Lawrence Dunn is a composer, improviser and music writer. BCMG give the world premiere of his new Sound Investment piece for Zubin Kanga Sunday 22 June 2025.

Lorī will be performed alongside new works by Bethan Morgan-Williams and Anne Castex as part of our Constellations concert at Bradshaw Hall, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, Birmingham.

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Can you introduce yourself and tell us a little about your music?

I was born in Walthamstow, London, to a musical family (my mother played oboe and my uncle is a clarinettist, formerly with the London Sinfonietta and OAE). I have been composing and improvising from an early age. I studied at Trinity College of Music (Junior Dept), later at Cambridge and at Huddersfield, where I studied with Bryn Harrison. Often my music adopts a certain ‘double’ character – a superficially benign-sounding, even consolatory surface, that hides something anxious and troubled beneath. A couple years ago I’d been idly comparing composers to substances: Stravinsky is cognac, Fauré is milk, Satie is flour, Prokofiev is marmalade, Messiaen is topaz, etc. Kate Molleson asked me what kind of substance I’d compare my music to – I said ‘algal bloom’.

Can you tell us about your new Sound Investment piece?

This piece, titled Lorī, is for piano and keyboard soloist, and ensemble. It is at least in some sense a kind of lullaby, which is the meaning of the title in Sanskrit and Hindi. But it’s a piece less about sleep than about awareness as such. The fragility of awareness, the experience of noticing one’s own awareness – that it may be taken away, forcibly, without just cause, or slip away on its own. As with several works written over the past 18 months, perhaps for obvious reasons, it is a piece about death. An analogous image for the music might be the act of pressing out one’s hands on a soft surface, from the centre towards the boundary, knowing that the boundary is there, feeling for where it must be, until it is gradually and suddenly found.

What should audiences expect from your new piece?

A kind of gradual expansion, from something that could sound quietly familiar, through series of textures of increasing density and activity, which gradually reach toward a boundary, whose location is never known exactly but whose existence is assumed, until it arrives.

Do you have any rituals when you compose? Can you tell us more about your compositional process?

With any new piece I usually get very stuck looking for what I want until I find it. Every kind of music I start to come up turns out to be the wrong music, and I have to start again. Recently I’ve found that staying up late and becoming very tired and groggy can be good for clarifying which kind of material I want to settle on.

What is it like writing for/working with Zubin Kanga?

Zubin is great! He’s unique in the new music community in the UK – willing to try anything, and keen to work with as many composers and collaborators as he can. He has access to some of the most advanced music tech around, and it’s put to use in a sensitive and creative musical way. Most musicians would never think to see themselves as research leaders, but Zubin takes it all in his stride.

Our Constellations concert is part of our Boulez centenary events. Has your music been influenced by Boulez?

Yes, I think so. I remember first hearing Le Marteau sans maître as a teenager (I was looking at the score too) and just being blown away by its audaciousness. How it would buffet between virtuosity and crystalline lyricism. Only later did I really understand the depth of Boulez’s poetic expression, how he captured Char and Mallarmé’s landscapes of metaphor. I think the important poetic aspects of his music are often overlooked.

It is the poetic question which asks what about the world the music is reflecting back at us. What kind of world does the music reveal we are living in?

My uncle Tony Pay knew Boulez and worked with him on several occasions, though sadly I never met him.

What’s it like working with BCMG?

This will be my first time working with BCMG – but Stefan and everybody at the office have been extremely helpful in the run up to rehearsals and this concert. I’m looking forward to it!

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