Output details

"The Freedom of the Earth for chorus and ensemble" (commissioned by Spitalfields Music and New London Chamber Choir)

"The Freedom of the Earth" was commissioned by Spitalfields Music and New London Chamber Choir, and was first performed by NLCC and the London Sinfonietta, conducted by the composer, in June 2011.

The research goal of this composition continues the researcher’s investigation into the elemental building-blocks of musical language, the overall compositional project being to strip musical material down to its fundamental, bare essentials in order to achieve a ‘refreshed hearing’. This involved the research process of the composition starting from a very restricted range of pitches and rhythms before greater sophistication and complexity emerged from these. The necessity here was to avoid superficial refinement disconnected from the foundations of musical language.

The text of the work was taken from the writings of the seventeenth century writer and political activist Gerrard Winstanley, leader of the Diggers. The researcher / composer saw clear parallels between the fundamental and egalitarian political and religious ideology of the Diggers and his own appreciation of the power and potential of elementary particles of musical structure and language. "The Freedom of the Earth" is the researcher / composer’s largest scale investigation of these principles to date, and on one level is intended as a summation of several strands of research begun in earlier works.