Category Archives: Works

With the weight of a tree at my back

This short, two-movement work came out of an earlier work for solo viola, Gaza Cantos, which was written after the in­va­sion of the Gaza Strip by the Israeli Defence Forces in December 2008. The title ref­er­ences Amir Nizar Zuabi’s play I am Yusuf and this is my brother, set be­fore and after ‘al Nakba’ in […]

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June Unfolding

June Unfolding was written for a con­cert marking the 750th Anniversary of Macclesfield’s Royal Charter given by King Edward Musical Society in June 2011. Faced with the length of time in ques­tion  —  an un­ima­gin­able dur­a­tion, the change during which is dif­fi­cult to fathom  —  it was a chal­lenge to re­spond in a mean­ingful way. As time passes we […]

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La leggerezza delle città

Combining a sonic vocab­u­lary that fuses con­crete sounds of the city with more ab­stract ma­terial, La leggerezza delle città hopes to ex­plore and ex­pose the weight­less clarity of cer­tain acoustic ex­per­i­ences whose rapid in­cisions into the listener’s per­cep­tion leave crisply out­lined yet mul­ti­far­ious and ul­ti­mately in­ef­fable im­pres­sions, en­ga­ging in a dia­logue between the sonic reality […]

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The Golden Lion Hotel

Friedrich Engels lived in Manchester for more than 20 years, during that time re­ceiving many visits from Karl Marx who was living in London. Engels led a double life as both man­ager of his father’s cotton factory and polit­ical rad­ical, and the harsh con­di­tions of workers in Mancunian in­dustry formed a key in­flu­ence on his ideas […]

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Wege & Waldstille

Driven by an urge to find ways of com­bining the quiet, tactile spaces I have been be­coming in­creas­ingly fond of with some­thing more forceful and volatile, Wege & Waldstille in some ways com­bines ideas from various strands of my work from the last couple of years. In trying to frame lim­inal, del­icate sound­worlds with more […]

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  • Microbiography

    Chris Swithinbank is a British-Dutch com­poser who works with both acoustic in­stru­ments and elec­tronic sounds. He is cur­rently a stu­dent at Harvard University with Chaya Czernowin.
    Full Biography »

  • Hear