orchestral
Firstly, here’s part of an orchestral piece of mine called Search Engines. The piece was inspired by ideas of exploration, voyages of discovery, searching and scanning through vast areas of unknown content or form.
Click here to listen: search engines
Recently the 
music has been radically revised, although the underlying idea is still the same. This short excerpt is taken from a live performance of the original version by C.U. Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Will Carslake, and is one of the few parts which is largely the same in the revised version! Click here to read the programme note. If you’re interested to hear a CD of the complete piece (about 10 minutes) and other music by Jeremy Thurlow, post me a message in Comments.
Here’s another extract to listen to: Search Engines (II).
The picture above shows imaginary machinery constructed by fractal recursion, from Jock Cooper’s fascinating website. I only found this picture recently, but its combination of the technological and visionary is very evocative of the ideas I was trying to explore in the piece. To see the image in full size, click Fractal Machinery.
Since posting this the new version of the piece has been premiered by the BBC Philharmonic conducted by James Macmillan, and is due for broadcast on Radio 3’s Hear and Now later this year.
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And here’s the first solo entry from my piano concerto. In this piece I tried to develop a particular kind of flow inspired by the fractal shapes found in many natural processes: it has a strong consistency, with a well-defined character in its contours and rhythms, but it never actually repeats, and at any particular moment the pace and direction is liable to change in what feels like a spontaneous, almost whimsical fashion.
And here’s another passage from later on in the movement: one of the main climaxes, followed by a moment of introspection. All the piano writing here derives directly from the solo entry heard in the first extract, though the effect is very different.
In this performance the soloist is Matthew Schellhorn, and the Cambridge Mozart Players are conducted by Tim Murray.
Music by Jeremy Thurlow.
