Laurence Osborn’s music has been performed by renowned ensembles including the London Philharmonic Orchestra, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Modern, The Riot Ensemble, and Manchester Collective.
His music has been programmed throughout the UK at venues such as The Royal Festival Hall, The Wigmore Hall, and Symphony Hall Birmingham, and at major international festivals including Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Festival Présences (Paris), and November Music Festival (Den Bosch).
Laurence Osborn’s song-cycle Essential Relaxing Classical Hits was nominated for an Ivor Novello Award in 2021. He was also a winner of the Royal Philharmonic Society Composition Prize in 2017. Laurence recently completed a PhD in Composition supervised by Sir George Benjamin at Kings College London, supported by a full scholarship from the AHRC.
Upcoming projects include a day of portrait concerts at The Wigmore Hall on November 25th 2023, featuring Mahan Esfahani, The Britten Sinfonia, and Marian Consort.
In recent pieces, I have returned again and again to the idea of compromised or tainted subjectivity. I am especially interested in emulating voices which are simultaneously human and mechanical, like the sound of HAL 3000 as he pleads for his life in 2001: A Space Odyssey, or the voices of rappers like Future and Travis Scott, or the sound of the harpsichord, whose sound is inseparable from the mechanical means of its production.
While I was writing Coin Op Automata, my partner told me about how her mother used to take her to a museum in Covent Garden filled with all sorts of coin operated machines. There was a little mechanical family that slurped spaghetti, a bird that sang with a metal throat, and a little unicyclist who lurched along a wire. I loved the idea of this little ecosystem of coin-operated creatures, trapped in their own mechanical vignettes.
Coin Op Automata is a series of little mechanical tableaux, grouped into two movements. Musical ideas are shared between tableaux and between movements, sometimes obviously, sometimes less so. The first movement is made from wooden sounds, and is a series of lurching dances. The second movement is more metallic in sonority. It begins with a melody, sung by a mechanical voice, which is passed between instruments, before going somewhere else.