Golden Hour begins from a place of familiarity: an A minor seventh chord derived from the foundational structure of the tuning system itself, where each harmonic “colour” is built from stacked fourths. From this almost just intonational opening, the piece gradually introduces more unfamiliar intervallic relationships as the clarinets emerge, allowing rhythmic beating and subtle microtonal interference patterns to slowly bloom inside the harmony. The music is intended to unfold organically, like a flower opening or a fern uncurling, moving from something stable and recognisable into increasingly intricate textures and shapes.
The sonic world of the piece is closely tied to the atmosphere of early to late spring: the glowing green of overcast days, newly formed leaves, and the imagined interior colour of tulips. A central gesture is the saxophone hocket, where sustained tones are passed continuously between performers in a circular motion, allowing the physical limitations of breath itself to shape the rhythm and phrasing. Rather than concealing the mechanics of performance, the work embraces them, creating a cooperative pulse that hovers around a slow, breathing momentum.
The string writing draws inspiration from Within You Without You by The Beatles, particularly its layered doubling and raga-influenced modal character. In Golden Hour, these influences become refracted through the macrotonal tuning system before gradually giving way to a more rhythmic, folk-like closing section featuring harp, saxophone arpeggios, and future vocal overdubs intended to imitate blackbirds moving through trees and bushes at dusk.
Beneath this final section is a slight melancholic lilt within the tuning itself, reflecting the impermanence at the end of spring: daffodils losing their heads, blossom falling from the trees, and bluebells beginning to wither as that brief luminous season slowly disappears for another year.
RGB approaches the tuning system from the opposite direction to Golden Hour. Rather than beginning from a familiar harmonic centre, the piece constructs its opening sonorities from different regions of the tuning simultaneously, layering red, green, and blue note groupings against one another to create a shifting, luminous harmonic field. The work takes direct inspiration from light itself - both in the visual colour coding of the tuning system and in the way separate harmonic identities can combine into something unified, much like coloured light forming white light.
As a companion to the spring atmosphere of Golden Hour, RGB inhabits the height of summer. The harp writing is intended to evoke sunlight moving through leaves, reflections across water, and the soft instability of heat and air in motion. Throughout the piece there is a dreamlike, ornamental quality inspired by Art Nouveau imagery and the atmosphere of A Midsummer Night’s Dream: overgrown gardens, glowing foliage, and moments where beauty feels almost suspended in time. When the violin melody emerges, it leans into the slight lilt within the tuning system itself, producing an emotional ambiguity that sits somewhere between joy and ache.
As the composition develops, the clarinets gradually pull the music into a more rhythmic and playful space, introducing a loose groove that contrasts with the floating textures of the opening. By the final section, the music becomes almost celebratory, with repeating figures and interlocking gestures that feel closer to a communal pulse than a fixed melody. The bass clarinet acts as a final release within the piece, arriving as a kind of payoff that grounds the surrounding shimmer into something warm, physical, and deeply satisfying.
Moonlit Eucalyptus was the first composition written using the tuning system, created before its structures and relationships had been fully systematised. It emerged from the earliest intuitive experiments with implementing the tuning inside digital instruments and samplers, allowing strings, saxophones, and sustained acoustic textures to inhabit the harmonic world for the first time. Because of this, the piece carries a sense of discovery throughout: an attempt to feel out the emotional and tonal character of the system intuitively, before any formal framework had been established around it.
The composition opens with slowly shifting cello figures that seem to emerge gradually out of silence, before violins introduce a more unsettled and ambiguous harmonic language. Much of the first half explores what felt intuitively like the tuning system’s “minor” quality: dark, eerie, and slightly alien, with emotional relationships that do not map cleanly onto conventional Western harmony. The piece was strongly shaped by the atmosphere of moonlight itself, particularly the strange duality of the moon as something both beautiful and unknowable.
As the work progresses, the harmony gradually resolves into what felt like the tuning system’s “major” counterpart, though this shift is less triumphant than dreamlike. The brighter sonorities retain a softness and ambiguity, as if the music never fully settles into certainty. Written beneath a full autumn moon and inspired by the sight of moonlight illuminating a eucalyptus tree in the garden outside my old cottage, the piece became an attempt to capture both the visual atmosphere of that moment and the emotional attachment tied to the tree itself. After eight years living underneath it, the eucalyptus later became a symbol of loss when it was cut down shortly before I was forced to leave the cottage. In this sense, Moonlit Eucalyptus also functions as a quiet dedication to that tree: its shifting bark textures, luminous greens and turquoise tones, and the memory of a place transformed by moonlight.