During 2024 I co-developed a project with improviser and composer Melisa Yıldırım. It was an experiment in collaborative composition, combining my field recordings, audio processing and some of my instruments – oud, saxophone – with her instrument, the Anatolian kamancha. Our interest was in how listening together and working with Read more…
While composing these tracks I was asking myself where we can find hope today, living in such a tortured world.
Composing music with water, and for water, in a time of exteme climate crisis. This has occupied me in multiple projects in the last year. Playing with the Life of the Sea is a project I began early in 2023. I was deeply grateful that Tom Kieckhefer and Ocean Conservation Research Read more…
Called after Ornina, goddess of music in Mesopotamia and ancient Syria, our ensemble is leading a revival in the tradition of female music-making by women in the Arab world. In the courts of Baghdad, Cordoba, and Medina women were highly trained in musical composition and performance, as well as in Read more…
I’m intrigued by the interplay between the sounds that are conventionally part of concert music, and those conventionally excluded. I recently started bringing external sounds in, while continuing to use traditional instruments and – with a certain ambivalence – becoming a studio musician. In the works below I engage closely Read more…
I composed ‘Talking about Tatyana’ when I was a student at the Royal Academy of Music in London. It is an oblique homage to Tatyana Nikolayeva, the pianist who premiered Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues. It’s a fugue, and I scored it for clarinet trio. Why? I don’t remember!