![College Crest](/wp-content/uploads/logo-01.png"){kind=logo}
Mute, a new composition by Laurence Osborn, Fellow Commoner in the Creative Arts premieres at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, London on Thursday 3 April 2025.
Written for the London Sinfonietta conducted by Geoffrey Paterson, Mute is for 12 players and is a series of four movements, in which the soloist’s part is stifled, muffled, or overwhelmed.
Dr Osborn tells us more about his creative process.
Where and how did the notion of these stifled, or hidden solos arise?
The idea of writing a piece of music in which a soloist’s voice is presented as an incomplete, stifled thing came to me during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Like most people in lockdown, I was reliant on incomplete, disembodied forms of communication -voices heard over 5G and through laptop speakers. I found something compelling – compelling and painful – in the ways that lockdown communication muffled the voice in static, and contorted it into glitches and delays.
During that year my oldest son was born. I got to experience the formation of his voice in real time – the unfixed vowel sounds of hunger, then the slaps and pops of his first syllables, then babbling, then the beginnings of speech.
I spent most of lockdown with these two experiences of the incomplete voice, which ran in a sort of contrary motion to one another: the fragmentation of digital voices that surrounded me, and the formation of the little voice in my arms.
The scenarios painted in Mute are not explicitly drawn from personal experience, but some of them refer obliquely to this time.
Most of the third movement is based on a small fragment of Edward-Léon Scott de Martinville’s early recording of ‘Au Claire de la Lune’ from 1860, and the final part of it is set of variations on the degraded sound of the recording when they reconstructed it in 2008.
To what extent does politics and public discourse shape your work?
I live in the world and make music in it, so politics and public discourse always shapes my work, whether I want it to or not.
When I was younger, I wrote some pieces – like Ctrl and Essential Relaxing Classical Hits – which referred explicitly to conversations that were happening at that time. It was a useful approach, and it was true to what I wanted to do then, but it wasn’t entirely musical. I found it was leading me into writing the same kinds of music all the time.
Nowadays, I prefer to try and keep myself from knowing fully what a piece is about until I’ve finished writing it. Instead, I focus on the actuality of what I want to hear, and trust that whatever I need to say will be in there.
When are you most creative?
When I’m working on a section of music, I need to set myself little musical exercises in order to start writing. This is why so much of my music involves processes — things getting faster, slower, bigger, or smaller.
If I can start with a problem — for example, how can I get from here to here with these two simultaneous chord progressions, one of which gets slower and one of which gets faster — it can become a sort of scaffold on which I can build pitches and rhythms. This sounds academic, but it isn’t: it’s almost a kind of automatic writing that births its own distinctive material.
Separately to this process, I’ll have ideas about what I want the ‘vibe’ of a piece to be, its colour and sound-world: my imagination here is timbral, gestural, often referring to other musics, or theatre, or film.
For me, this part of composing is easier, and my thoughts are clearer and more spontaneous. Eventually, I’ll reach a critical point where I have the material, and I have the sounds and the gestures, and I begin to fuse them on the page.
The fusion of these separate processes gives me all sorts of distorted shapes and rough edges, the parts of the music that I really love. At this point I can start to play around with these weirdnesses, and see where they go. It’s my favourite part of writing, and it’s probably the point at which I’m most purely creative.
What do you hope audiences will take away from Mute?
I hope that what I want to hear is also what they want to hear!
Mute premieres as part of ‘Hidden Voices’, alongside works by Hannah Kendall and Luciano Berio on Thursday 3 April 2025, 7.30pm at Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre. Tickets from £11.00.