Composition Portfolio

Jon Phipps on stage with Daniel Merrill & The Flowers of Evil (UK)

 Whilst studying for a masters degree in music at university, I composed various eclectic pieces which drew inspiration from diverse sources, ranging from poetry, geometry, mathematics, cryptography, mythology and non-Western cultures.

Below you will find concert works (written between 2006-2009) for choir, strings, orchestra, chamber ensembles and soloists, displaying little regard for upholding tradition, and more of a focus on exploring novel combinations of style, genre, and musical language.

Composers that greatly influenced my approach to composition at this time were Olivier Messiaen, Frank Zappa, and Béla Bartók, as well as Dmitri Shostakovich, Toru Takemitsu, and David Fanshawe, the last of which I worked for as a digital manuscript engraver, to republish his works in a modern format through Oxford University Press.

Some of these pieces were performed by The Bingham Quartet, Gemini Ensemble, Kingfisher Ensemble, Ixion Ensemble, and the Black Barn Singers.

I will be revisiting these pieces, using skills and expertise that I refined through working as an orchestrator with bands on the global metal scene to create virtual performances, which will replace any audio on these pages marked 'midi demo'.

ORCHESTRAL COMPOSITIONS

The five tracks below were composed as last-minute commissions for Alibi, in response to clients who needed to be able to hear something that fit their project requirements within the next 24 hours.

You can hear more tracks I composed and produced for the Alibi Music Library (New York) on the production page.

'Ainulindalë-The Music of the Ainar: I'

J.R.R. Tolkien's creation myth at the start of the Silmarillion was the catalyst for this short orchestral work, with particular subsets of the circle of 5ths coupled with specific sections of the orchestra representing elemental deities as they strive to shape the world despite the evil designs of Melkor, who's disruption and chaos corrupts these themes as they progress through the music.

The recording for this piece is an updated version compared to the score, made with virtual instruments in 2012, with some variations (The original was composed in 2006).

You can find more of my orchestral writing for metal bands on my portfolio page.

COMPOSITIONS FOR STRINGS

Most of the pieces I composed during my time at university were inspired by progressive, avant-garde, and experimental music - if you are looking for something more traditional and tonal, then feel free to check out my classical and traditional page. 

'String Quartet No.1'

A very abstract and jagged work, I have drawn influence from both serial composers and minimalists, and allowed my roots as a metal musician to shape the phrasing, perpetual dissonance, and intensity of this piece. It was performed at sight by the Bingham Quartet in a composition workshop.

'Reflections Quartet'

This extended work was composed for the Kingfisher Ensemble, featuring the virtuoso clarinetist Charles Hine. It contains numerous symmetries, of both harmony and form, and explores a lot of extented performance techniques throughout, including multiphonics, harmonic glissandi, and snap pizzicato.

The first three movements are shown here as a midi demo, but parts four and five have been taken from the live workshop recording, where The Kingfisher Ensemble sightreading the piece.

'The Spiral Horns of Ammon'-String Trio

I very much enjoy drawing parallels and finding patterns between at first apparently disparate things. This piano trio is inspired by the Fibonacci sequence expressed as a geometric spiral in it's structure, Egyptian scales, and the demon, Ammon (also an Egyptian god with ram's horns).

'Tala Quartet'

With a bustling minimalistic texture, and surprising melodic contours, this string quartet brings together the tala rhythms of Indian music, serial processes, and the ferocity of metal music into a vibrant and mesmeric fusion of different cultural influences.  

'PANTONAL THEME & VARIATIONS FOR PIANO'

Placing limitations on creativity can force it to express itself in innovative ways. In this work, the middle of the piano register is off limits whilst I extrapolate variations upon a theme in a pantonal harmonic framework of my own devising, which demonstrates the limiting principle ad absurdum. 

'ANTIKYTHERA'-Piano

Captivated by the Antikythera mechanism (which is an ancient mechanical computer found by divers off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera at the turn of the century), I created my own 'device' - a set of inlaid rotating wheels that generated new pitch sets when turned, resulting in this work:

'THE CALM (BEFORE THE STORM)'

This dreamy and more traditional piano piece was commissioned by the US metalcore band Wolves and Revenants, as an intro for their debut album. The piano is intended to lead into the first band track on their forthcoming album, which is called 'The Storm'. There is more relaxing piano music, accompanied by tuned percussion on my classical and traditional page.

​CHORAL COMPOSITIONS

'Agnus Dei'-SATB

This is a mystical and stirring work that explores my own bitonal harmonic method, juxtaposing lingering close dissonances against more traditional melodic patterns. It was performed in 2009 by the Black Barn Singers in Suffolk. 

'Darkness'-SATB

This is a piece inspired by the poem by Lord Byron, using word-painting in conjunction with my own bitonal harmonic technique. The combination results in a through-composed work that strives to conjure up the bleak and barren imagery that the words bring to mind. 

'Üsküdar'a Gider İken'-SATB

This was another experiment with bitonality, but this time in a very subtle pairing that created harmonies reminiscent of the Middle-East, which is fitting for this classic Turkish melody, which i have arranged for choir.

'Sestina: Altaforte'-TTBB

Based on a text in Sestina Form by Ezra Pound, which twins themes of medieval warfare and clashes between the elements in nature, the music (for male voices) combines serial technique with the sestina process, resulting in new note-rows as the basis for each movement of the piece. 

Compositions for
​Mixed Ensemble

'The Ones Who Run'

Composed for the Gemini Ensemble, and inspired by Tsoltim N. Shakabpa's poetry about contemporary troubles in Tibet, this piece displays a feeling of perpetual motion at times, which are then surprisingly thrown into chaos by intense piano clusters, evoking the spirit of revolt. 

'Threnody for Easter Island'

Having always been fascinated by the mysterious giant statues on Easter Island, whilst also seeing parallels between the demise of that civilisation and our own, this piece combines cryptography, the fibonacci sequence and otherworldly sonorities to evoke the magic of the forgotten past.

'Crow Songs'

Crow Songs This is a hybrid work, at times sounding more like metal, jazz and funk than modern classical music. It is intensely cryptographic, with most of the rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic material being based upon the latin names of crows encoded into music. 

There is also an album of music for tuned percussion ensemble that I composed and produced for the Alibi Music Library on my classical and traditional page if you want something more relaxed, meditative, and thoughtful to listen to than the music on this page, which is more dark, obscure, and intense. 

Compositions for
​Soloist & Duet

'The Night'-Voice & Piano

'The Night' and 'The Narcissus' are two short pieces for baritone voice and piano, based arabic poetry by Ibu Al-Mutazz. For both pieces, a combinatorial yet harmonic approach to serial techique has been used, yet the harmony of the night is much darker and unsettling. 

'The Narcissus'-Voice & Piano

In contrast to 'The Night', 'The Narcissus' has much less obscure harmony, and the melodic ark 'blooms' in sequence through superimposed major chords that create a diminished dominant, which is rich and colourful. ​

'Raagavardhana'-Snare Drum

Raagavardhana is a tala, which are rhythmic building blocks in Indian classical music. Here, I've used the tala to explore the different available sonorities on a single snare drum. The instrumental limitations in this piece result in creative use of the sticks and different parts of the drum to create the illusion of multiple instruments. 

'How Water Began to Play'-​Guitar & Voice

An intimate little piece, it is based on a poem by Ted Hughes. The guitar part is in an unusual tuning, which lends itself to augmented harmonies and whole-tone patterns of natural harmonics. which are interspersed between the fretted notes, facilitating a ringing, shimmering texture. 

'Fibonacci Variations'-Cello

Another work based on the Fibonacci sequence in it's structure, however this one uses musical cryptography to encode the cellist's names into music, and then through the use of modular arithmetic in combination with the fibonacci sequence, new melodic material was germinated.

'The Opaque Veil'-Cello & Guitar

Composed for the cellist Kayleigh Simpson, the two parts dance together, obscuring the theme that the guitar harmony stems from until the veil of process is lifted midway through. In contrast, the cello melody is written freely in response to the harmonies that the theme generates. 

'Fragments of a Litany'-Clarinet & Guitar

This experimental serial piece is based on the 'shards' of a larger work that I destroyed, holding onto only a few themes which I explored in this novel context of clarinet and electric guitar. The clarinet part was written for my second cousin, Luke Mitchell, a fellow student at the time.