Streams (Sketch)

Programme note

Streams (Sketch) was written across one week during the Britten–Pears Composition and Performance Course in 2022. Each day required a new sketch for chamber orchestra; at the end of the process, the composer had to reconcile the accumulated materials and their sharply different textures into a finished work. The resulting piece concentrates the source of origin. It treats each sketch as a stream with its own density, pacing and instrumental behaviour, then tests how those streams might occupy the same temporal space without losing their individual contours.

The opening grows from scattered points of colour: isolated wind attacks, bowed friction, tremulous string sound, keyboard resonance and short instrumental exchanges appear before any stable hierarchy can form. As the work proceeds, identities become increasingly porous. Instruments change roles and doublings; pitched figures are interrupted by bursts of pitchless sound; harmonic glissandi pass between strings; and an open improvisation draws percussion, whispered voice, Sprechgesang and slowly moving noise into the notated fabric. Page 7 captures a crucial stage in this process. Fragmentary solos still retain their independence, but brass and strings begin sustaining common trajectories, dynamics expand across the ensemble, and colour is transferred from one instrument to another. Difference is not eliminated—it is made to exert pressure inside a shared field.

Later passages continue to alternate between exposed chamber groupings and denser collective states. Bright, brittle attacks give way to held sonorities; instrumental masses suddenly thin into solos; and recurring pitchless or percussive actions behave as seams between materials rather than conventional transitions. The ending extends this logic into a freely reactive exchange between soprano and piano. Instead of resolving the week’s disparate ideas into stylistic unity, the work discovers a form capable of containing their incompatibility.

Streams (Sketch) became the immediate precursor to Tulpa. Its migrating timbres, unstable instrumental identities, pitchless eruptions, improvised vocality and movement between private gesture and collective body provided the later work with its central theatrical vocabulary. Tulpa concentrates those discoveries into a more explicit dramaturgy of imagined beings; Streams (Sketch) exposes the generative process underneath—the moment at which separate daily textures were first compelled to coexist and, through that pressure, began to suggest another work.