The excellent Carter Quintet recently gave the London première of some of my Dreamsongs for WInd Quintet, a set of seven miniatures based on titles and lines from American poet John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs. I used these as a way into writing for wind quintet, an ensemble that requires a great deal of attention to bring together the very disparate sounds  and demands of the instruments in a way that is musically satisfying.

They opened with the snorting ‘Stimulant for an Old Beast’, before playing ‘Flying boy in mountain air’ and ‘Times of galaxies fleeing’, an exercise in stasis followed by an exercise in movement, especially of tempo, which is constant flux.