Greg May Whistle-Stop

This piece is in two halves, both starting with the same percussion gesture. Each half takes the material on different journeys, the first part ending calmly, and the second ending riotously. The title refers to the quicksilver changes between musical ideas throughout — nothing fully settles, or is heard the same way twice.

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Reuben Esterhuizen gestures

For this piece, I was interested in presenting a number of similar musical gestures. I decided to use certain algorithms and codes to determine different textural aspects of the successive gestures but found the outcome to be in need of more impulsiveness. The resulting work comprises a mixture of process-based musical progressions and more intuitive interventions, which I hope gives both a sense of something working itself out, and the spontaneous.

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Thank you to the Plus-Minus Ensemble.

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Theo Finkel Distant Cousins

I found the instrumentation for this piece acutely confounding and equally liberating. My compositional work to a great extent is concerned with instruments as multifaceted things in of themselves — when they are brought together they inevitably suggest various connections and contradictions. This is what lead me through the writing process. It is an enormous privilege to work with Plus-Minus and I am very grateful to them.

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Maki Gajic Murata Please don’t let this be goodbye

“How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”

— A. A. Milne

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Darius Paymai quintet

The musical materials used in quintet come from several different sources. They are mainly from un-used sketches and drafts of my older pieces, but there are also newly devised materials which sound like something I would have written in the past. I worked by surrounding myself with these scraps and slowly bringing them together as layers which roll over loosely, attaching to and detaching from one another, some solidifying and others fading away.

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With many thanks to Mark and Plus-Minus Ensemble.

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Zhuoer Zhou Mark Knoop becomes a Tree

Renowned conductor Mark Knoop undergoes a transformation to become a tree against the backdrop of haunting fake Renaissance music. Many thanks to the Plus-Minus Ensemble and Mark Knoop.

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Anian Wiedner somewhere nowhere

somewhere nowhere is first and foremost an exploration of sound. Fusing the ensemble sound with subtle electronics, this piece takes a recording that I took one night walking through Green Park tube station as its starting point. The composition delves into themes of presence and absence, encapsulating the dichotomy of feeling both connected and isolated.