Locke’s Theatre, an orchestral work in three short movements, takes as its departure point incidental music written for Shakespeare’s The Tempest by the seventeenth-century English composer Matthew Locke. Aspects of Locke’s idiosyncratic and daringly advanced harmonic and rhythmic language were to be adopted (some might say perfected) by his younger friend and protégé Henry Purcell. But it is the very rawness and directness of Locke’s theatre music that I wished to acknowledge and emulate.
In each of my work's three movements – entitled respectively ‘The First Music’, ‘Rustic Music’, and ‘Curtain Music (with Storm)’ – the baroque originals, though very often submerged, remain a constant, shadowy presence. Locke’s Theatre was commissioned by the Aldeburgh Festival to mark the centenary of Benjamin Britten’s birth. Ryan Wigglesworth
Instrumentation:
orchestra