In Clean Air

In March 2020, the Matangi Quartet (who had recently featured my work in their Unheard festival in The Hague) invited me to contribute to a series of 90-second pieces they were commissioning, hoping for melodies with healing powers for that difficult time.

It was the beginning of the first lockdown, and strangely, in London, the sky was startlingly blue. Without traffic fumes or aeroplane trails, it had never seemed so clear. It sent a message that not everything was terrible. Perhaps it was even hinting at what a better life might look like. I found myself wondering what that sky might sound like as music.

In Clean Air is the simplest possible statement of an idea that I would develop more fully in the last movement of my second string quartet.