I wrote a piece last year for the violist Bridget Carey that was full of extremely high harmonics and had a great fragile and delicate feel to it. I'm really looking forward to trying similar ideas across the four bowed strings in the Nieuw Ensemble - I have no idea what it will sound like!

This is a fantastic opportunity to write a large-scale piece - I've never written for more than six players before - and I'm still trying to figure out how to cope with so many musicians. Hopefully things will become clearer when I meet the group! Roll on Amsterdam...

Ben Isaacs is currently studying for a Masters degree in Composition at the University of Huddersfield with Aaron Cassidy, and enjoys playing in the University's edges ensemble and Split, his free-improvising, notation-reading, experimenting trumpet trio.

Ben is one of four composers selected to join this year's HCMF & Nieuw Ensemble Composers' Professional Development Programme, which sees emerging composers spending two weekends of workshops in Amsterdam working alongside the Nieuw Ensemble, trying out new ideas with the ensemble and receiving advice and guidance from the tutors. Each composer will have their piece performed by the Nieuw Ensemble at HCMF 2009. The first set of workshops runs from 20-22 February and the second set from 24-26 April.

Only two lines are now missing from my sketch for the second weekend of workshops. A lot of time, ink, and tippex, as well as four sheets of (now ripped and curled) A2 paper have been used. I have expanded my string quartet sketch from the first weekend (where constantly shifting harmonic phrases move quietly and unpredictably between pitched and un-pitched sound) to create a longer, more substantial passage in which consistently intricate internal detail creates a largely homogenous, slowly moving surface. The result, I hope, is an intense and perhaps unstable environment, somehow imposing yet dominated by microscopic gestures. I can't wait to hear it!

Work on my Nieuw Ensemble piece is in its last phase; roughly a quarter of the notation is complete. Pictured are two pages of an overall plan. Each box represents a single phrase, a small gestural compound characterised by a low dynamic and a slow but noticeable rate of change. This may be a soft tremolo beating on a muted glockenspiel, a focused strumming of an upper-register mandolin note, or a slowly sliding harmonic fingering on a bowed string. The highlighted boxes are those in which pitched material is present, with the uncoloured phrases contributing to the muffled darkness from which individual details emerge. The distribution of pitched material, in its gradual diffusion across the ensemble, mirrors the fragile unpredictability one finds within each phrase, the whole piece then becoming a slowly fluctuating, tense aggregate.

Inspired by:

James Saunders – #211007

Joanna Bailie – Five Famous Adagios

Evan Johnson – Colophons (“That other that ich not whenne”), reflecting pool / monument

Roland Barthes – The Pleasure of the Text

Mark Z. Danielewski – House of Leaves

Ben Isaacs

It feels great to look back on a year working with and writing for the Nieuw Ensemble. Composing for the group posed many new challenges which were rewarding to overcome. The weekends in Amsterdam were very informative and the concert at HCMF was a fantastic event for all four of us. Special thanks are due to Heidi Johnson for all her hard work on the project. The recording and score of and darkness sweeps in like a hand can be heard and seen here.

Ben Isaacs