(2022) for string quartet
Duration: 23 minutes
2 violins, viola, cello
World Premiere: TBA, Solem Quartet
Commissioned by the Solem Quartet with generous support from Marchus Trust, Jerwood Arts Live Work Fund, Peter and Veronica Lofthouse and Carol Nixon.
(2022) for soprano and string orchestra
Duration: 22 minutes
soprano and strings (min 5.4.3.3.1)
World Premiere: 16.06.22, Lakeside Arts, Nottingham, U.K.: Ruby Hughes/Manchester Collective
Out of the Dawn’s Mind
This song cycle for soprano and string orchestra sets five poems from Alice Oswald’s book Falling Awake. I. A Rushed Account of the Dew II. Sunday Ballad III. A Short Story of Falling IV. Shadow V. Slowed-Down Blackbird These poems deal with light, water, time and the experience of coming into contact with the world. The cycle opens with a dawn. Light searches a room ‘where two lay twined in bed’. There is falling rain ‘that rises to the light and falls again’. At dusk a shadow falls. Rooks fly upwards. The cycle closes in the snow with a kind of erasure. © Edmund Finnis(2022) for orchestra
Duration: 15 minutes
2.picc.3.2.bcl.2.cbsn – 4.3.2.btrbn.1 – timp – perc(3): bdm/crot(+db bow)/3 bell plates/med. nipple gong/vib(+db bow)/Tam-t/tbells – strings
World Premiere: 3.3.22, Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool: Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra/Domingo Hindoyan
Commissioned by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra
(2021) for violin, cello and piano
Duration: 7 minutes
World Premiere: 12.12.21, Kohl Mansion, Burlingame, California: The Lee Trio
Through Vanished Arches was commissioned by The Lee Trio
(2021) for solo cello
Duration: 7 minutes
World Premiere: 25.11.21, Royal Academy of Music, London, UK, performed by Sheku Kanneh-Mason
Preludes were composed for the ‘200 Pieces’ project, marking the bicentary of the Royal Academy of Music.
“Spherical, exceedingly inspiring and intoxicating.”
Klassik begeistert“The real standout was Edmund Finnis’s five Preludes for solo cello, which made the instrument sing, speak, trace shapes in the air, growl in the depths and reach up into the ether. ”
The Times
(2021) a ballet score
Duration: 9 minutes
violin and piano
World Premiere: 11.07.21, Kings Place, London, UK: Sara Trickey (violin), Ivana Gavric (piano) Laurel Dalley Smith and Liam Riddick (dancers) Choreography by Kim Brandstrup
commissioned by Spitalfields Music, with the support of the New Music Commission Fund
“The myth of Psyche, able to sense and feel her lover Cupid but forbidden to look at him, forms the subject of A Duet in the Dark, a pas de deux of remarkable beauty, danced by Liam Riddick and Laurel Dalley Smith, who convey closeness, desire and tenderness, but rarely touch, apart from brief, vertiginous lifts. The understated eroticism of Brandstrup’s choreography mirrors Finnis’s exquisitely crafted score, with its throbs, pulses and melodic refinement, the latter very much geared to the lyricism and sweetness of Trickey’s playing. […] Fascinating, all of it.”
★★★★ The Guardian
(2021) for string quartet
Duration: 14 minutes
2 violins, viola, cello
World Premiere: 10.7.21, Christ Church Spitalfields, London, UK: Manchester Collective
“a finely balanced work in four short movements that uses all the timbres and mysterious overtones of four strings, four instruments without hurry or urgency, and with minimal use of vibrato. The slow dialogue between the instruments had the meditative feel of 17th-century English consort music by Lawes or Purcell. Or that’s how it seemed on first hearing. I might think quite differently on a second encounter with this bewitching work, which I hope will be soon.” ★★★★ Fiona Maddocks, The Observer
(2021) For solo piano
Duration: 16 minutes
World Premiere: 24.9.22, Purcell Room, Southbank Centre, London: Víkingur Ólafsson
Commissioned by the Southbank Centre
“[Finnis’s] new pieces are exquisitely crafted, rather Ravel-like at times, but also full of gorgeous overtone effects as well as some thrillingly virtuosic requirements.”
★★★★★
The Times“Finely judged and beautifully refined… each piece a perfect miniature yet the whole creating a seductive sequence.”
Planet Hugill“This music is pure sound magic.”
oper aktuell
(2020) For soprano saxophone with reverb
Duration: 7 minutes
World Premiere: 30.9.20, Concertgebouw, Amsterdam: Jess Gillam
Commissioned by Sage Gateshead and the European Concert Hall Organisation.
“[Jess Gillam’s] performance of Edmund Finnis’s diaphanous solo piece A Spiral Ascending was a miracle of breath control, with tiny tendrils of sound peeling away from, and then back to, silence.”★★★★ The Telegraph
A Spiral Ascending
This meditative piece for soprano saxophone with reverb was composed for Jess Gillam. The soloist traces flowing lines that rise and fall in wavelike motions. Lightly amplified reverb holds these revolving patterns of sound suspended briefly in the air, altering our perspective of the music and the space that it occupies. The words of the title are from a poem by Alice Oswald called ‘Birdsong for Two Voices’.
© Edmund Finnis
(2020) For solo cello
Duration: 6 minutes
World Premiere: 25.3.20, London, UK: Tim Gill (London Sinfonietta)
Three Solos was commissioned by the London Sinfonietta
(2019) For 12 string players
Duration: 14 minutes
6 vn. 3 vla. 2 vc. db
World Premiere: 6.7.19, Purcell Room, London: Manchester Collective
The Centre is Everywhere was commissioned by the Manchester Collective with generous support from the RVW Trust and PRS Foundation.
“Edmund Finnis’s The Centre Is Everywhere offered a tranquil oasis. A rising star, the British composer seems to make the very air shimmer with his music. Written for 12 strings, inspired by a medieval description of God, the piece mesmerises with aquatic loveliness, ideas rising in waves. The whole is ineffably beautiful, it demands us to pay attention.” The Times
“an ecstatic experience”
Bachtrack“delicate, microtonal string writing woven into drifting clouds of sound, that provided real musical subtlety”
The Guardian“…haunting, iridescent work by Edmund Finnis …. scored for 12 string players, the piece has an ageless, ancient-yet-modern quality: like a shimmering ghost of Lawes’ viol consorts, a fine latticework of line and colour is viewed through a kaleidoscope of grainy harmonies and whistling white noise.”★★★★★ BBC Music Magazine
“a bewitching piece for 12 string players”
The Guardian“Filling the stage in an egalitarian formation of a semicircle, Manchester Collective performed Edmund Finnis’ The Centre is Everywhere, an interwoven texture of 12 independent voices that created a shifting foreground of dynamic arching lines, washing over and converging in cascades of harmony, petering out into the texture of white noise.” www.cutcommonmag.com
While composing this piece I was giving a lot of thought to the space of a piece of music; how within a piece of music we can become aware of foregrounds, backgrounds and numerous planes in between. I also have an enduring fascination with the interaction that takes place between the physical space of a performance and the interior/mental space within each of us, where vibrations of air are perceived and held in the memory. The more that I make music, the more richly mysterious I find this process to be.
The movement of sounds and ideas around the space of an ensemble of string players was integral to my thinking about this piece. The twelve musicians create together a layered musical space through which interlocking patterns of sound emerge, accumulate and disperse. The music is replete with overlapping lines that rise and fall, moving from hushed white-noise to wide, full-bodied sound and back again in wavelike motions.
The title comes from an anonymous medieval definition of God as ‘an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere’. The beautiful intangibility of this image captured my imagination when I first read it and made note of it years ago in an old notebook. It came back to me early on while thinking about this piece and somehow guided my decisions about how to shape the music.
© Edmund Finnis
(2019) For unaccompanied choir
Duration: 4 minutes
For SSAATTBB
World Premiere: 1.6.19, LSO St Luke's, London: ORA Singers/Suzi Digby
Improperium Expectavit Cor Meum was commissioned by ORA100 for Suzi Digby OBE and the singers of ORA
This motet takes Palestrina’s Offertory for Palm Sunday as a musical starting point. The same words of foresakenness from the Psalms are set here, and certain harmonies and melodic contours from Palestrina’s music are freely recomposed and reflected upon without ever being directly quoted. Solo voices and duets alternate with the chorus, recounting grief in search of deliverance.
© Edmund Finnis
(2019) For violin, cello and piano
Duration: 10 minutes
violin, cello and piano
World Premiere: 11.2.19, West Road Concert Hall, Cambridge, UK: Britten Sinfonia
Five Trios was commissioned by Britten Sinfonia
In these five short trios the fabric of the music is made of flowing iterative patterns, delicate pulsations, closely interwoven colours, lines tracing arcs, unfolding and revolving at different speeds, sustained resonances that hover and dissipate in the air like mist, and undulating piano figures that the bowed strings glide through and above.
© Edmund Finnis
(2018) For soprano, chorus and orchestra
Duration: 7 minutes
2.2.2.2 – 2.2.3.0 – strings Singers: soprano and SATB chorus
World Premiere: 19.11.18, St John's, Smith Square, London: Lucy Crowe/La Nuova Musica/Holst Singers/David Bates
Eldest Night was commissioned by La Nuova Musica in memory of Ingrid Beazley.
Eldest Night was composed as a prelude to The Creation by Haydn.
The text for the piece is an assemblage of words and phrases from Milton’s Paradise Lost, itself one of the sources for the libretto in The Creation.
In Milton’s epic poem, ‘eldest Night and Chaos’ are together described as ancestors of nature, holding dominion over a wild abyss: ‘the womb of nature, and perhaps her grave’. Echoing the ‘formless void’ and ‘the face of the waters’ from the opening of the Book of Genesis, Milton evokes pre-Creation with startling images of boundless water and desolate darkness.
The soprano soloist here is a solitary voice lost in this original night, singing into the darkness, prefiguring the first arrival of light.
© Edmund Finnis
(2018) For solo piano
Duration: 90 seconds
piano
World Premiere: 7.7.18, Ely Cathedral: Clare Hammond
For Emmeline was commissioned by Clare Hammond and Peter Inglesby on the occasion of their second daughter’s birth
(2018) For string quartet
Duration: 16 minutes
2 violins, viola and cello
World Premiere: 25.5.18, Cason Hirschprunn, Margreid, South Tyrol: Minetti Quartet
String Quartet No.1 - "Aloysius" was commissioned by Alois Lageder and Aldeburgh Festival
“Given its affecting rocking patterns, expressive musings on gravely beautiful polyphony by Byrd, and the natural ease of its writing for strings, I now look forward to Quartet 2, 3, and 4”
The Times“[E]in zartes, fünfsätziges Werk voller Poesie.”
“A delicate five-movement work full of poetry”
Klassik.com
This quartet is in five movements. While composing the piece I had in my mind: the shape of a valley; the image of clouds forming and dissipating; lines becoming interwoven and energy being passed around between four individuals; a sense of sounds breathing.
The fourth movement is a reflection on the hymn ‘Christe, qui lux es et dies’ by William Byrd.
String Quartet No.1 – ‘Aloysius’ was co-commissioned by Alois Lageder and Aldeburgh Festival, and is dedicated to the Lageder family.
© Edmund Finnis
(2017) Ten pieces for piano
Duration: 14 minutes
piano
World Premiere: 12.3.18, Milton Court, Barbican, London: Clare Hammond
Youth was commissioned by Clare Hammond with generous financial assistance from the John S Cohen Foundation, Hinrichsen Foundation and RVW Trust
Youth
Ten pieces for solo piano
I Bloom
II Spin
III Frankenthaler
IV Stream of Days
V Serried Ridges
VI Coenties Slip
VII Hammershøi Windows
VIII Buren
IX Heath
X Helsinki Patterns
These are the first pieces I have composed for solo piano. Many of the sounds, patterns and ideas within them have been in my mind and under my hands for a long time. The brief pieces variously include performance directions like ‘intimate’, ‘spacious’, ‘with childlike simplicity’, ‘as if improvising’. Each one seems to me now like a specific memory of an image, a sensation of place, a significant encounter, or a moment of vivid perception. I wanted above all to convey each musical image as clearly and directly as possible, and to write for the piano in a focused, uncluttered, personal way.
Youth is dedicated to my nieces and nephews.
© Edmund Finnis
(2016) For Orchestra
Duration: 9 minutes
3(III=picc).3.3(III=bcl).2.cbsn - 4.3.2.btrbn.1 - timp - perc(3): 5 bell plates/susp.cym/crot (+db bow)/Tam-t/vib(+db bow)/med. nipple gong - strings
World Premiere: 23.2.17, City Halls, Glasgow: BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra/Ilan Volkov
Commissioned by the BBC for the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
“Inspired by Scottish poet Robin Robertson’s Finding the Keys, this piece was an ethereally beautiful exploration of the transient nature of the wind and its interactions with the natural world.”
Herald Scotland“very atmospheric…magical…powerful”
Seen and Heard International“With sumptuous Russian music dominating this BBC SSO programme, the breeziness of Edmund Finnis’s The Air, Turning made for an ideal opener. Conductor Ilan Volkov gradually built up the full spectrum of string sound, from the bottom bass notes to eerie violin harmonics, which was then finely smudged with woodwind and brass colour.”
The Scotsman
The Air, Turning
The individual elements of this piece are predominantly very simple. Patterns of sound are made up of interwoven instrumental lines that variously rise or fall, remain fixed or form arcs. Blocks of sound colour approach and recede across a background haze of softly shimmering metallic percussion and ephemeral string harmonics. As these clear lines and planes are superimposed and overlapped they create variegated lattices of sound, accumulating and dispersing in waves, revolving and creating subtly shifting harmonies. Sounds are heard drifting into and over one another, gradually coalescing, circling and gathering into swirling currents.
The words of the title are lifted from a poem called “Finding the Keys” by the Scottish poet Robin Robertson. While composing this piece I was thinking about how we experience the medium of air: how vibrating air moves as sound across distance; how air is coloured by light, seen and seen through, breathed in and out; the sensation of it moving around us.
© Edmund Finnis
(2016) For violin with reverb
Duration: 9 minutes
World Premiere: 26.6.16, St John's Smith Square, London: Daniel Pioro
Commissioned by Daniel Pioro
“absolutely remarkable”
Mary Anne Hobbs, BBC 6 Music
Cyclical patterns of sound move in and out of focus, as if approaching from a distance before receding into haze. The tone of the violin is periodically transformed from white noise via drifting pitch into glistening harmonics and back again, forming arcs. Lightly amplified reverb is used to extend the sounding space that the music inhabits. Our perspective on the music is altered. What we hear is simultaneously both in the room and seemingly elsewhere. Ephemeral sounds are briefly held suspended in the air, heightening our perception of details within them before they disperse.
© Edmund Finnis
(2015) For ensemble of 15 players
Duration: 16 minutes
2 cl (I+II=bcl) - 2 fgh - perc(2): t.bells/crot/2 nipple gongs (medium)/vib/glock/bell plate/2 marbles/2 metal thimbles - 2 pf - strings (2221)
World Premiere: 6.2.16, CBSO Centre, Birmingham: BCMG/Richard Baker
Commissioned by Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, with financial assistance through BCMG's Sound Investment Scheme
“…music of simply stunning beauty… exquisitely handled … extremely impressive…. the most magical music of the evening”
5against4“The symmetrical construction of Birmingham Contemporary Music Group’s latest programme reflected the symmetry of the amazing work premiered at the heart of it.
Latest in the long line of BCMG’s spectacularly successful Sound Investment commissions, Edmund Finnis’ Parallel Colour employs two virtually identical ensembles, facing each other, with a lone double-bass as the linking king-pin. In some ways this symmetry goes back to the two orchestras of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, and though Bach uses his forces for dramatic and contrasting ends, here Finnis sees his own more as vehicles for repetition and refraction, as mirror-like as the confluence of sea and sky on a still horizon.
There is sheer beauty in the timbres he creates – subdued, sometimes ethereal – and only towards the too-soon-reached end is there a slight livening-up of activity. […] its effect was totally magical. Richard Baker conducted a willing BCMG in this premiere of what I would dare to declare a masterpiece in the genre. ”
Birmingham Post
Parallel Colour
This piece is in seven short movements. The ensemble of fifteen musicians is divided into two symmetrical groups, with a double bass in the centre. The arrangement of the musicians in the space informs the way the music is designed. Clear and direct patterns of sound are made to move across the ensemble-space, variously heard in canon, in parallel motion, overlapping or closely interwoven. Near-replica harmonies and melodic shapes are voiced alongside one another, exchanged between the instruments, or heard unfolding together at different speeds and in different registers. The piece is replete with tilted reflections and echoes, as if the music is mirrored back on itself.
While writing this piece I held in my mind an indelible memory of a late afternoon spent looking out at the Baltic Sea. On that cold and radiantly clear day the incredible stillness of the water’s surface made a near-perfect mirror of the sea, with the horizon as a sharply drawn line dividing subtly divergent colours.
© Edmund Finnis
(2015) For violin and ensemble
Duration: 16 minutes
1(=picc+afl).1.1.0 - 1110 - perc(1): t.bells/crot/2 bell plates/2 marbles/2 metal thimbles - pno - solo vln - 2 vln.vla.vcl.db
World Premiere: 10.12.15, St John at Hackney Church, London: Benjamin Beilman/London Contemporary Orchestra/Hugh Brunt
Shades Lengthen was commissioned by London Music Masters, supported by the Boltini Trust.
Shortlisted for RPS Music Awards 2016 – Chamber Scale Composition
“… Shades Lengthen, a beautiful new chamber violin concerto by Edmund Finnis. That was the centrepiece of a superb London Contemporary Orchestra concert in the incense-drenched cavern of St John-at-Hackney. Commissioned by London Music Masters and the Boltini Trust and played with mesmerising lyricism by Benjamin Beilman, the piece has an elegiac quality that reflects its title, with detunings and rich Tippettian counterpoint.”
The Times, Richard Morrison“exquisite”
Sara Mohr-Pietsch, BBC Radio 3
Shades Lengthen
I have a tendency to begin new pieces by imagining music in quite visual terms. Not in any pictorial or illustrative sense, but in a more abstract way, thinking about foregrounds, backgrounds and planes in between, and considering how different elements within a piece might be made to interact, overlap and sit alongside one another.
While working on this piece I was thinking explicitly about line and shadow. The solo violin is almost always heard distinctly in the foreground, voicing clearly articulated arcing lines of sound. Parts of these lines are often picked up by instruments in the ensemble, ‘shadowed’ and heard again in canon or in stretched elongated forms. The ensemble also creates varied kinds of sound surfaces upon which the solo line and its shadows are cast. Throughout the four movements of the piece there is an overriding obsession with lines in simple rising and falling motions, heard from the violin and threaded through the ensemble at different registers and at varied speeds.
As well as referring to the relationship between soloist and ensemble, I also wanted the title of the piece to evoke a particular quality and mood of evening light, closing of day, when the colours of sky can intensify before draining away. While writing the ending of the piece I was thinking about the subtle sense of acceleration that can be felt while observing the last seconds before sun dips below horizon.
© Edmund Finnis
(2012/2015) For violin and viola
Duration: 11 minutes
World Premiere: First performance of version in 4 movements: 16.3.15, Roundhouse, London: Galya Bisengalieva, Robert Ames
Brother was commissioned by the London Contemporary Orchestra
(2014) For string orchestra
Duration: 13 minutes
strings (min. 5.4.4.3.2)
World Premiere: 23.8.14, Roundhouse, London: London Contemporary Orchestra/Hugh Brunt
Between Rain was commissioned by the London Contemporary Orchestra
(2014) For cello with reverb
Duration: 10 minutes
cello and electronics (reverb)
World Premiere: 23.6.14, Holy Trinity Sloane Square, London: Oliver Coates
(2014)
Duration: 27 minutes
World Premiere: 26.6.16, St John’s Smith Square, London
(2014) For bass viol
Duration: 6 minutes
World Premiere: 5.2.14, Cross Linx Festival, Rotterdam: Liam Byrne
Commissioned by Cross Linx Festival
Lines Curved Rivers Mirrored was written for Liam Byrne. When writing the piece I thought a lot about the construction of the bass viol, its rich and particular sonority, the precision and speed that the fretted fingerboard allow, the tuning and resonance of its open strings and their natural harmonics, and the kinds of harmony these could create. The idea of flowing lines is also integral to the music, along with the mental image of rivers forming.
(2014) For choir
Duration: 4 minutes
SSAATTBB
World Premiere: 26.4.14, New College Chapel, Oxford: New College Choir, Edward Higginbottom
Verbo Domini was commissioned by the Choir of New College Oxford.
“an exquisite plangent prayer in close dense harmony with a rising soprano solo.”
Bachtrack“They evoked bleak northern climes in Arvo Pärt’s flawless Kyrie from the Berliner Mass, Pēteris Vasks’ mesmeric Plainscapes II and Edmund Finnis’ Verbo Domini with its edgy dissonance. ”
The Scotsman
(2013) For 14 musicians
Duration: 11 minutes
1(=picc+afl).1(=eh).1.1 - 1110 - perc(1): glsp/tam-t/nipple gong (medium)/t.bells/2 marbles/2 metal thimbles - pno (prepared w. blu-tak) - 2 vln.vla.vcl.db
World Premiere: First performance: 8.12.13, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London: London Sinfonietta, Baldur Brönnimann
Seeing is Flux was commissioned by the London Sinfonietta with the generous support of Michael and Patricia McLaren-Turner.
“Notable was the level of technical accomplishment in works conceived in diverse styles and mostly produced by a younger generation of composers. Premiered as the final concert’s centrepiece, Edmund Finnis’s Seeing Is Flux takes its title from the American novelist Siri Hustvedt, its layered textures and ambiguous blend of innocence and sophistication demonstrating a keen ear for sonority skilfully deployed throughout a neat and effective structure; conductor Baldur Brönnimann held its iridescent surface up to the light in what proved to be a compelling reading.”
The Guardian“Melodic patterns swarmed like sardines through Edmund Finnis’s likeable Seeing is Flux”
The Times
(performed by the London Sinfonietta conducted by Garry Walker)
“The Sinfonietta opened with a graceful piece by Edmund Finnis called Seeing Is Flux, its featherlight strands deftly laced together.”
The Guardian
Clear and direct linear patterns of sounds are variously heard in sequence, superimposed and threaded through the ensemble; subtle pulsations and sustained resonances act like grids and flat planes of sound that these patterns flow across, overlap and intersect with; the instruments make lines that intertwine, dovetail and shadow one another.
The title of this piece is lifted from a Siri Hustvedt novel. While composing I was thinking about parallels between listening and seeing, reflecting particularly on experiences of looking at the line-based drawings and paintings of the artists Nasreen Mohamedi and Agnes Martin. I had in mind the kind of friction that exists between the calm, iterative clarity of their work and the complex act of perception itself, which elicits memory, shifts focus and is perpetually in flux.
© Edmund Finnis
(2013) Electronics only
Duration: 15 minutes
World Premiere: 22.8.13, walking from Primrose Hill to Roundhouse, London: Part of London Contemporary Orchestra’s Imagined Occasions series
Commissioned by London Contemporary Orchestra
(2013) For 9 musicians
Duration: 15 minutes
fl (=afl). cl - perc(1): sus.cym/t.bells/glsp/vib - pno - 2vln.va.vlc.db
World Premiere: 15.6.13, Dillon Gallery, New York City: Chelsea Music Festival Ensemble, Ken-David Masur
in situ was commissioned by the Chelsea Music Festival
“Elegant, shapely, cool in its timbres … the piece deserves to slip into any imaginative programme.”
Birmingham Post
in situ
I. (after Perotin)
II. (after Locke)
III. (after Josquin des Prez)
IV. (after Brumel)
V. (afterRameau)
in situ is inspired in part by the mirror sculptures of the late American artist, John McCracken. These reflective pillars alter our perception of the landscapes they inhabit in fascinating ways, each one simultaneously merging into its surrounding while mirroring it back on itself, creating angular incisions of spaces and uncanny perspectives on otherwise familiar scenes.
Each of the five parts of in situ takes a pre-existing piece of music and treats it as a kind of landscape into which analogous distorting mirrors are placed. Fragments of the original pieces are spliced, freely reassembled, recomposed, dwelt upon, as if being folded into new shapes or reflected back on themselves. The attitude towards the source material is never one of irony or subversion, but instead comes out of a deep fondness, a desire to live and move around for a while in these musical spaces.
© Edmund Finnis
(2012) Clarinet and Piano
Duration: 10 minutes
cl, pno
World Premiere: 8.12.12, Royal Festival Hall, London: Mark Simpson, Víkingur Ólafsson
Four Duets was commissioned by Mark Simpson with generous financial assistance from the Fidelio Charitable Trust
There is parity between the two instruments in these short duets. I wanted to treat the clarinet and piano as equals, avoiding the hierarchy of a soloist-plus-accompaniment scenario.
The first duet takes the opening melodic idea of Josquin des Prez’s motet Memor esto verbi tui and unravels it, prolonging its rise-and-fall motion.
The second makes patterns out of the interplay between varied speeds (like individual parts of a mobile spinning autonomously), ending with a coda of soft imitative pulsing.
The third is a single unfolding melodic line, the piano shadowing and fusing with the clarinet.
The fourth, like the first, is made of canons.
© Edmund Finnis
(2012) String Septet
Duration: 11 minutes
2 vln. 2 vla. 2 vlc. db
World Premiere: 12.3.12, Carnegie Zankel Hall, New York: various/E.Finnis
This piece is influenced in part by looking at Bridget Riley’s vibrant paintings from the late 1980s, and reading Josef Albers’ book, Interaction of Colour.
The ensemble is divided into two trios, underpinned by a double bass. By detuning the strings in one of the trios, a kind of asymmetry occurs: the resonant qualities of the trios become slightly divergent, making the twin instrumental groups speak with subtly different voices.
Musical material is passed around the ensemble, and the trios variously merge, imitate, blur, and pull apart from each other; similar iterative patterns are set against one another in canonic interplay; the surface of the music fluctuates between situations of friction and fusion.
While composing, I had in mind the ways in which adjacent colours seem to vibrate against one another in Riley’s paintings, and Albers’ deft demonstrations of how colours are perceived in relation to one another, rather than as physical absolutes.
© Edmund Finnis
(2012) Chamber ensemble of 4 players
Duration: 12 minutes
cl (=cl in A detuned 1/4-tone). pno. vln. vlc
World Premiere: 19.3.12, The Forge, London: Mercury Quartet
Quartet in Three Parts was commissioned by the Mercury Quartet
(2012) String Duo
Duration: 5 minutes
vln. vlc
World Premiere: 20.8.12, Seiji Ozawa Hall, Tanglewood: Micah Ringham, Michael Dahlberg
(2011 rev.2012) Chamber ensemble of 5 players
Duration: 7 minutes
fl (=picc+afl). cl (=cl in Eb). hn. vln. vlc
World Premiere: 5.11.11, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London: London Sinfonietta
Commissioned by the London Sinfonietta as part of Writing the Future, which is generously supported by the Boltini Trust, The John S Cohen Foundation, Anthony Mackintosh and Michael and Patricia McLaren-Turner
I could point to three non-musical influences that were on my mind while composing this piece: the shimmering grid paintings of Agnes Martin, the near-weightless and transparent architecture of Junya Ishigami, and Italo Calvino’s 1985 lecture on ‘Lightness’ in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium.
In their respective mediums, both Martin and Ishigami seem to me to be reaching for something akin to the ideal of ‘thoughtful lightness’ that Calvino describes. This is not lightness in the sense of frivolity or superficiality, but rather the ‘subtraction of weight’ that can bring about clarity, flexibility, precision… a letting-in of light. They create work whose subtle, elegant forms invite the perception of fine detail.
Thinking about the connections between these influences led me to compose a piece characterised by delicate reiterative musical patterns (sometimes heard in sequence, sometimes superimposed) and an absence of bass or loud sounds. I aimed to make music with a quiet intensity, and to find a balance between senses of agility and poise.
© Edmund Finnis
(2011, rev.2012) Chamber Ensemble of 14 players
Duration: 5 minutes
1(=picc+afl).0.1.1 - 1110 - perc(1): crot(with bow)/tam-t/t.bells - pno (prepared with blutak) - harp - 2 vln.vla.vlc.db
World Premiere: 22.7.11, Snape Maltings, Aldeburgh: Britten/Pears Ensemble/Gregory Charette
This piece is partly inspired by the experience of seeing Junya Ishigami’s designs of near-weightless architecture. The clarity of his structures – their transparency – was frequently on my mind while composing.
The music is made of a number of clearly differentiated musical materials that reappear in various combinations throughout the piece. Hard, stone-like notes ricocheting on prepared piano; iterative patterns of chords on high strings; a rising and falling duet of clarinet and muted trumpet; sustained brass chords whose tunings drift like warped vinyl; various kinds of steady-state metallic percussion backgrounds…
The piece ends with the majority of its constituent musical elements superimposed and interweaved, heard simultaneously. Here another analogy, aside from Ishigami’s work, could be of a clockwork orrery whose individually rotating parts eventually become aligned.
© Edmund Finnis
(2011) Solo Viola with live electronics (reverb)
Duration: 6 minutes
World Premiere: 5.4.11, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London: Paul Silverthorne/London Sinfonietta
Commissioned by the London Sinfonietta as part of Writing the Future, which is generously supported by The Boltini Trust, The John S Cohen Foundation, Anthony Mackintosh and Michael & Patricia McLaren-Turner.
” Edmund Finnis’ Veneer stirred magical cries from Paul Silverthorne’s reverberating viola. ”
The Times (Geoff Brown)“a bracing study in natural harmonics”
Gramophone (Richard Whitehouse)
The character of the viola is subtly denatured for this piece by changing the tuning of its strings. This alters the resonant qualities of the instrument, making it speak with a different voice. As the piece takes shape, patterns are formed out of natural harmonics, unisons are pulled apart and open strings are made to ring out. Variable reverberation is used to heighten the listener’s perception of the surface details of sounds left hanging in the air.
This piece was written for Paul Silverthorne.
© Edmund Finnis
(2011) Chamber ensemble of 8 players
Duration: 7 minutes
fl (=picc). cl(= cl in Eb). ca. hn. pno. vla. vlc. db
World Premiere: 26.2.11, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London: members of BBC Symphony Orchestra/Guildhall Musicians/Richard Baker
This piece, composed in 2010 for members of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and postgraduate students of the Guildhall School, plays with different types of musical momentum. Sound surfaces defined by their high speed are juxtaposed with points of volatile stasis; there is an underlying obsession with basic upward and downward motions; recurring harmonic patterns variously expand and contract; polyphonies alternate with moments of unified direction; related harmonies surge into one another; the music begins over and over, each time being pulled in different directions, the texture eventually coming apart before regaining momentum.
© Edmund Finnis
(2008) Full Orchestra
Duration: 10 minutes
3(I=picc).3.3(I=cl in Eb).3(III=cbsn) – asax – 4331 – perc(2): xyl/t.bells/BD/crot(with bow)/t.tam/3 Sus.cym/tgl/medium nipple gong/SD/whip – 2 hp – cel – pno – strings
World Premiere: 21.4.08 Temppeliaukion, Helsinki: Sibelius Academy Symphony Orchestra, Sian Edwards
“Now in his mid-twenties, Edmund Finnis has recently worked in dance and electro-acoustics though lacks nothing in terms of an orchestral sense. Over the course of its 8 minutes, Flicker (2008) touches on a variety of pithy yet distinctive motifs, given coherence by a secure formal grasp (both the culmination and conclusion of the piece were unobtrusively evident) and definition through the skilful deployment of timbre and texture. Lucidly rendered by the GSO, it gave notice of a creative talent of whom one looks forward to hearing more.”
Richard Whitehouse for classicalsource.com“The flickering of his work was almost visible, indeed: there was tension during the pauses – silences were loaded; woodwinds were obdurate in their superimposing musical fragments; fiery strings cast an electronic shadow on the musical texture – sometimes recalling an electric instrument’s feedback. Stinging metallic trumpets tore everything into pieces and, paraphrasing Ed Finnis’ comments in the programme notes, the tottering and insistent quality of the musical patterns moved forward with an ‘unsettling lack of inherent memory of what has gone before’.
…the overall impression was of a quivering satisfaction. And the mid air ending was, to quote a friend of mine, ‘just genius’.”
MusicalCriticism.com“Entitled Flicker owing to its constantly changing surface texture, Finnis’s composition exhibits sharp contrasts of mood varying between exuberance and mystery. …it made an excellent showcase for the orchestra.”
MusicOMH.com