This Garden of Death
Site-Responsive New Music · Co-Curator & Composer · 2025
Event poster for performance
The Concept
In November 2025, Richard Peace and I curated This Garden of Death at York Cemetery, bringing together new music by composers from York St John University.
The project grew through Richard’s relationship with the cemetery and our shared interest in making a concert that responded genuinely to the place in which it would be performed. We wanted the cemetery to be more than an unusual backdrop: its history, landscape, atmosphere and the experiences people brought into it became the starting point for new music.
York Cemetery Chapel.
The Place
The title This Garden of Death came from the history and character of York Cemetery: a place where landscape, memory, public life and remembrance sit unusually close together.
Before composing began, we met with the participating composers, shared material about the cemetery and walked through the grounds together. There was no single response we wanted them to arrive at. The purpose was to spend time with the place and see what each person noticed, remembered or imagined there.
That openness became one of the most interesting parts of the project.
Book by historian High Murray on the history of York Cemetery.
Different Responses to One Place
The resulting programme moved in very different directions. Some composers responded to the cemetery’s history; others brought personal stories into conversation with the setting; elsewhere, particular images, sounds and details encountered in the gardens became the starting point for musical ideas.
What connected the works was the place, but not a prescribed interpretation of it. The concert became a collection of individual responses to a shared environment, allowing the same landscape to hold very different meanings from one piece to the next.
In the Silence - Damien Collis.
Dream Collision - Manic Calm.
The Body - Freya and Richard.
Our Music
Richard and I also wrote Here Lies the Leaves for two acoustic guitars. The piece grew from the experience of walking through the cemetery gardens. Its musical ideas continually shift as the piece moves forward, reflecting the way the environment seems to change with each turn: another path, memorial, patch of planting or small detail entering view.
I also composed In the Silence for flute, B-flat clarinet and piano. My response was more concerned with the strange balance I felt within the cemetery itself. I found it peaceful and beautiful, but with an underlying eeriness that never disappeared entirely.
The music moves between dissonance, silence and warmer harmony, allowing unease and stillness to exist beside one another. Small sounds remain present around the quieter spaces, much as they do when walking through the cemetery.
Both works came from the same place but arrived there very differently — something that ultimately became true of the programme as a whole.
This Garden of Death
The concert brought those different responses back into the cemetery for performance, allowing the music to be heard within the environment that had helped generate it.
My thanks to York Cemetery for welcoming the project; to all of the composers who contributed new work; Jude Clark for editing the audio material; Samuel Morais for the film; and, of course, Richard Peace for creating and curating the project with me.