Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax (2015)
(for large ensemble)

Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax takes its name from a line of Lewis Carroll’s ‘Walrus and the Carpenter’ poem, which first appeared in his nonsense book, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1871). The ‘shh’ vocalisations heard throughout the piece represent the sibilant line and title. The piece’s structure is inspired by the fragmented nature of Carroll’s Alice books; it is organised as a musical mosaic which experiments with stylistic juxtapositions, drawing from jazz, rock, funk, metal, and dance. I have explored ideas from the Alice books in previous pieces; like Carroll’s body of work, at times Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax indirectly quotes and refers to phrases (with a knowing wink!) from my earlier works Cabbages and Kings (2014) and Radishes and Strings (2014).