Tom Coult on his debut disc 'Pieces That Disappear'

Composer Tom Coult provides an in-depth preview into his recently released Debut Disc entitled Pieces that Disappear.

My upcoming album for NMC – Pieces That Disappear – features four pieces of orchestral music, some with solo instrumentalists or vocalists.

It’s an unusual privilege to have an album of orchestral music recorded. For obvious practical and financial reasons, things are often on a slightly smaller scale. I think my orchestral music, however, is pretty central to and representative of what I do, so I’m very lucky that NMC (and its funders) have been able to make this album.

I think of writing for orchestra as being a kid given free reign in a big, sweet shop. The first time you do it, you want to gobble down everything all at once, enjoying a dizzying sugar rush from using absolutely everything it has to offer. When you give it another go later, you know a bit more about what your tastes are, and your trolley-dash around the shop becomes a little more selective, a little more characterful. As you get more used to the shop’s contours, you can chart an interesting and different path each time – sampling new things, enjoying things that you know will work for you, creating a different experience from the last time but still with something of your personality in it.

To abandon the sweets metaphor for a moment, I now think of the orchestra not as a massive army of sound-making troops, but more like an almost inexhaustible set of eccentric chamber groups. The fun is ‘I’d never get a 45-second piece commissioned for 8 violins, bass trombone, 3 flutes and a snare drum, but here I can do exactly that!’ Then – ‘let’s use two double basses in harmonics, bowed marimba and 4 horns – what could I do with that?!’.

Three of the four pieces on this album were written during my time as Composer-in-Association with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, and that wonderful orchestra perform all four.

The first piece, and the piece that gives the release its title, is Three Pieces that Disappear, premiered in 2023. I wrote in the programme note that ‘the three movements of this piece are linked by a vague, loosely connected set of ideas about music being remembered, forgotten, misremembered, imagined or deteriorating’. To this end, there are chains of suspensions typical of Baroque laments (with their evocations of loss and remembrance), music disappearing into a haze and becoming timbrally threadbare, and evocations of decaying recorded media – a worn-out wax cylinder perhaps, or a warped vinyl record. Most notably, there is the use of a scratchy recording of a Schoenberg orchestration of a Handel piece, which weaves its way into the music.