Work in Progress
October 2025 - present
Lines of Sight
for string quartet
Composer's that influenced Lines of Sight - for string quartet:
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Unsuk Chin
Pascal Dusapin
György Kurtág
Hans Abrahamsen
Thomas Ades
After composing The Cloud, an opera without scene for baritone and string quartet, I felt an increasing need to explore the string quartet on its own, without the presence of another instrument, such as voice for example. That impulse gradually intensified until ideas began to take shape, sketches accumulated, and eventually a manuscript emerged.
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Lines of Sight is inspired by a London story about a photographer who helped save gay man on trial. From 1979 to 1996, Phil Polglaze photographed London's public toilets to support the legal defence of men arrested in so-called 'cottaging' cases, documenting a period when homosexuality was still actively persecuted in London.
Music usually begins on an ordinary day at the piano. I improvise chords, meloried, and, most often, modal passages that allow me to explore sonorities and identify which materials resonate with me at that particular moment.
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This time, however, I chose a different approach, I created a timeline plan outlining the materials I intended to use, the type of material, and their approximate durations. I mapped out whether these elements would unfold simultaneously or appear in isolation, shaping the overall structure before the actual composing began.
After establishing the timeline, I returned to the piano and began the process of improvisation. Once a set of chords had emerged, I started locating them within the harmonic series. From there, I transposed and inverted them by applying a technique that I called inverted harmonic series which basically transforms the harmonic series into its negative form, a technique I developed during my doctoral studies at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama.
This process involves inverting the harmonic series whiles preserving its intervallic structure, but projecting it from a high-register pitch. This upper pitch may be placed several octaves above the original fundamental, or it may be a transposed, very high, fifth derived from the original fundamental.
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For example, in a conventional harmonic series built on C, the fundamental is a low C. The series then ascends to the fifth, continues to the octave, the major third, and so on.
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In an octave-inverted harmonic series, the original fundamental C is displaced three or four octaves higher. From that elevated pitch, the harmonic progression unfolds downward: first the fifth below, then to the octave below, then to the major third below, and so forth.
In a fifth-inverted harmonic series, the new "fundamental" becomes G, the fifth above the original C. Taking, for instance, G in a high register (such as G5), the series then descends following the same intervallic succession: a fifth downward, then an octave, then a major third, and so on.
This process is lengthy, yet it significantly expands my harmonic possibilities. One it is complete, I return to the piano and begin testing the chords in succession, listening carefully until a convincing harmonic progression emerges, one that ultimately becomes the core of the piece.
​​As the chords are placed in relation to one another, melodies and gestures naturally arise. Most importantly, the harmonic progression takes shape, proving the structural and expressive foundation that defines the entire work.
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At the time of writing this work-in-progress article, the piece has moved beyond the sketching stage into the phase of full composition. The central idea originated from a gesture that initially had little to do with music. Inspired by the 1979 story, the interplay of descending lines set against lines that rise seeks to articulate a contrast between differing perspectives, multiple ways of perceiving the same space, the same material.
Let’s Work Together
