Richard Russell

Compositions

Composing sheet music involves both mathematics and a nerdish obsession, not dissimilar to knitting or building toy trains. I’m to understand very few people do any of the above any more, else we’d be warmer and our trains would be safer for a start. I started writing my own music for school performances, where the alternative was a dismal arrangement of Greensleeves or some chundering Jimmy Lally.

Works that still exist include:

  • "Variations on a flat ice-cream van" for two clarinets (or larger group) (1983).
  • "Sorry Elgar" for wind quintet and jazz trio (1984).
  • "Improvisation" for solo clarinet (1985).
  • "The Singer" a short opera for six singers and pit band (1989).
  • "F.A.B." for brass quintet (1994).
  • "Pargul" for speaker and Hinduish melange (1996).
  • "Radio-daze", arrangement of songs by Radiohead for orchestra (2000).
  • "Tribute to John O’Neil No. 1" for big band (2000).
  • "Symphony No. 1, ‘Classical’" (2000).
  • "Suite for wind trio" (2000).
  • "String Quartet No. 1" (2000).
  • "Symphony No. 2, ‘Romantic’" (2000).
  • "Symphony No. 3" 'Leviathan' (2001).
  • "Clarinet Concerto No. 1" (2001).
  • "Broadchurch" for organ (2001).
  • "Suite" for solo acoustic quitar (2001).
  • "Symphonic extraction for big band" (2001).
  • "Ivory Plural" for piano (2001).
  • "Symphony No. 4" (2002).
  • "Three bits for solo clarinet" (2002).
  • "Changes" setting of poem for choir (2002).
  • "Sonata for clarinet and piano" (2002).
  • "Concerto for bass trombone or tuba" (2002).
  • "Clarinet Concerto No. 2" (2002).
  • "Symphony No. 5 in one movement" (2003).
  • "Serenade for flute and strings" (2003).
  • "Brass Quintet No. 2" (2003).
  • "String Quartet No. 2" (2003).
  • "Quartet for three clarinets and bass clarinet" (2003).
  • "The illusory in realism" for wind quartet plus guitar (2003).
  • "Soliloquos sermon" for solo ‘cello (2003).
  • "Trumpet Concerto" (2003).
  • "Symphony No. 6," 'English' (2004)
  • "Clarinet Quintet" (2004)  
There is also a box at home filled with works that only exist on rotting cassette, including songs with bands like Whip The Minister and Subterraneans, album-length constructions of midi files mixed with poetry and a whole host of tasty wombats i’ll put to use one day on someone else’s Logic.  

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