Welsh composer Nathan James Dearden releases his debut album, i breathe, today on Signum Classics. Bringing together fifteen choral works written over the past decade, the album maps music that is shaped by people, places, and the experience of making music together.
Growing up in Tonyrefail in the South Wales Valleys, Nathan was surrounded by a culture in which singing was part of everyday life. Community choirs, chapel traditions, and the familiar sound of Welsh hymns provided an early understanding of music as something people do together. It was through the National Youth Choir of Wales, which he joined as a teenager, that this experience developed into a lasting relationship with choral music.
“Welsh hymn singing sits alongside the rhythmic energy of underground trance music”
That relationship sits at the heart of i breathe. The album brings together three ensembles from different stages of Nathan's musical life: the National Youth Choir of Wales, where he first experienced the possibilities of singing together; the Choir of Royal Holloway, where he has been Composer-in-Residence since 2021; and Manchester-based Kantos Chamber Choir. Cellist Maxim Calver also features alongside the Choir of Royal Holloway in Three Motets.
The music draws on the sounds and experiences of Nathan's upbringing, while looking outwards towards a wide range of influences. The collective expression of Welsh hymn singing sits alongside the rhythmic energy of underground trance music, explorations of digital culture, and reflections on ritual and memory. Across the album, the relationship between individual voices and the collective becomes a recurring musical idea.
As Nathan reflects:
“Pulling together this album made me notice the threads in my own language. Textures that envelop you like a hug. Simple moments of collective singing that pack a punch, the way those famed Welsh hymns I grew up with in the Valleys do. Ideas of ritual. Communities. What home means to us. The act of humans coming together. Our breath.”
These threads emerge in different ways across the collection. Everything about us, written for the National Youth Choir of Wales, was conceived in the aftermath of the pandemic. Its opening section gives individual singers the freedom to occupy space through fragments of song, spoken text, and poetry, before the choir gathers into a powerful collective declaration: now it's my time. The work explores the relationship between individual expression and the strength of a shared voice.
In suo, dedicated to Nathan's mother, the familiar melody of the traditional Welsh lullaby Suo Gân is placed above gently shifting hummed harmonies. Elsewhere, Morals + Interludes draws on the virtual memories of young singers during the pandemic, transforming personal recordings, reflections, and fragments of everyday life into five short choral postcards.
The title work, i breathe, returns to the Welsh landscape. Setting three short poems by Ken Jones, Paul Chambers, and Arwyn Evans, it explores the relationship between people and their surroundings through sung and whispered Welsh, breath, and moments of stillness. The work received the Best Music Creator award at the 2022 Making Music UK Awards and was subsequently selected to represent Wales at the International Society for Contemporary Music's World Music Days in South Africa in 2023.
The album also features Three Motets, commissioned by the Presteigne Festival for choir and cello, and a series of settings of texts by George Herbert. In these works, Nathan looks towards older traditions of sacred music, finding new ways to explore the relationship between text, ritual, and sound. The collection closes with My joy, a meditation on joy and its changing nature, drawing on the influence of J.S. Bach's motet Jesu, meine Freude.
“i breathe is a decade of that living and learning.”
It is this experience of choral music as a living, shared practice that runs through i breathe. The album is not simply a collection of compositions written for different ensembles, but a record of relationships built over time, and of the singers who have given the music its life.
As Nathan writes:
“i breathe is a decade of that living and learning. Recorded with the choirs who shaped me, and released with gratitude to every singer who taught me that music is never made alone.”
The album has been supported by the PRS Foundation, the Hinrichsen Foundation, Royal Holloway, the Centre for AudioVisual Research, and the Vaughan Williams Foundation, alongside a public crowdfunding appeal.
A series of launch events will take place in Surrey, London, and Cardiff during November, bringing together some of the musicians involved in the recordings.
Listen to i breathe
i breathe is available today on CD, streaming, and download from Signum Classics.
