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Hi!  Welcome to the full list of scores.                                List below (scroll down)

I'm always looking for new and exciting opportunities, so please feel free to connect and discuss.There are alternative versions to some pieces.  You can get in touch to talk about versions and instrumentation.

Back to score selection with previews

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Musicians find my work enjoyable and fulfilling to play, and audiences find them stimulating.  (See 'Testimonials.')  They include professional concert musicians, amateurs and learners.

There are lots of great unpremiered pieces that you be yours. 

I write intimate, compelling and dramatic chamber music for solo instruments, duo and chamber ensemble, and voice.

My special interest is in dramatic works for music and voices, setting texts that are important to me, including my own translations from other languages.  Homerton College, Cambridge, recently produced my video-suite A Homerton Parade, which sets letters, diaries and documents from the college's 100-year-old archive.

I also write compelling and sonorous music for orchestra and large ensembles when the occasion arises, such as my two works written for Britten Sinfonia members, Cambridge students and conductor James MacMillan to workshop and earlier compositions premiered by youth orchestras.

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(Scores by instrumentation below)

Solo

Piano

  • Aderyn a cheffyl (prelude on Welsh nursery rhymes, 2003/4)

  • Three Little Dances (2004-5, rev. 2011, premiered by Natalia Williams-Wandoch 2011)

  • Nevertheless (reflections on a Shostakovich prelude, 2005)

  • I remember scratching a cross (2005, premiered by composer, 2007)

  • Four Pieces for Piano (2006-8, some completed later) - 1. Week 5-7 Blues,  2. Solitaire,  3. Andante dramatico,  4. Fuoco

  • Variations on a Rigaudon by Handel (2007-8)

  • Passacaglia (2008, premiered & recorded by Natalia Williams-Wandoch 2011)

  • Serenade

  • Variations on 'God Rest You Merry'

  • Three Short Etudes (Nr.1 premiered by Natalia Williams-Wandoch 2011), Sonata-etude in C and other etudes.

  • Miniature Suite (2009-11)

  • Candlelit Dance (premiered by Natalia Williams-Wandoch 2012/13)

  • Fen Scene (premiered by Natalia Williams-Wandoch 2019, also part of Conservation Pieces)

  • Piano Mosaic (mosaic of pieces for pianist to put together!)

  • Stargazers (2016)

  • Seven Conservation Pieces (parts premiered & filmed by Natalia Williams-Wandoch, 2020 & 2021)                 -Fen Scene; Swanland I; Swanland II; Moth; Åšwieci Las (Woodlight); Extinct; Scratching a cross (postlude)

  • Twelve Days of Christmas (suite, 2019, also in version for solo viola 2018)

  • Blues to Amuse (2021)

  • Contagious Variations on a theme by Adrian Oswalt (2021-2)

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Organ

  • Seven Canons

  • Elegy

  • An 'Academic Festival Overture' on HCC (Homerton College Cambridge) from 'A Homerton Parade' (2020, premiered and filmed by Daniel Trocme-Latter 2022)

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Solo violin

  • Telling Tales (large suite/album of pieces about historical & legendary tales and the act of storytelling)

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Solo viola

  • Twelve Days of Christmas (2018, also in version for solo piano 2019)

  • Viola Sonatina (2017)

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Chamber:  instrumental music

DUO

  • Nocturne for violin and piano (2004)

  • Rhapsody for violin and piano (2004-5)

  • Midnight Garden Glimpses (a third rhapsody for violin and piano, 2012)

  • Dialogue and Aria (oboe and piano)

  • Sonata for clarinet and piano (2006, premiered by J.Evans and D.Choy at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, 2007)

  • Suite Elegiaque (clarinet and piano, also suitable for violin and piano)

  • Passacaglia for two violins / Passacaglia for violin and accordion

  • Plight of the Bumblebee (two violins, 2018)

  • Reinvention (a postlude to Bach's two-part inventions, for violin and cello, 2016)

  • Night Phantoms (chromatic accordion and clarinet, 2019)

  • Ding Dong Duet (piano four-hands, premiered by N. and R. Williams-Wandoch 2021)

TRIO

  • Six little dances (violin, viola and piano)

 

QUARTET

  • Variations for four string instruments (three violins, one cello)

  • Dilemma (string quartet in one long movement, premiered by the Mavron Quartet 2006)

  • Passacaglia (string quartet - NB: different composition from other ones with same title)

  • Fugue on 'The Holly and the Ivy' (string quartet, premiered at Wisbech Grammar School 2019)

  • 'God Rest Ye Merry' (string quartet, premiered at Wisbech Grammar School 2019)

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QUINTET

  • Berceuse on a theme by John Ireland (2 violins, viola & 2 cellos - an extended nocturne or dream-piece, shortlisted for the London 'Lord Mayor's Prize,' 2011)

  • Ritual (flute, clarinet, piano, violin, cello - 2006, premiered 2006) - see also version for ob/clar/pno/vln/vla/vc

 

SEXTET

  • Ritual (oboe, clarinet, piano, violin, viola, cello - 2006, second instrumentation 2006 - see also original version under 'Quintet')

 

LARGE CHAMBER ENSEMBLE

  • Concertino for twelve players (large mixed chamber ensemble.  2004)

  • Concertino for vibraphone and strings (or string-quintet) (2005)  Also for Bb clarinet and string quintet, premiered 2019.

  • Concertino for violin and chamber orchestra (2004-5)

  • The gaps between the shadows (fl./picc., ob., clar., bsn., Fr.horn, glock/bass drum/susp.cymb [one percussionist], vln x 2, vla, vc & cb.  2005, premiered by Britten Sinfonia, students and James MacMillan 2006)

  • Syntax (picc., ob., clar., bsn., trbn., bass drum, marimba [one percussionist], harp, vln x 2, vla, vc & cb.  2006, premiered by Britten Sinfonia, students and James MacMillan 2007)

  • Concertino in two movements (fl., clar., trpt., trmb., harp, vln x 2, vla., vc., cb.  2007)

  • Concertino Grosso (string quartet and beginner string orchestra.  Premiered 2016, second performance 2021)

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Chamber:  vocal

  • Four Beryl Johnson Songs (tenor and piano)

  • Three Beryl Johnson Songs (medium-high voice and either trombone or cello (two versions)

  • Psalms (long cycle for voice(s), piano and percussion - divided into two books, one for mezzo and one for soprano.  One percussionist with varied instruments; all psalms playable individually, some without percussion and some without piano)

  • Try to sleep (short song for young people of all ages for piano and any voice, from Tune Time commissioned for educational psychology research in schools.  2012)

  • Other short songs.

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Music drama / works for stage and screen

  • A Homerton Parade (suite for filmed production and/or concert performance, of music and words as settings of archive documents from the history of Homerton College Cambridge.  Composed for remote production during lockdown, 2020-1, produced as video available free online 2022 by Homerton College.

I was recently talking to a group of talented and aspiring young composers (female and male), about the great myth around 'women composers.'

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They were knowledgeable and intelligent people, but knew hardly any of the prolific and great composers from my list - because all the names were female.

 

Being astute, they were very much aware of the subjugation and limitations that our patriarchal history has always imposed on women, and for this reason they hadn't needed to think twice about why their repertoire and music-history education was virtually all male. Makes sense, doesn't it?

 

But no! - That is only part of the truth.  We may have got past the once-common belief that women can't compose, and have reduced the patronisation about their 'feminine music' that they have put up with and still experience, but we perpetuate the legacy of these ideas when we presume that all women in history have been prevented from professionally composing or not been able to develop their art.

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How many times have you heard that women composers before the 20th Century were invariably stifled and came to nothing? 

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Certainly, it has been the overwhelmingly normal story.  The oppression and repression of women through the ages, and perhaps particularly in the 19th Century, has been really staggering in its forcefulness, passionate drive, violence, and support across all sectors of society.  Women who have managed to develop their art to a point of greatness and mastery, and to achieve a professional or even international reputation, have always had to sacrifice everything else to it and suffer.  Even then, it has demanded of them continuous grit and perseverance.  Any number of women have indeed been stopped in this way.  Even now, in our very different times, the balance of expectations tends to suppose that a woman will first and foremost commit herself to her family, even that this is in her genes, and she may be treated as a perverse anomaly if she doesn't.

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However, many female composers, pushing through all this, have gained not only success in the concert hall and publishing but also international renown and respect, through the centuries - all the more amazing considering the adversity they had to battle through and what they had to sacrifice.  Barbara Strozzi, for examle, along with many of her now-forgotten contemporaries, was able to compose prolifically and famously but only because she was a courtesan. This meant that she was owned by an aristocrat who could literally command over whether she live or die.

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Then along came the 19th Century, the age of 'progress,' institutionalisation, systematisation, and hand-in-hand with these, the setting-in-stone of absolutist official sexism. Diverse spheres of life and commerce that had been open to women, and many that had been predominantly women's realm (such as many 'cottage industries') became men's realm because industrial, commercial and cultural activity was now to be the domain of men. Increasingly, artists were not patronised by the rich but made their own professional living, on their own terms, selling their own service - something that had become completely out of the question for women. The 19th Century was the time when loose social classes were turned into rigid pre-set castes, not only the working, middle and upper ones but also in all the other dimensions:  vague racial ideas were set into pseudo-scientific racial theory, new knowledge of evolution was turned directly into ‘social Darwinism’ and then eugenics; it became a matter of absolutely normal belief that skull-shape indicated a person’s character and abilities; and the idea of the criminal class, and the inherently criminal person, came about.  The capacity and role of a woman were set down in just the same way.  The 19th Century thus not only attacked women composers with really unbelievable ferocity – training otherwise-good men to believe adamantly that their art must take precedence over the womanly ideas of their wives – but also did its best to edit out women from the previous history of music.  For that was precisely the era that began the chronicling of art history –  the age that ceased to be concerned only with the fashions of the moment and to revere (sometimes even in the language of worship) those past masters whom it deemed to be ‘Great.’  Alas, it was inconceivable anyone female could have been significant – or even worthy of any note at all – in the progressive advancement and sophistication of European art which they grandly envisioned.  To many thinkers, women composers were a sort of perversion.

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Thus, it has been left to us in more recent times to dig out the existence and the oeuvres of the great pre-19th-Century figures who didn’t happen to be male. 

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A retort is sometimes made, saying 'history cannot remember everyone.'  But history does remember the names of a multitude of middling and muddling composers, artists and writers.  The names of many composers who did excellent work but didn't make it onto a pedestal, those who simply were not pivotal, groundbreaking or influencial, and of those who were genuinely second-rate, are regularly found in the literature and the repertoire - if they were male.

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Maddalena Lombardini Sirmen, by contrast, was a star pupil of one of the music-school orphanages in Vivaldi-era Venice, and a celebrity guest at Paris’s prestigious private royal concerts, published prolifically, was received in London as a VIP, and lived a long and creative life as composer and performer – far outstripping her husband who hoped to hitch an easy ride on the back of her reputation but didn’t do well.  Yet we knew nothing of her till recently and most copies of her many published concertos, sonatas, quartets and so on are still facsimiles of hard-to-read 18th-Century manuscripts. 

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Marianna Martinez was similarly famous, composing many major works in the Classical style of her age, with people travelling from all over Europe to her salon in Vienna.  Her family lived alongside the librettist Metastasio, a great influence on her, and then took in the penniless young Joseph Haydn as a guest – they mutually supported each other and he was a lifelong friend.  Yet we do not know about her.  Nor, generally, about her contemporary Austrian Marie-Therèse von Paradis who did not let her blindness prevent her from a composing career, nor generally very much about Maria Szymanowska, one of the 19th Century’s first professional virtuoso pianists and one of the first to perform memorized repertoire in public (well before Liszt and Clara Schumann) – yet Szymanowska wrote the very first Concert Etudes and Nocturnes in Poland and was the inspiration in this for Chopin.

 

Soon after, Fanny Hensel was having to publish her brilliant and gripping music under the name of her brother, Felix Mendelssohn; internationally touring virtuoso pianist and composer Clara Schumann was lectured by her husband Robert that the life of a composer-performer was now only for him - they had been each other's muses and fans during their passionate engagement, 'but it's different in marriage -' he wrote to her - 'because then there is the cooking to do!'  Louise Farrenc struggled against the odds to become the first woman professor at the Paris Conservatoire... and the last, for an extremely long time.  Rebecca Clarke had to estrange herself completely from her violently furious father and leave the house with no living and no accommodation, after he sabotaged her graduation from the Royal Academy.  And yes, up till the end of the 19th Century virtually all the names I could offer you here have been from outside Britain.  It really does speak about the culture here, I belive.

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One of the young composers I was talking with looked lost in thought for a long while, and then burst out ‘She was famous!’  This was about Sirmen, and I think we were all moved by the expression of pride and indignation in this realisation that we – ourselves, our own generation, even the young among us – have been taught that these careers simply couldn’t have happened.  The knowledge of the people, their sacrifice, their labour, their lifelong dedication to their art, and their wonderful music itself, has been kept from us.  It has been kept from us, and so have the names of so many composers who were black or not European, because we are still living in the shadow of that caste-bound age.  Even if we live beyond this shadow, we will always live in the age of humankind with its unending patriarchies, hierarchies, castes, outcasts, blacklists, scapegoats, repressions and evils.

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The playlist MUSIC BY WOMEN which is inspiring me to write all this, compiled by Natalia Williams-Wandoch, is an absolute joy to listen to.  As with any playlist, you can stop part-way through and resume at another time, or listen all the way through since it is painstakingly curated to work beautifully that way.  I found the opening incredibly compelling (what a piano concerto – surely ought to be top repertoire!) and the whole sequence kept that up.  The composers are mostly 19th-21st Century, and Natalia warmly invites listeners to suggest to her some earlier music to add – but please listen to the playlist and specify where in it you think your proposed track should go, and why!

 

Playlist here (click) - Happy listening!

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