WITHERBUD

Witherbud, commissioned and performed by the LPO as part of their 2020 - 2021 LPO Young Composers’ Scheme, was composed during lockdown. Challenged to respond to concert’s moniker of Bunker Music, a reference to the circumstances of our and many others’ composing, I wrote a piece hoping to sum up the jostling indecision and hesitation clouding our collective minds at the time. The piece’s title refers to the following quotation from Beckett’s Watt:

“For what is this shadow of the going in which we come, this shadow of the coming in which we go, this shadow of the coming and the going in which we wait, if not the shadow of purpose, of the purpose that budding withers, that withering buds, whose blooming is a budding withering.”

Would we go forwards or backwards? Begin again or falter? Wither or bud? The metamorphosises of Bach quotations into and from compressed seedling forms are weaved into ‘intricate overlapping scales, which suggest a never-ending movement being constantly renewed, like a waterfall.’ The piece sporadically speeds and slows, sometimes uncannily. The tone seemingly changes at the piece’s own whim from serious to playful to plainly ridiculous. The questions that the piece poses collapse in on themselves.

FOR ORCHESTRA (2021), premiered by JACK SHEEN and the LONDON PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA