4 October 2025
In the early Summer of 2024 I was approached by Simon Reynell, founder of Another Timbre, to make an album of instrumental versions of motets by Nicolas Gombert (1495-1560), with interludes to be composed by me.
Simon’s very clearly defined aesthetic has had a strong influence on many ‘experimental’ corners of new music, both in the UK and well beyond: often (but not necessarily) quiet music, often (but not necessarily) pared-back textures, encouraging of long-form works…and so on. We share a lot of common ground there, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed working with him on our previous albums, windfell and Summer.
Where our outlooks usually differ is in respect to vocal music, which is at the core of my work but which Simon finds problematic – there is very little of it on AT, and where there is it often has an instrumental quality, as far from bel canto as is imaginable. So I was a little surprised, not that he wanted to instrumentalise Gombert’s motets, but that he had been listening to Gombert at all. On closer inspection, though, it makes sense: Gombert’s music predates the expressive revolution of the later 16th century, and whilst sumptuous in texture operates within such restricted expressive limits that it has a somewhat abstract, homogeneous quality .
This made for an unexpected but happy meeting-point with Another Timbre’s natural aesthetic world, with eight Gombert motets shared around the musicians of Apartment House. I particularly enjoyed weaving the dark timbres of low flutes, clarinet, bass clarinet and muted trumpet in among the strings – not a colour combination Gombert would have recognised, but that was not the point.
My own pieces started life as Gombert Screens. The image I had was of a Japanese shoji, a translucent paper screen dividing one Gombert piece from another. The music is made by freezing small harmonic slices through Gombert, fleeting instants in the polyphony where one chord is melting into another through a momentary melodic suspension. Each piece is made from one or two of these harmonies, prolonged in suspended animation; eventually I realised that this idea of pausing time mid-flow could be reflected in the title of one of Gombert’s most famous works, Media vita. ‘In the midst of life’ is precisely where these four pieces appear, as moments of reflection in the flowing life of Gombert’s polyphony. And by extension, moments of pause and reflection in my own mid-life.
One of the most interesting aspects of the whole project for me was the element of commission – of writing to order, arranging music by a composer I didn’t really know, and creating interludes with the very specific purpose of breaking up the agreed sequence of Gombert motets. But my media vita is also designed to work on its own as a sequence, or indeed to function as interludes between something else completely.
The album came out in January 2025; as usual for AT releases I did an interview with Simon about it (except this was more a case of us interviewing each other), and there was an insightful feature by Clive Bell, and reviews by Peter Margasak and Ben Harper, among others.