Ethnomusicology

The beauty and historicity of Hydra moves both those passing through and the islanders themselves. The Hydriotes carry in them pieces and gleams of an island scorched by flowers and salt, and conversing with them, and with their religious figures, granted me a communion and a luminous connection with a culture that, far from melting away in the waves of tourism, keeps rebuilding itself upon its distant ruins.

The music and chants I found in Hydra still seal the circumstances and emotions of daily life, they narrate, and they carry us to moments undrawn in time, much like the boats suspended in the silver sea that sustains the impossible Peloponnese. Converging those chants and musical fragments with my own sensibility, I traced a visual and archaic process: the metallic oscillation of the synthesiser, recalling the classicism of strings and orchestra, answers those voices through a kind of magical realism. Not only an island of beauty and repose, but a deep and invisible cadence that continues to make its way beneath the sun.

A Century of Sounds is a partnership between Cities and Memory and the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. The project invites listeners to explore compositions created by selected contemporary scene composers, each working from a single recording drawn from a century of incredible ethnographic material in the museum's sound archive.

My contribution, All in Elgar, takes a recording of stringed instrument and tabla — captured by ethnographer David Mowat — and reimagines it as a chamber piece that holds the original sound at its centre. The composition doesn't fold the field recording into a backdrop; it treats it as a soloist, with orchestral writing answering, framing and shadowing the archival voice.

The wider project is searchable by category, year, country and instrument — a living index that places a hundred years of recorded life next to a hundred new responses.

Working with such overwhelming and divine material, I deliberately refrained from over-determining its symbolism. The composition leans into sonic patterns, repetition, recurrence, almost delirium and possession, and ends as a quiet nod to Edward Elgar: an abstract gesture of camaraderie in the face of the immensity of cultures and sonic narratives that, in the end, reduce themselves to the act of recounting daily life and the emotions that embody the human condition.

The river sits at the centre of contrasting visions — a resource to be harnessed for some, a living landscape to protect for others — and yet it shapes all of our lives at the forefront of the climate struggle. Participating as a composer in Flow, I use sound as a medium to reflect on climate change and to express what rivers mean to us: a sonic dialogue between what flows, what resists, and what is interrupted, mirroring humanity's relationship with these waters.

By sampling field recordings and accompanying them musically, I amplify the hydraulic force of the water and turn the river's distinctive voice into an instrument. I then follow the collected data to guide the cadences, tonalities and tempos — letting the river itself determine the form.

Flow was presented alongside other artists and scientists reflecting on rivers, climate, environment and what these waters mean in our daily lives.

An ongoing fieldwork project with ethnographer Leopoldo Urrutia, preserving endangered Corsican chants and the traditional Chjam'è Rispondi, improvised poetic duels sung in alexandrines. The recordings are being donated to the Phonothèque de la Corse so the material remains accessible to researchers, locals and future composers.

The work also traces the path of Corsican song through Maurice Ravel's orchestrations, listening for where his palette echoes the polyphonies of the island.

From the donated archive, a sonic reinterpretation is being created and will be showcased as a sound installation at the Musée de la Corse and at the Corsica Luce cultural and artistic space in Nonza, an imaginary journey through the sounds of Corsica that brings together shepherds' polyphonies and stories of nature and humanity.

Big Sur is a solo album that revives folkloric songs about a lost paradise — gathered, restored and re-arranged in conversation with the singers and players who still carry them. The record sits between balladry and reinterpretation, treating each song as a piece of inherited geography.

It was profiled in depth by Radio Gladys Palmera, the leading Latin-music station out of Barcelona, as part of a longer conversation on how a ballad evolves across decades and across the people who keep it alive.

An invitation from Radio Relativa to share field recordings and reflections gathered from Ethiopian Orthodox liturgy — its monophonic chant, its sense of time, its relationship with the Old Testament — and to weave those materials live with composition.

The episode sits halfway between a listening session and an essay, treating the recordings as primary sources and the conversation as a way to open them up to a wider audience.