City academic nominated for Ivors Classical Award

Dr Newton Armstrong, Reader in Music in the Department of Performing Arts, has been nominated for an Ivors Classical Award in the Best Small Chamber Composition category for his work The Book of the Sediments.

The Ivors Classical Awards take place on 14 November 2023 at BFI Southbank in London and 11 Ivor Novello Awards will be presented to eight category winners and three Gift of the Academy award winners. BBC Radio 3 will also broadcast the ceremony on 18 November in a special edition of the New Music Show and the episode will also be available on BBC Sounds.

Premiered by soprano Juliet Fraser at City, University of London last year, the composition is inspired by The Sea Around Us, a best-selling book by the American marine biologist Rachel Carson. Notably, Dr Armstrong uses Carson’s imagery as a prompt to contemplate “the interactions between the momentary and the vast, and of the endless process as a form of saying”.

Mastered for headphone listening in surround-sound binaural format, The Book of the Sediments encourages the performer and listener to enter into a contemplative state in which musical materials, like ocean sediments, drift in semi-regular motion.

Speaking about the nomination, Dr Armstrong said:

What’s most special about being nominated for the Ivor Novello Award is knowing that the judging panel is comprised mainly of composers. There’s something about having that peer acknowledgement that’s particularly gratifying.

“It’s the nature of these awards to focus on individuals, but that only tells part of the story. The nominated work was commissioned by the soprano Juliet Fraser, with whom I have a long-standing collaborative partnership both in performance and in the studio. It was Juliet who introduced me to Rachel Carson’s Sea Trilogy — a set of beautiful texts that formed the heart of the project that we undertook together.”

Released in June this year, The Book of the Sediments was recorded in December 2022 at City, and it has also been performed at the following places:

• 11 October 2022: City, University of London
• 12 November 2022: Bernaola series, Vitoria
• 26 November 2022: Rainy Days festival, Luxembourg
• 9 March 2023: Musica nova festival, Helsinki
• 21 June 2023: Aldeburgh Festival, Suffolk

It was produced and edited by Mark Knoop, and the engineering, mixing and mastering was carried out by Dr Armstrong. The composition was commissioned by Juliet Fraser with the generous support of Arts Council England’s National Lottery Project Grants, PRS Foundation’s Open Fund and the Vaughan Williams Foundation.

Listen to The Book of the Sediments

About Dr Newton Armstrong

Newton Armstrong is a composer, performer, and occasional builder of electronic musical instruments. His work has encompassed a wide range of activities, including score-based instrumental music, projects for children, and improvisation projects with dancers, choreographers, film, video, and installation artists. Much of his music is situated across and between the areas of instrumental and electronic music, with focus directed towards the composed interactions between people, technologies, and their environments.