Output details

The Zong Affair’ (mixed septet)

Premiere: Kings Place, London

The Zong Affair, for clarinet, horn bassoon, violin, viola, cello and double bass.

Commissioned by the Turner Ensemble.

Recording issued by Guild Music on CD in July 2013 (GMCD 7397).

My compositions are often known for their extramusical dimensions, in particular with poetry and literature: Porphyria's Lover for flute and piano (after Browning); In Xanadu for wind quintet (after Coleridge); Softly in the Dusk for piano trio (after D.H. Lawrence). The tradition of composers engaging with painting tends to be associated with Romanticism and post-Romanticism: contemporary examples, such as David Matthews's The Flaying of Marsyas, are rarer. Based on the same forces as Beethoven's Septet, Op.20, The Zong Affair was commissioned by the Turner Ensemble. I was required to draw upon the ensemble's name by engaging with a painting by J.W. Turner, and chose his disturbing painting 'The Slave Ship', based on the Dutch cargo ship The Zong, and the subsequent legal case in the 1780s. The painting is ostensibly colourful; but given the dark and menacing subject matter, I opted for darker instrumental combinations in the ensemble and more claustrophobic content. The piece begins by quoting a contemporary eighteenth-century English folk song, its melody drawn out in sustained overlapping notes and using an octave displacement technique that results in a strange disembodiment of the song. Later, a passage marked 'Drammatico ma tenebre' features a desperate melodic duet between viola and horn, against a sustained double pedal in low double bass and high violin simultaneously. Elsewhere I treat the double bass independently to cast darker timbral colours and musical gestures. All are approaches I would almost certainly not have taken without the external stimulus of the painting.

The musical style further demonstrates my distinctive compositional voice and approach that sits crucially in the void between modernism and postmodernism, a style that is only now beginning to be documented by analytical and historical musicologists, using working terms such as 'second modernism' (Mahnkopf, 2009; Metzer, 2010) and 'neomodernism' (Dromey, 2013).