Burn

Solo Clarinet and Wind Orchestra

Written for British clarinetist Linda Merrick, Burn was premiered by Linda in March, accompanied by Sheffield University Wind Orchestra (SUWO) conducted by Tony Houghton. The initial unaccompanied passage that opens the work was written during 2011’s “Arab Spring”, which dominated news reports of the time.

The haunting soundtrack to these newscasts (which were a strange cocktail of devastating, uplifting, angry, mournful, rallying and peaceful) was the calls to prayer.

There was no attempt whilst writing Burn (a title inspired by region’s climate) to directly imitate these calls to prayer, but certainly they had an impact on the opening passage of the work, and therefore the whole piece.