I’m honoured to be presenting the premiere of my Concerto for Piano and Loudspeaker Orchestra at Queens University, as part of the lunchtime concert with wonderful pianist Marie Vermeulin. In this talk, I want to try to avoid plot-spoilers for the performance, so that the work can speak for itself in concert. Instead, I’ll explore some of its motivations and processes of making. For starters, why a ‘concerto’? And why loudspeaker orchestra? Composing is often a very private process, but I will share elements of the sketching and working documentation. I’ll examine the unusual pitch system of the work, and my approaches to handling this on paper and with ad hoc computer aids.

An appeal of the loudspeaker orchestra is its capacity for sound spatialisation, and I wanted to explore what ‘orchestration’ might mean for this medium. I chose to experiment with new Dolby Atmos tools, with their promise of flexibility for the end user or venue, testing their creative possibilities and constraints against our several decades of technical and aesthetic research in the electroacoustic world.

This Concerto is fed by many strands of my creative practice: as composer for acoustic forces, fixed media, and ‘live electronics’ hybrids; as orchestral player and conductor; and as performer of electroacoustic work in concert sound diffusion. The result has resonances of all of those but isn’t like quite anything I’ve previously made.