Practical Mechanics

The first draft of my chamber ensemble work is finished. It’s in 5 movements, and it’s called Practical Mechanics.

Here are some demos:

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A big thank you to the members of Nonsemble whose playing, comments and ideas have hugely helped me refine this score to where it is now. Thanks also my partner Helen for singing the tenor part in the MVT I demo, because it was waaay too high for me (she’s a soprano, so it was pretty low for her…).

Thematically the work is an ode to technological optimism. I’m fascinated by people’s faith in science to improve human life, against the backdrop of the infinite complexity of ourselves and the universe, and our unavoidable mortality.

Each of the titles is taken from the tattered pages of vintage issues of Practical Mechanics Magazine, a home science and technology magazine published between 1933 and 1963.

The magazine embodied the collision of scientific laws with domestic human life, and reflects the tension in my music between mathematically elegant rule-based compositional approaches and the ineffable chaos of human musical intuition.