I'm one of six composers who have been commissioned by harpist Sioned Williams to create a piece to celebrate her sixtieth birthday. The other 5 include Michael Finnissy, Paul Patterson and MIchael Stimpson. We are awaiting confirmation of a date for the premiere though it looks likely to be in the Autumn of 2014.

My piece is called Domestica and includes a film shot by director Magali Charrier. As always the piece uses techniques that I've not tried before, in this case a simple additive structure that dictates the shape and flow of the whole piece: made up of 26 fragments, each with its associated film clip, fragment A is just over half a second long with the following fragments increasing in duration to fragment Z which is 40 seconds in length. The structure is

AABABCABCDABCDABCDE… etc. ending with fragment Z played one time only. Its all kept in time by a recorded ticking clock that acts as a click track and starts at 120bpm and gradually slows down to 60pbm. The whole idea should be quite straight forward because the written material for each fragment is almost the same each time it is heard. The tricky part is that it looks different on the page each time as the clock tempo has slowed. Luckily Sioned is an amazing reader...