Originally aiming for a career in the film industry, and beginning a degree course in film studies, Marcus Rock soon recognised the precarious nature of artistic control and its reliance on many collaborators and backers. When one of these fails, your artistic intentions are unfulfilled. Rock took a leap of faith, left his film course and pondered how, with little more than a keen interest in music and no formal training, he could enter a conservatoire. Needing to create and submit notated scores required theory lessons and as much practice at composition as he could get. ‘My musical intentions became more intuitive,’ he recalls, and after applying to the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire (RBC) he was offered a scholarship. Now in his fourth year there, he has studied with Sean Clancy, Andrew Hamilton and Edwin Roxburgh. ‘They’re drastically different creatively, but constantly supportive and generous.’ Rock has also taken part in external programmes including the Cheltenham Music Festival Composer Academy (2022) and has written pieces for players from Chineke! and the London Symphony Orchestra.

Last year he won a place on the Britten-Pears Young Artists’ Programme, with mentoring from Colin Matthews and Mark-Anthony Turnage. ‘Again, very lovely, generous people. It’s an intensive and enjoyable course, and rather than stepping on the composers’ toes, they were just there looking over our shoulders and providing support. “How are you doing? How do you feel?” And I can reach out to them whenever I need to.’ At the Red House, Rock benefited from the camaraderie of living alongside the other composers while they all worked on their own scores. ‘We pulled an all-nighter on the final day to get things finished. Although our work is very different, we all understood each other. Being a composer is so often solitary, it was lovely to know that you’re never really that alone, and afterwards we all kept in contact.’

His creative process varies. ‘I’m a synesthete. So initially I start with sketches; I write down instrumental combinations or textural characteristics, depending on the instrumentation. For the orchestral work that I’m writing now, I have pages of combinations and colours and textures. Sometimes I will sketch an idea on paper as a cross-section of how that could look in a larger setting. Before I go to the notation software, I make sure I can hear every technique or harmonic or melodic change, and what the timbre of the instrument is going to sound like in a live setting.’

A self-cognisant assessment of his music brings Rock’s compositions into two categories (internal and external). ‘Internal’ descriptors are: ‘chamber of emotion – impulse, desire, uninhibited’ and ‘chamber of thought – logic, constructed, ideation’. Acidic Considerations (2020) for solo flute uses extended playing techniques with boundless energy: there is an animalistic sound to the breaths and drumming on the keys; the combination of these elements with expressive melodic writing reminds me of the way J.S. Bach implies a harmonic dimension to the melody of the cello suites. The solo flute sounds more like a chamber ensemble. ‘I was thinking about polyphony with a single instrument and how I could split up the technical capabilities and the registral characteristics of the flute to create a dialogue. I mapped a typical characteristic or a melodic feature to a tempo and then switched tempo and changed the characteristic. So it was, as you say, another way of exploring polyphony.’ Shadow Mania (2022) for violin and cello also has a sense of dialogue and a vividity to it. ‘That word – vividity – does characterise how I think about music. I’m glad that comes through because this immediacy of the writing is important.’

Conversely in Rock’s catalogue, ‘external’ expressions are: ‘extrinsic episodes – external realities, future, past and present’ (these are longer pieces). Soul Shards (2020) for string quartet has an expressionistic beauty. It’s a 15-minute single movement, written as Rock was coming to the end of his first year at RBC, having negotiated several life changes. What can he say about its form and language?

‘It’s an external narrative where these shards – episodes of recurring material – sometimes change, sometimes remain the same. They are sections of harmony and texture which never complete their arc but are interspersed and spliced together. I imagined a single person sitting still and the entire atmosphere constantly changing around them. Each atmosphere is in its own grounded place. So switching between atmosphere A, atmosphere B, atmosphere A, atmosphere C, allowed me to build a longer arc until, at the end, some of these themes resolve.’

Death Drive (2023) for two pianos is minimalistic in texture (although with a freer central section). ‘That piece is part of a series which explores minimalism. The psychological concept of repetition leading to death made me explore how different types of repetition have different kinds of meaning. I felt that this idea of poetic death, and this kind of flickering light, a breath with shifting pulses in the music, presented a warmer perspective of this death process.’

In the preface to his New Music piece Toe by Toe, Rock describes how, after not finding what he sought, he turned to one of his own texts from a collection of short stories. The imagery in that prose is vivid and the musical setting even more so. No extended vocal techniques are required, though imaginative scoring includes glissandi, speaking, whispering, free unconducted repetition and divisi with precise directions. Can Rock describe how the ‘oneiric’ – dreamlike – sense of the music paints the text?

‘The oneiric instruction relates to immediacy of experience and immersion, like the French Symbolist idea that crossing over of the senses and experience of the object is more important than the description of the object or action. My familiarity with the text made it easier to set; I knew I needed to include some unconducted narrative.’ The vocal lines are very singable and seem to come from an experienced choral composer. ‘No, this was my first choral piece, actually! I knew it was essential to sing through the individual lines – then I’d know it’s singable because I could do it. When does this person need to breathe? How are they going to approach this phrase?’

Looking to the future, Marcus Rock’s characteristic scrutiny of his creative direction points to ‘intratextuality’. Can he explain? ‘By creating a network of pieces, I’ll be able to, in however many years, look back and see certain similarities, creating a neural network of works that are all interrelated, not the same but connected. Not so much linear but nebular.’ Your own universe of music? ‘Yes. I still feel that I’m searching for a real voice. I hope that maturity reaches everyone in different ways and at different stages. I try not to place myself in the music that I write. Some of my pieces are minimalistic, some more melodic, others contain extended techniques. Rather than categorising myself as an aesthetic composer, I try to be true to what the piece requires rather than imposing what I want or what I think will be fashionable.’ 

The score for Toe by Toe, commissioned by Choir & Organ in partnership with The Marian Consort and supported by PRS for Music, was available to download and perform until 30 June 2024. Visit our New Music page for our current scores.