Writing beneath the surface: A selection of programme notes for Riot Ensemble

I love writing programme notes, but most of all I love writing programme notes for Riot. For a decade now, I’ve been asked by the group to introduce our audiences to the vast range of new and recent music that we play; and for all of that time, I’ve also had permission to be playful in what I do. One of the first concerts I introduced was a collection of text scores by Pauline Oliveros. Inspired by Oliveros’s thinking of everything as potentially music, and music as potentially in everything, I constructed a little textual ouroboros (music > listening > stillness > breathing > movement > making > music) that allowed me to give a short paragraph’s attention to every aspect of Oliveros’s work that I thought important and interesting. For a concert at The Warehouse, in Waterloo, I took inspiration from the title and structure of Benjamin Graves’s Four Façades, writing a note in four numbered sections that didn’t include any work titles. My notebooks don’t record why I opted to do that (a challenge to myself? A play on the idea of façades as surfaces, rather than the things themselves?), but I do remember it as a fun thing to try to pull off.

The other notes here are among my favourites from the years since. I believe Liza Lim’s Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus is one of the most significant works of the last ten years, so it was a delight to grapple with this (and to see our amazing performance of the piece on Valentine’s Day, 2020). Rzewski’s Coming Together was one of my sonic emblems of the pandemic, so it was truly exciting to have an opportunity to write it into a context that was both much wider and much more personal. Covid continued to influence my musical thinking for a year or two more, reflected in notes for a concert of Szmytka, Bates and Hall in April 2022, and one of Del Tredici, Pinnock, Korsun and Putt in October 2022. Thanks to Naomi Pinnock’s beautiful (it looks like someone lived there), the second of these also allowed me to nod towards one of my eternal inspirations, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

The most recent note here, from our Milton Court concert at the start of 2026, is an example of Riot’s enduring adventurousness in programming. It’s not immediately easy to write about works as diverse as Anna Meredith’s Brisk Widow, Alex Paxton’s Shrimp BIT Babyface, Eden Lonsdale’s Ozeane und Tränen and Corie Rose Soumah’s Limpidités IV all at once. But Riot concerts frequently force me into such positions, force me to listen beneath the surface to uncover hidden threads of connection and comparison. Inevitably – as they were in this concert, as they are in everything we play – those connections are there, and it is my pleasure to lift them a little closer to the surface, in whatever way I think most interesting.