How they Creep

Styles (1982 - ) How they Creep Tait Chamber Orchestra Jessica Cottis, conductor Alexandra Hutton, soprano Ashlyn Tymms, mezzo-soprano Tait Winter Prom 2016 St John's Smith Square 30th November 2016 Sponsored by Commonwealth Bank of Australia Luke Styles Luke Styles is an Australian and British composer. He recently completed three years as the Glyndebourne Young Composer in Residence, and from February-December 2015 was the composer in residence at the Foundling Museum. the first to occupy the position since Handel. His opera Macbeth was premiered at Glyndebourne and was then performed at the Royal Opera House in 2015. Luke was a Tait Awardee in 2014/15, that was generously supported by the VEC Acorn Trust. "In 2012/2013 I worked with two groups of highly motivated and talented students from London and Lewes on writing for voices and instruments, along with professional singers from Glyndebourne and instrumentalists from the LPO. We used the Cunning Little Vixen as a springboard to explore the ideas of characterisation in opera, music/drama and how to combine the voice with instruments. The result was the composition of 12 new works by these students and one by myself, either using a text featuring animals (enter the influence of Janacek) or setting a section of the Cinderella story. My work, How They Creep, takes the second stanza from E. A. Poe‘s A Dream Within A Dream, which like the Cunning Little Vixen looks at nature for its subject matter. As with the students I embarked on a piece that has at it‘s heart the combination of two voices and how they are supported and at times directed by the instruments around them. At the time I found myself largely influenced by Benjamin Britten‘s Canticles whilst writing this piece and see How They Creep acted as a testing ground for ideas for my second opera for Glyndebourne, Wakening Shadow, which premiered at the 2013 Glyndebourne Festival" Luke Styles, November 2016