For twenty years, I have been developing my own way of thinking through the orchestra.
It has grown through hundreds of performances, recordings, commissions and collaborations: building London Contemporary Orchestra from the ground up, working closely with artists across music, film, dance, fashion and visual culture, and repeatedly testing what an orchestra can be.
This is not simply a field I work within. It is a practice I have helped to shape.
I have never thought of classical music as something fixed or finished. I came to it through sound, colour and physical sensation: the shock of a harmony changing, the weight of a bass drum, a strange combination of instruments, an orchestra suddenly becoming larger than the room containing it.
Berlioz still feels radical to me. His music is excessive, theatrical, psychologically unstable and completely alive. He imagined sound spatially and dramatically. He treated the orchestra not as a neutral vehicle, but as a world in itself.
That is the classical tradition I feel connected to.
Berlioz, Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Varèse and Messiaen used the orchestra to alter perception. They were not protecting an established language. They were stretching it, breaking it apart and inventing new forms of colour, scale and experience.
Their work reminds me that orchestral music was never supposed to be polite.
Colour as structure, not surface
Colour is not decoration
Colour is one of the central forces in my work.
It is not something added after the structure is complete. Colour carries meaning. It creates atmosphere, tension, memory and emotional perspective. A change of texture can transform how time feels. A single instrumental sound can alter the psychological temperature of an entire room.
As a conductor, I want to make those relationships audible.
I want an orchestra to feel transparent enough that every detail matters, but powerful enough that the collective sound becomes physical. I am drawn to precision, but not tidiness; to intensity without unnecessary weight; to performances in which texture, space, rhythm and silence become as important as melody.
For me, the orchestra is not simply a collection of instruments. It is a material through which emotion, image and atmosphere can be shaped.
Conducting is the point at which sound becomes physical and individual energies become one.
Sound, light and space treated as one material
Performance as a living installation
I think of performance as a living installation.
It exists not only in the music, but in the relationship between sound, space, light, movement, musicians and audience. The physical arrangement of bodies matters. The distance between people matters. The way sound travels across a room matters.
An orchestra is one of the clearest expressions of collective human action that we have.
Dozens of individual bodies, each with their own skill, personality and responsibility, work in tandem. They listen, adjust, support, lead and respond. No single person can create the whole, but the whole depends upon the attention of every individual.
At its best, an orchestra reflects something hopeful about society: difference held together without being erased.
Installation as concert hall
That physical image has become increasingly important to me. At a time when so much of life is mediated through screens, the orchestra remains a constant reminder of what can happen only when people meet in person.
Musicians gather. An audience gathers. For a period of time, everyone agrees to inhabit the same experience.
Two thousand years of gathering, still the same agreement
The sound is felt through the body as much as it is heard. You sense the air moving, the friction of the bows, the force of the percussion, the breathing of the players and the concentration of the people around you.
That shared attention can become a form of meditation. Not an escape from the world, but a deeper way of being inside it.
Everyone agrees to inhabit the same experience
My orchestral language
Over the past twenty years, I have built, tested and refined a distinct orchestral language.
It begins with the belief that the orchestra is not a genre. It is a material, a social structure and a way of organising human energy.
I do not begin with the inherited concert format and ask how it might be modernised. I begin again: with an idea, a physical space, a group of artists and the question of what an orchestra can make possible.
Sometimes that produces a concert. Sometimes it becomes a staged work, a ritual, a film, an environment or a living installation that sits somewhere between all of them.
This approach came from building an orchestra capable of moving between different artistic worlds without losing its identity. It grew through long-term relationships, practical experimentation and the accumulated knowledge of what happens in rehearsal rooms, recording studios, concert halls, warehouses and unfamiliar spaces.
I have spent twenty years learning how to take something fragile, strange or not yet fully formed and give it scale without making it conventional.
I know how to translate an instinct, image or sound into the reality of musicians, notation, rehearsal and performance while protecting what makes the original idea singular. I know how to create trust between artists who do not always speak the same musical language. I know how to give musicians genuine ownership of an idea so that an orchestra becomes more responsive, instinctive and alive.
That is not an occasional method I apply to particular projects.
It is my way of working.
The orchestra I believe in is disciplined but not obedient. Precise but not sanitised. It can carry the full weight of its history without being controlled by it.
A language built across rehearsal rooms, studios and unfamiliar spaces
I build worlds with orchestras
I rarely begin with the question: What repertoire should we perform?
I begin with a theme, an atmosphere or an unresolved idea.
Landscape. Grief. Ritual. Memory. Technology. The body. Repetition. Ecstasy. The natural world. The relationship between the individual and the collective. The way sound changes our experience of an image. The way a familiar piece of music can become unfamiliar when placed beside something new.
From there, I build relationships between works.
A programme might move between Berlioz and Hildur Guðnadóttir, Philip Glass and Ryuichi Sakamoto, Steve Reich and electronic music, an orchestral score and a new work developed with a filmmaker, choreographer or visual artist.
The point is not to demonstrate how many different worlds can be placed together.
It is to reveal the hidden connections between them.
I think of an evening as a complete emotional, visual and physical journey. The architecture of the programme, the transitions, the space, the lighting and the way the musicians inhabit the stage are all part of the composition.
The audience is not outside the work, observing it from a distance. Their presence completes it. The atmosphere changes according to how people listen, how they breathe and how willing they are to enter the experience together.
I do not want audiences to feel that they have attended a sequence of pieces.
I want them to feel that they have entered somewhere.
An evening as a complete physical journey
Classical music is part of modern culture
For twenty years, I have worked to place the orchestra inside the culture being made now.
Not by making classical music resemble popular culture, and not by attaching fashionable artists to an inherited concert format. The real work is deeper than that.
It means allowing artists from different practices to change the orchestra—and allowing the orchestra to change them.
My relationships with Philip Glass, Hildur Guðnadóttir, Mica Levi, Jonny Greenwood, John Luther Adams, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Bryce Dessner grew from this way of working. So did projects with Radiohead, Anoushka Shankar, Little Simz, The National, Frank Ocean, Sigur Rós and others.
I have worked as conductor, arranger, curator, performer, collaborator and listener. Often those roles overlap.
I am most useful when a project does not yet have a clear form: when an artist has an instinct, a sound or an image, but does not yet know how it might become orchestral.
My role is not to make that idea respectable or conventional. It is to understand its internal logic, protect its strangeness and discover what the colour, scale and physical force of an orchestra can reveal within it.
I have spent two decades creating the conditions for those encounters to happen properly—not as superficial crossover, but as serious artistic exchange.
Trust between people who do not speak the same musical language
The orchestra can be punk again
The orchestra was once a site of danger.
Berlioz used it to create hallucination, violence and impossible colour. Stravinsky used it to rupture time and social order. Varèse treated organised sound as physical matter. Messiaen created ecstatic structures that appeared to exist outside ordinary time.
These composers did not behave as custodians.
They used the orchestra to disturb the present.
That is the classical tradition I claim: not one of preservation, but of radical invention.
For orchestral performances to become more punk, they need to stop asking permission from the concert format.
The music does not always need to begin after the audience sits down. The conductor does not always need to enter last. The stage does not need to reinforce hierarchy. Pieces do not need to be separated by applause, explanation or ritualised exits.
Amplification, electronics, film, light and movement should not be decorative additions. They can be part of the composition itself.
The orchestra can surround an audience, move through a building, emerge gradually or remain visible before and after the formal performance. The concert hall can become less like a container for repertoire and more like a temporary world.
Between traditions
Punk also means resisting smoothness.
Too much orchestral presentation removes the evidence of risk. It hides the labour, physical effort and possibility that something might fail. But the orchestra is most exciting when we can sense people making difficult decisions together in real time.
I want the bow changes, breath, weight, friction and collective concentration to remain perceptible. I want the audience to feel the force of air moving through the room and recognise that the performance is being constructed in front of them by human bodies.
Not reproduced. Not streamed into existence.
Made there.
What comes next
For twenty years, I have not simply participated in a changing orchestral culture. I have helped build it.
Through London Contemporary Orchestra and through my own work as a conductor, curator, arranger and collaborator, I have developed a recognisable way of working: artist-led, physically immediate, visually aware and rooted in deep orchestral knowledge.
I have proved that an orchestra can be more agile, more instinctive and more connected to the culture around it. That it can build genuine relationships with artists rather than inviting them into a pre-existing format. That it can move between Berlioz and Hildur Guðnadóttir, Philip Glass and electronic music, the concert hall and the club, without treating one world as more serious than another.
The next stage is not simply to continue that work.
It is to keep building on it, and to see how much further an orchestra can go.
My work is about colour as emotion: using texture, resonance, space and orchestral force to alter perception and change how an audience feels.
It is about togetherness as a physical act: musicians and audiences gathering in one room, sharing attention, breath, sound and time. The orchestra as a living image of interdependence, and performance as a form of collective meditation.
A whole hall tuned to one colour
And it is about radical reinvention: treating the orchestra not as an inherited format to be preserved, but as living material capable of becoming an installation, a ritual, an environment or something that has not yet been named.
These are not new interests I am beginning to explore. They are the foundations of a practice I have spent twenty years building.
Now I want to take that practice onto a larger stage.
I want to conduct the radical music of the past as living material, not heritage. I want Berlioz to feel as immediate as Hildur. I want newly commissioned work to stand beside the classical canon without apology or explanation.
I want orchestral performances to feel authored from beginning to end: music, space, light, movement, scale and the physical relationship between performer and audience.
The orchestra is not separate from modern culture.
It is one of the most powerful ways we have of making it—and I have spent twenty years showing how far it can go.
The orchestra on stage, inside the culture being made now
The orchestra is not separate from modern culture.
It is one of the most powerful ways we have of making it.