Philharmonia Composers' Academy Volume 9

On 4 December 2026, NMC Recordings releases Volume 9 in the Philharmonia Composers’ Academy series.

Each year, the Philharmonia commissions and supports early-career composers to create a new piece for an ensemble of Philharmonia musicians, working with NMC to bring the recordings to wider circulation. Previous composers have included Ayanna Witter-Johnson, Mark Simpson, Alex Paxton, Nneka Cummins and many others who have gone on to secure major commissions and residencies.  

Created during the Philharmonia’s 80th birthday season, this edition brings together works by Claire Cope, Ellen Drewe and Harry Rees, responding to the orchestra’s theme Music & Identity, with each composer exploring ideas and issues that are important to them. The three works were performed by the Philharmonia conducted by Mert Yalniz. 

Claire Cope’s Cold Earth is inspired by Sarah Moss’s novel of the same name, which tells the story of a group of archaeologists trapped on an isolated dig in Greenland as a global pandemic takes hold. As fear and hysteria grow, the group begin to experience ghostly visitations as past and present collide. Cope’s piece centres on ideas of social fragility, from pandemic-driven societal collapse and political instability to growing fears about the climate crisis. Densely moving chords, ominous syncopated undercurrents, plaintive melodies and delicate, glassy textures create an atmosphere of grief and fragility. 

Ellen Drewe’s Clap Your Hands is built around field recordings taken during a political protest in London in 2025, attended by many thousands of people. Drewe incorporates chants from the recordings into the musical material, quoting and distorting them while layering prerecorded and notated rhythmic material. The dialogue between ensemble and fixed media creates a highly emotive atmosphere, with music becoming a tool for communication and thea collective pursuit of justice. 

Harry Rees’s I Once Saw The Face Of God takes inspiration from a poem by Sophia Light. The piece unfolds in three sections: a foreboding prelude, a faster pulsating undercurrent of dread, and a final sequence of increasingly fast, dissonant and disconnected passages representing the ongoing waves of terror experienced by the narrator. The work ends abruptly and timidly, as the narrator avoids confronting what they have seen and understood about the world they inhabit.