Autumn Chorale was written in response to a commission from CoMA to write a piece exploring the climate crisis that currently threatens our existence. I was initially uncertain as to how to approach this brief, wrestling with the age-old question of how and to what extent instrumental music can be ‘about’ anything at all. I was, however, keen to make the link a tangible one, and one that was written into the notes, rather than being simply (and arbitrarily?) asserted by the title and programme note.

I decided to make this connection by separating the performers spatially. Throughout the history of Western Art Music, from the cowbells of Mahler’s 6^th Symphony to the horn calls of Julian Anderson’s Imagin’d Corners, spatial effects have been used to simulate vast natural landscapes. In Autumn Chorale, four soloists are places off-stage around the concert hall, and play a variety of hunting calls to evoke the natural landscape. Onstage, the rest of the ensemble play a melancholy chorale, drawing on the religious and therefore funereal connotations of the choral genre, and mourning a world that seems to be disappearing before our eyes.