Remember Us!
Fanfare for the Victims of a Mismanaged Pandemic. The surviving film is embedded below.
Watch
Why it was written
This piece was written in November 2020, while the pandemic was still very much present in everyday life. Alongside the human loss, I found it impossible not to feel sadness, frustration and anger at what I saw as political and moral failures in the handling of the pandemic in the United Kingdom.
Although the UK was no longer my home, I cared deeply about what happened there. The piece was intended both as a memorial voice for those who died and as a demand that lessons be learned.
Four overlapping trumpet passages are progressively sampled and layered. A central flügelhorn solo is accompanied by processed television and radio news reports and a choral compilation made from re-synthesised pre-1952 recordings. The work is intended for a large acoustic — ideally a church or cathedral — with the tape material placed above and away from the soloist so that it sounds distant and ethereal.