Tim Tricker
Tim Tricker is a composer and conductor from Aberdeen in Scotland.
His piece Ninian’s Lilt (an orchestral work devised around a locally-written melody) premiered in the Czech Republic in 2008, and has subsequently been performed in the UK, Ireland, Germany, and Belgium (and will be performed in the Netherlands in 2022 (if restrictions allow).
His two sets of Fragments for String Orchestra have been recorded by Concordia String Orchestra on their consecutive CDs Concordia Recorded and Concordia Recorded II, together with his Miniature Suite for Strings and an arrangement for strings of Edward MacDowell’s Woodland Sketches.
His Porcine Sequenza, a piece for 8 bassoons, was performed by FagottOktett as part of the Sound Festival in Aberdeen in 2018. In 2019, Con Anima Chamber Choir premiered his Gloria (for SATB, piano, brass quintet, timpani and xylophone).
He was recently one of the finalists in the BBC Radio 3 Carol Competition 2020, where his ‘Christmas Carol’ melody was arranged by Clare Wheeler and recorded by the BBC Singers.
Beam Splitter in B Minor
Beam Splitter in B Minor is an allegro movement for baroque string quartet.
The piece is minimalistically conceived, making using of rhythmic variation over a recurring phrase that gets passed around verbatim by the various instruments of the quartet.
Harmonic and rhythmic shifts, in four bar increments, create different colours and textures within the piece as a whole, whilst retaining the driving momentum of the movement. There is an ABA structure (borrowed from a traditional baroque form) and this is done tonally, from B minor to D major and back to B minor, and this is also reflected in the dynamic range, which is deliberately limited to suit the instrumentation and style of the piece.
A ‘beam splitter’ is an optical device designed to split beams of light which can create prismatic variations from a single source. The idea is that this piece ‘splits’ the darker colour of the opening, refracting in four bar variants to create slightly different facets of the same prism. The middle section continues this process whilst generating a brighter colour in contrast to the outer sections.
The modern idea of phase shifts and beam splitting is therefore interfaced with the baroque forms, tonalities and dynamic ranges, hopefully resulting in an experimental but prismatically rewarding whole.