Nathan is delighted to announce that I will be spending twelve days as an Artist-in-Residence at the Arvo Pärt Centre in Laulasmaa, Estonia, this August.
The residency will provide an important period of creative development for Passion, my new large-scale work exploring sacrifice, identity, memory, and post-industrial Welsh heritage. Taking place from 17–30 August 2026, the residency will give me dedicated time away from my usual work to begin developing the musical and conceptual ideas at the heart of the project.
Speaking about the opportunity, Nathan said:
"I'm deeply grateful to the Arvo Pärt Centre for this invitation, and to Royal Holloway, Wales Arts International, and Arts Council of Wales for making the residency possible. Time and space to think, read, listen, and create are among the greatest gifts a composer can receive. The Centre's unique setting, and the opportunity to engage with Arvo Pärt's extraordinary creative legacy, provides the perfect environment in which to begin shaping this new work."
A place for thinking
The Arvo Pärt Centre is located among the pine forests of Laulasmaa, on Estonia's Baltic coast. It houses the personal archive of composer Arvo Pärt and provides a space for artists, musicians, and researchers to engage with his work and creative practice.
I am particularly looking forward to spending time in this environment and allowing the landscape around the Centre to become part of the creative process. During the residency, I plan to spend time walking, listening, reading, sketching, and experimenting with ideas for Passion. I am especially interested in using creative walks through the surrounding landscape as a way of developing material away from the desk. The residency will not be about trying to complete the work. Instead, it will provide space to ask questions, explore possibilities, and begin to establish the musical language of the project.
Developing Passion
Passion will reimagine the Passion form for the twenty-first century.
The project will explore questions of sacrifice, queer identity, memory, belonging, and the experience of growing up in a post-industrial Welsh community. It will bring together elements of early music and contemporary practice, including a consort of viols alongside immersive and extended-reality technologies.
The residency at the Arvo Pärt Centre will form an important first stage in this research and development process. I am particularly interested in how an ancient musical form can be transformed to speak to contemporary experiences, and how music, technology, and space might work together to create something that goes beyond the traditional concert experience.
Learning from Arvo
Spending time at the Arvo Pärt Centre will also provide an opportunity to engage more deeply with Pärt's music and creative practice.
I have long been fascinated by the concentration and clarity of his music, and by the way his work encourages us to listen carefully to individual sounds, gestures, and silences.
The residency will give me the opportunity to reflect on these ideas while developing my own musical language. For me, one of the most valuable aspects of a residency is the opportunity to slow down. There is often pressure on composers to constantly produce new work, but creative development also requires time to listen, think, and allow ideas to remain unresolved. I hope this residency will provide exactly that space.
What comes next
The time at the Arvo Pärt Centre will mark the beginning of a longer period of research and development for Passion.
Following the residency, I will continue developing the project through conversations, experimentation, and collaboration with musicians, performers, researchers, technologists, and other creative practitioners. There is still much to discover, and I am deliberately allowing the work to develop gradually.
For now, I am incredibly excited to have the opportunity to spend time at the Arvo Pärt Centre and to begin this next chapter of Passion in such a remarkable environment. I will be sharing more from the residency and the development of the project over the coming months.
Double-click to edit...
