suntime bedtime moontime (2024)
Commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra through the LSO Discovery Panufnik Composers Scheme, supported by The Helen Hamlyn Trust
Premiered at the Barbican with the London Symphony Orchestra & Maxime Pascal, Jan 2025
for full Symphony Orchestra
score and audio available on request
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Programme note
Lara Agar generates musical ideas and solutions through found objects, accidents and improvisation. Although writing for orchestra does not easily offer opportunities for such messy experiments, when she composed her original three-minute version of suntime bedtime moontime for the Helen Hamlyn Panufnik Composers Composer Workshop in 2023 Agar introduced unpredictability by selecting and editing fragments of material as she composed, setting things against each other to see what happened. ‘I like this way of working,’ she said at the time, ‘because then it’s not mine as in, it feels like I didn’t make it up, which is way more exciting.
When that first version made contact with the Orchestra itself, however, Agar found another source of unpredictability: that the work could breathe more than she had expected. The opportunity to revise and extend her piec allowed her to engage with another interest in her music: stretching the momentary feelings that coincidences and accidents can prompt. The oddly sinking opening for example, is transcribed from layered digital synthesisers bu then rescored, as though a dial is being manually turned to slow the speed until it feels ‘settled’.
suntime bedtime moontime follows the cycle of a day, with an almos childlike simplicity of routine. And yet it is not entirely comfortable: th slight detunings of the orchestra create a fuzzy haziness of sound what the composer describes as both a ‘warming’ and a ‘tightening of pitches. There is a sense of nostalgia (reflected too in the analogue knob-turning gesture of the opening) but also a pinch of pain, like a crick in the neck. ‘Music can do this thing where with stasis, you can stay in a world says Agar. And so, she has created not the reality or stimulus of a particular experience, but instead something holistic, a complete and very human mix of sensations.
-Tim Rutherford Johnson
Commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra through the LSO Discovery Panufnik Composers Scheme, supported by The Helen Hamlyn Trust
Premiered at the Barbican with the London Symphony Orchestra & Maxime Pascal, Jan 2025
for full Symphony Orchestra
score and audio available on request
Programme note
Lara Agar generates musical ideas and solutions through found objects, accidents and improvisation. Although writing for orchestra does not easily offer opportunities for such messy experiments, when she composed her original three-minute version of suntime bedtime moontime for the Helen Hamlyn Panufnik Composers Composer Workshop in 2023 Agar introduced unpredictability by selecting and editing fragments of material as she composed, setting things against each other to see what happened. ‘I like this way of working,’ she said at the time, ‘because then it’s not mine as in, it feels like I didn’t make it up, which is way more exciting.
When that first version made contact with the Orchestra itself, however, Agar found another source of unpredictability: that the work could breathe more than she had expected. The opportunity to revise and extend her piec allowed her to engage with another interest in her music: stretching the momentary feelings that coincidences and accidents can prompt. The oddly sinking opening for example, is transcribed from layered digital synthesisers bu then rescored, as though a dial is being manually turned to slow the speed until it feels ‘settled’.
suntime bedtime moontime follows the cycle of a day, with an almos childlike simplicity of routine. And yet it is not entirely comfortable: th slight detunings of the orchestra create a fuzzy haziness of sound what the composer describes as both a ‘warming’ and a ‘tightening of pitches. There is a sense of nostalgia (reflected too in the analogue knob-turning gesture of the opening) but also a pinch of pain, like a crick in the neck. ‘Music can do this thing where with stasis, you can stay in a world says Agar. And so, she has created not the reality or stimulus of a particular experience, but instead something holistic, a complete and very human mix of sensations.
-Tim Rutherford Johnson