Joseph Phibbs was born in London and studied at The Purcell School, with the support of a Suffolk County Council scholarship, before continuing his education at King’s College London (B.Mus, M.Mus) and Cornell University (DMA).His teachers have included Param Vir, Sir Harrison Birtwistle. and Steven Stucky, and his works have been performed by leading ensembles in the UK and beyond including the London Sinfonietta, Britten Sinfonia, BBC Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, and National Symphony Orchestra (Washington). Much of his output has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3, and he has received commissions from the Aldeburgh, Cheltenham, and Bath festivals, among others. He has also written for the theatre, scoring for a number of productions at the Wolsey Theatre (Ipswich), Sadlers Wells, Setagaya Theatre (Tokyo), and The Globe.
Large-scale works include In Camera (BBC SO/Slatkin), Lumina (BBC SO/Slatkin, 2003 Last Night of the Proms), Tenebrae (St Albans Bach Choir/Andrew Lucas), Shruti (LSO/Petrenko), Rainland (a choral drama to a libretto by Stephen Plaice), The Spiralling Night (featured at the 2007 WASBE conference, conducted and commissioned by Phillip Scott),a clarinet concerto for Sarah Williamson, and a setting of Psalm 98 for choir and orchestra, commissioned by the Bachakademie Stuttgart to mark the Mendelssohn bicentenary. His largest chamber work to date, The Canticle of the Rose, was premiered at Wigmore Hall by Lisa Milne and the Belcea Quartet, and shortlisted for the 2006 RPS Chamber Music Prize. Other chamber works include FLEX (a joint RPS/BBC commission for the 2007 City of London Festival), Personnages for Nicholas Daniel, Arc de Soleil for clarinet and piano (premiered by Sarah Williamson at Wigmore Hall in 2008),The Moon’s Funeral for James Bowman and Andrew Plant, and The Silence at the Song’s End, a song cycle for soprano and string quartet based on poems by Nicholas Heiney. Both Lumina and The Spiralling Night were shortlisted for a British Academy Award, the former in two categories.
A work combining school choirs in Suffolk with the Britten-Pears Chamber Choir will be premiered at Snape Maltings in November 2010, and he will be Composer in Residence at both the Presteigne Festival in 2011 (for which he is writing a new work for strings), and at this summer’s Exon Singers Festival in Tavistock, where smaller choral works will be performed alongside a newly commissioned Ave Regina. An extract of an opera-in-progress, based on the novel Under the Volcano, was recently featured at Covent Garden’s Linbury Theatre.
Commissions for 2011 include a percussion concerto for Dame Evelyn Glennie (Cheltenham Festival, 2011), a song cycle for piano and baritone for Jeremy Huw Williams, a work for the Diller-Quaile School of Music (New York), and a harp concerto for David Watkins. CDs of his choral works (conducted by Matthew Owens), and his chamber music are due to be released in 2011 and 2012.
Since 2003 Phibbs has combined his composing career with the editing and promoting of Benjamin Britten’s music, and he is a director of the Britten Estate, Ltd. He is currently a visiting member of staff at the Purcell School, having previously held teaching posts at King’s College London and Wells Cathedral School.
A number of his works are published by Faber Music and Oxford University Press, and he is represented by David Wordsworth.
Commissions and Performances
The Dawn Breakers – 2005
21 March 2005: Civic Hall, Stratford-upon-Avon (world premiere)
22 March 2005: Pittvile Pump Room, Cheltenham
The Dawn Breakers
The first movement begins with the ensemble divided at its most extreme registers: at the top, a piccolo introduces a pointed melodic figure that descends gradually through the ensemble, while the double bass provides a slowly ascending motion. This wedge-like formation eventually settles in the middle register of the ensemble, where a web of slow melodic lines begins to coalesce, finally breaking out into fanfare-like sequences in the high wind instruments, before a fast descent back to the middle register.
The second movement is fast and rhythmic- a type of scherzo, exploring syncopations between groups of instruments and density of timbre (specific qualities of sound provided by individual instruments, and how these might combine into composite sounds). This relates also to a kind of foreground-background in the music, the shift of emphasis in this respect being constantly challenged and disrupted.
The final movement is slower and more reflective, nocturnal in character, and occasionally recalling figures from the previous two movements.
The work was inspired in part from imagery evoked in the poetry of the Provençal poet, René Char, of which Les Matinaux (The Dawn Breakers) is one collection.
Joseph Phibbs
Clarinet Concerto – 2009
28 October 2009: Cadogan Hall, London (world premiere)
Clarinet Concerto
While writing this concerto, my first work in this genre, I imagined a depiction of ‘light in sound’: the passage of light through the course of a day, evocations of different qualities of light and the speed at which these change, and atmospheres and moods that certain periods of the day might suggest.
The work is in three separate movements. The first, a type of ‘dawnscape’, features a simple duet in which the clarinet plays a slow countermelody above a gently rising line in the strings and harp, the blurred unfolding of the melodic strands analogous perhaps to the slow, inexorable ascent of the sun and the eventual arrival of morning. The movement slowly gathers pace, breaking out into a high, impassioned vocalise in the clarinet, the melodic gestures (which feature glissandi) sharing characteristics with certain Eastern European vocal traditions.
The central movement is generally fast and dance-like, the clarinet often playing over syncopated pizzicato patterns in the strings which emerges halfway through. I am intrigued by unexpected interruptions in the flow of music, and one such instance appears here: the slowly rising string melody from the first movement is suddenly recalled, now in a descending sequence, as if its resolution has been delayed or transplanted to the second movement.
To round off the theme of light, the third movement (Vocalise) could be regarded as a nocturne, and recalls the simplicity of the opening, though here the texture is pared down further to a slow clarinet melody set over sustained string chords. The texture is underpinned by a pizzicato figure in the double bass, which runs throughout, rather like an Indian talea. It was here in particular that I chose to explore my favourite middle register of the clarinet (roughly the octave above middle C), the neutral, effortless quality of which I have always found captivating.
Joseph Phibbs