened, was a perfect match for the perpetual darkness onstage: a world of music distantly perceived through closed doors, fragile, fleeting, whispered on harmonics, bordering the sinister and the familiar.”