still life

BCMG gave the UK premiere of Katherine Balch's still life on Sunday 21 June 2026 for Still Life at CBSO Centre, Birmingham conducted by Clement Power.

Talea Ensemble (New York, US) co-commission

...and other spirits was made possible with the financial support of our Sound Investors.

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still life is in many ways a piece about process. Over the past few years, there are two processes that I find myself most preoccupied with: the process of composing music, and the process of growing/raising the food I eat. These processes both unfold in cycles of several months or sometimes years. Like eddies, there are cycles within cycles, each at their own time scale. There’s luck, skill, and attention to detail involved in each, a sense of profound care and attachment to material, abstract or alive.

In still life, audio and video field recordings from our fledgling homestead in rural Connecticut are abstracted into musical sound. The course of a day (from the dawn morning chorus to evening crawlers and bullfrogs) is condensed into four episodes of contrasting activities.

My husband and collaborator on this project, Ted Moore, abstracts raw footage and recorded sound from its source, and I do the same with the instrumental ensemble. The natural world has offered rich imagery to the musical imagination since the beginning of song, but it also is a proxy for something beyond metaphor and mimesis that perhaps only music can grasp at.

Katherine Balch, 2026

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Download the Still Life concert programme

Listen to the Talea Ensemble world premiere recording