Score and parts for hire

Rainbow-Shooting Cloud Contraption has had rather a tangled history. During 2013, I was working on an orchestral piece inspired by Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus – a gloriously eccentric encyclopaedia of imaginary animals, landscapes, buildings, fauna and inventions. I had heard a first draft of this orchestral piece performed, and wasn’t satisfied with it – the first four minutes in particular. While thinking about how to turn this draft into a finished piece, I attended the composers course at Aldeburgh, and used my time there to re-work material from those opening minutes, giving it a new profile and shape (but for 15 instruments rather than 80). This re-thinking of the material then got incorporated back into the orchestral piece, making Rainbow-Shooting Cloud Contraption a sort of reverse-engineered prequel to the larger piece. The piece’s title comes from one of Luigi Serafini’s inventions from the Codex Seraphinianus – in the chapter on machines, Serafini displays a cloud fitted with wheels and helicopter blades that shoots rainbows out of colourful gun turrets at its rear, forming rainbows wherever it flies.