Instrumentation: mezzo-soprano/contralto and chamber ensemble (bass clarinet, violoncello, electric guitar, keys (rhodes and grand), percussion, recordings of Roland Juno 106 synthesisers and tape delay)
First Performance: Ditte Marie Bræin and ‘Asamisimasa’; ‘Only Connect’ Festival, Oslo NOR April 2024; commissioned by Norwegian Council for the Arts
Text: excerpt from Seminar XII from Jacques Lacan, with quotations from various love songs.

Duration 40′ / 2024 (revised 2025)

Love Songs Without a Subject is a meditation using a key text from Jacques Lacan’s Seminar XII: ‘Love is to give what you don’t have to someone who does not want it.’ This text is set across a four measure chord sequence based on the ‘descending, chromatic bass lament’. This occurs in all twelve major keys and their corresponding relative minor variants. Sometimes the sequence appears in a clear harmonic form, but more often than not, it is re-harmonised either using the the original chromatic chord sequence as extended chords, or as shell chords with added extensions. The overall effect is hopefully akin to a slow descending shepherding effect, whereby one senses a falling, but never lands; as in love.

The chord sequences are book-ended in sections by other love songs which also make use of descending, chromatic bass lament. Given the wealth of examples in popular culture that employ this device, these examples are played in parallel in the piece — e.g ‘Dido’s Lament’ alongside the ‘Most Beautiful Girl in the World’, ‘Michelle’ alongside ‘My funny Valentine’ — not because it’s an insider musical joke, but because, like in love, and in deference to Boudleaux Bryant’s song of the same name, if two memories are recalled simultaneously, love hurts.

Instrumentation: two keyboardists and two percussionists
First Performance: Yarn/Wire; Miller Theater, NYC USA April 2022; commissioned by Miller Theatre NYC, with lead support from Mark H. Jackson and Karen L. Hagberg; and additional support from Australian Performing Rights Association ‘Art Music Fund’.
duration 25′ / 2022 (revised 2024)

Another Children’s Television is a live recreation of an imaginary library music record, the titles of which come from children’s television programs of the 1970’s that never saw production. On the one hand, these musical blocks of Anglo-American cultural memory may induce a melancholia for a lost time when daily routine was shaped by free-to-air television, and not everything was privatised. On the other, to quote Walter Benjamin, ‘in waste products, children recognize that the face of the world of things turns towards them, and towards them alone’. (TM)

Violins: Mari Sawada & Biliana Voutschkova / Viola: Daniella Strasvogel / Violoncello: Boram Lie / Guitar: Rico Repotente / Pedal steel guitar: Anthony Burr / Radio DJ: Pat O’Shea / Voice, keyboards, electronics, realisation: Thomas Meadowcroft / Sound engineer: Thomas Monnnerjahn / Producer: Marcus Gammel / Text: Thomas Meadowcroft (with references to Psychological Aspects of Geographical Moves: Homesickness and Acculturation Stress, ed. Miranda van Tilburg and Ad Vingerhoets, Amsterdam Academic Archive)
First broadcast Deutschlandfunk Kultur, August 2013; Commissioned by Deutschlandfunk Kultur, with additional support from Berlin Senate for Culture and Europe.

Duration 50′ / 2013

“See youz later. Yeah, see youz mate. Chain-smokin’ in a wheelchair. Yeah, say g’day to Beryl and the kids hey. Cut down on the durries. Yeah, no worries will do. Diabetes. Hungry Jacks. Yeah. Nah.“

Song Buslines describes, through sound, the routes of ‘long-haul’ bus trips along the east coast of Australia. Song Buslines takes its inspiration from the ‘songlines’ of indigenous Australia, where song as oral tradition assists in navigation of the land or ‘country’, however, not only here do truck stops, hot boxes and town names replace the geographical markers of the natural world, but, there is also a separation between the spiritual and material worlds: at the end of a twenty-four hour road trip on a bus the body and suitcase may have arrived, but the heart is several thousand kilometres back down the road.