Confluence & Lamentation
Tuesday 24 March 2026, 19:30PM - 21:00PM
Silk Street Music Hall, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London
Tuesday 24 March 2026, 19:30PM - 21:00PM
Silk Street Music Hall, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London
This is a student-led concert.
Pernille Faye - Penumbra
Goi Ywei Chern - On Destruction and Death in Ancient Times
I. Fragment from A Prayer for the City of Ur
II. Lament for Corinth
III. Lament for Jerusalem
IV. Meditation
INTERVAL
Efe Yüksel - Resistances
Goi Ywei Chern - Singha
I. Flight of the Stag
II. Towards White Sands
III. Singha
Efe Yüksel - Confluences
Goi Ywei Chern - OVERLOAD
Programme Notes
Penumbra
Pernille Faye
A part of a shadow in which only some of the light is blocked is known as a penumbra. They are found in the outer part of sunspots and shaded areas cast by the earth or moon during an eclipse.
Dark, resonant string textures explore these contrasts between light and shadow and the slow shift of the boundary that divides them. Merging and splitting, the trio imitates the motion of illumination set against shade and the changing character of light over time.
This piece is dedicated to the women of Iran in support of their continuing fight for freedom and equality.
On Destruction and Death in Ancient Times
Goi Ywei Chern
This song cycle consists of three texts of ancient city laments and one meditation, all translated into English. In the first song, Fragment from a Prayer for the City of Ur, there are words missing from the text due to damage to the cuneiform tablets they were found on. The text used in the songs are below.
I. Fragment from A Prayer for the City of Ur
Text from Miscellaneous Babylonian Inscriptions, trans. George A. Barton
Thy temples are destroyed like a jar that is smashed.
Thy city, the second which thou foundest, is struck down; it cries out.
Thy house weeps; O speak, lift it up!
Like thy city it is overthrown.
Thy city, the dwelling of its lady, didst thou establish;
let it not be moved!
Thy dwelling, the yoke of the abyss, thou didst establish
As a plant protected of Ninmul, the lady;
The. . . thou didst found.
Its lady as protectress entered.
On her weeping thou thinkest; thy anger is unfavorable!
Heartfelt tears flow; they are not checked; they fall.
She cries before thee with thoughts,
A loud voice she lifts up:
“Unto thy city give rest; it is caught’’ she cries.
Thy house . . .verily is shattered like thy. . . . it is smashed.
Ur was founded, it was established;
Like a .... it is caught, it cries out.
Its ruin verily abounds; for thee it abounds;
Thy heart . . .is broken;
II. Lament for Corinth
Text by Antipater of Sidon, trans. W. R. Paton, The Greek Anthology
Where is thy celebrated beauty, Doric Corinth?
Where are the battlements of thy towers and thy ancient possessions?
Where are the temples of the immortals, the houses and the matrons of the town of Sisyphus, and her myriads of people?
Not even a trace is left of thee, most unhappy of towns, but war has seized on and devoured everything.
We alone, the Nereids, Ocean's daughters, remain inviolate, and lament, like halcyons, thy sorrows.
III. Lament for Jerusalem
Text ascribed to Jeremiah, Bible, King James Version
Remember, O Lord, what is come upon us: consider, and behold our reproach.
Our inheritance is turned to strangers, our houses to aliens.
We are orphans and fatherless, our mothers are as widows.
We have drunken our water for money; our wood is sold unto us.
Our necks are under persecution: we labour, and have no rest.
We have given the hand to the Egyptians, and to the Assyrians, to be satisfied with bread.
Our fathers have sinned, and are not; and we have borne their iniquities.
Servants have ruled over us: there is none that doth deliver us out of their hand.
We gat our bread with the peril of our lives because of the sword of the wilderness.
Our skin was black like an oven because of the terrible famine.
They ravished the women in Zion, and the maids in the cities of Judah.
Princes are hanged up by their hand: the faces of elders were not honoured.
They took the young men to grind, and the children fell under the wood.
The elders have ceased from the gate, the young men from their musick.
The joy of our heart is ceased; our dance is turned into mourning.
The crown is fallen from our head: woe unto us, that we have sinned!
For this our heart is faint; for these things our eyes are dim.
Because of the mountain of Zion, which is desolate, the foxes walk upon it.
Thou, O Lord, remainest for ever; thy throne from generation to generation.
Wherefore dost thou forget us for ever, and forsake us so long time?
Turn thou us unto thee, O Lord, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old.
But thou hast utterly rejected us; thou art very wroth against us.
IV. Meditation
Text by Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. Jeremy Collier
It will not be long before you will have forgotten
all the world, and in a little time all the world
will forget you too.
Resistances
Efe Yüksel
“Resistances and Confluences” was originally a subheading for a chapter in my doctoral thesis that I ended up not using but instead decided to name two pieces after.
Resistances, for saxophone and electronics, written for saxophonist and fellow doctoral student Lydia Kenny, explores the interaction of the performer’s body with the different parts of the saxophone: the resistance of the reed against the mouth, the action of springs underneath the keys against the fingers, the interaction of the lungs with the tubing. These sonorities are combined with electronic processing to transform them into imitations of nature sounds: key clicks morph into water, breath becomes wind, and they create a digital ecosystem for the saxophone to exist in.
Singha
Goi Ywei Chern
I. Flight of the Stag
II. Towards White Sands
III. Singha
Composition of this piece began when Goi was visiting his home of Singapore. Singha originates from the Sanskrit word for lion, and is the word from which Singapore's name is derived. According to legend, the semi-mythical founder of the city, Sang Nila Utama, was hunting a stag on a nearby island and during the chase ascended a large rock, from which he saw an island with "sands white as cotton". As he sailed towards the island, his ship was caught in a storm which only subsided when he threw his crown into the sea. Once ashore, he spotted an animal, which his advisor told him was a Singha, after which he named the island.
The Malay Annals, trans. Leyden
"There they saw an animal extremely swift and beautiful, its body of a red colour, its head black and its breast white, extremely agile, and of great strength, and its size a little larger than a he-goat. When it saw a great many people, it went towards the inland and disappeared. Sang Nila Utama enquired what animal was this, but none could tell him, till he enquired of Damang Lebar Dawn, who informed him that in the histories of ancient time, the singha or lion was described in the same manner as this animal appeared. This is a fine place which contains so fierce and powerful an animal."
Confluences
Efe Yüksel
Confluences, signifying the conjunction point of two rivers, attempts to find analogous gestures between instruments belonging to different families and “harmonise” them together. Scored for Pierrot ensemble and guitar, the piece functions as miniature guitar concerto, where the gestures of the soloist spreads across the rest of the instruments and manifests in different ways, depending on their construction. The guitar part was written for fellow doctoral composer and guitarist Ywei-Chern Goi.
OVERLOAD
Goi Ywei Chern
OVERLOAD was composed during the finals of the 11th International Antonin Dvorak Composition Competition, in which two pieces had to be composed within five days based on given musical material. In this competition Goi was awarded first prize in the senior category, as well as special prizes for the best chamber music and best polyphonic music.
Performers & Composers
Eva Stone-Barney
Mezzo-soprano, On Destruction and Death in Ancient Times
Eva Stone-Barney is a Canadian mezzo-soprano pursuing her Masters in Vocal Studies at Guildhall, where she studies with Samantha Malk. She holds degrees in vocal performance and musicology from McGill University and the University of Toronto. This summer, she will appear as a young artist in various performances at the Festival Lyrique-en-mer in Belle-Île, France. Recent highlights include Marcellina in Le Nozze di Figaro (Goodenough College), Nancy in scenes from Britten’s Albert Herring, Ramiro in scenes from Mozart’s La finta giardiniera (Guildhall), chorus in Strauss’ Die Fledermaus (Guildhall), and New Ofglen in Poul Rouders’ The Handmaid’s Tale (Banff Centre).
Lydia Kenny
Saxophone, Resistances
Lydia is a versatile saxophonist, composer and interdisciplinarian.
She has performed as a soloist across the UK and Europe and collaborated with many composers, including Gregory Rose, Toby Young, Alex Groves, Jenni Watson, Malcolm Singer and Etienne Rolin, and also plays with Notes Inegales, led by Peter Wiegold, and The Bauhaus Band, led by John Harle.
Lydia's compositions incorporate elements of chamber music, physical movement and video, and have been performed across London and the UK, including BEAT with verbatim lyrics curated by Olivia Bell (2025), FABLES (vol.1) co-written with Toby Young (2024), Gleamings (2024), That's the New Barbican (2023) and After the Birds (2022).
Her academic interdisciplinary writings at UCL (BASc 1st) and Guildhall School of Music and Drama (MMus 1st; MPerf, Dist 2025, Concert Recital Diploma) explore the intersections of music, culture, and social issues, alongside collaborative projects on cross-disciplinary composer-performer relationships.
Lydia is actively involved in outreach initiatives with organisations such as Create Arts, Live Music Now, Ark Music, and Woven Gold, and also enjoys calisthenics and running.
Lara Ali
Alto flute, OVERLOAD
Lara Aisha Ali is a Nigerian-German classical flautist. She is based in London, studying at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and performing with Guildhall Orchestras in the Barbican Centre. Her studies at GSMD thus far have led to her being awarded the Guildhall Flute Prize 2024 and becoming a Liverpool International Flute Competition semi-finalist in the same year. Lara has been performing across London playing various genres, developing a holistic, creative musical identity and networking with up and coming artists. She is driven by community and collaboration, which fuels her passion for chamber music as well as leading workshops. Lara’s musical voice is formed by improvisation and contemporary music, and her anthropological perspectives on music are forming a path toward further studies in ethnomusicology.
Jacob Cavendish
Conductor, On Destruction and Death in Ancient Times
Jacob Cavendish is a London-based conductor specialising in contemporary music. He regularly conducts premieres of new works by living composers, collaborating closely with composers and soloists to realise their artistic intentions. The majority of his work to date has focused on post-2000 repertoire, with particular emphasis on composer-led projects.
He is drawn to the colours and sound-worlds explored by modern composers and values rehearsal as the space in which those textures are shaped and refined. His approach prioritises precision, rhythmic clarity, and detailed ensemble coordination, ensuring that complex contemporary music emerge feeling like a cohesive performances rather than collections of individual parts. In chamber and small-ensemble contexts (where contemporary works often require a conductor despite chamber-scale forces) he supports the ensemble’s natural instincts, enabling players to breathe and respond together with clarity and flexibility.
Jacob has conducted a number of student composer showcases at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, including one in October 2025 in which he premiered his own Flute Concerto. The work received its second performance in January 2026 at Milton Court Concert Hall as part of Guildhall’s Composition Open Day. In February 2026, he conducted the premiere of thresholds to imaginary gates, a new work by Thomas Shorthouse for fifteen flutes at the Royal College of Music alongside Steve Reich’s Vermont Counterpoint. Throughout 2026, he also conducted several concerts featuring new works by living composers.
Jon Paul Mayse
Conductor, Singha, Confluences, OVERLOAD
Jon Paul Mayse is a composer, curator, and researcher. His work is shaped by a deep interest in the granularity of our listening, a multidisciplinary bent, and devised/collaborative curatorial practices.
His music is spacious, colorful, and often quiet, almost to the point of silence, and explores memory, gesture, perception, and the expressive potentials of virtuosity. He has worked with many artists including Mark Padmore and the Britten Sinfonia, JACK Quartet, The Hermes Experiment, CHROMA Ensemble, Tabea Debus, Charlotte Barbour-Condini, and Ensemble Garage. He won the 2020 Luigi Nono Composition Prize.
As a curator, his practice bridges concert and research contexts. His concert curation ranges from scenographic and thematic concerts with Stomping Ground (In the Room, Analogue Nostalgias, and Chasing Shadows) and his co-directorship of the Guildhall New Music Society, which produced 14 concerts in 3 years using DIY, punk, and queer frameworks to claim performance spaces for devised works. With NMS, he coordinated the orchestra for LCMF's performance on Luigi Russolo's Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners at the Wigmore Hall. His research-led curation focuses on practice-based inquiry, co-directing the Guildhall Researchworks seminar series for two years and co-curating PGR symposia such as Play, Practice Laboratories, and Marginalia. He is currently curating Small Talk, a series of spoken word/practice-research events with Small Room Arts. As a producer, he has brought music, dance, opera and devised theatre works to the Tête-a-Tête Opera Festival; Resolutions Festival at The Place, London; and Oslo Fringe.
His PhD research, Smelly Music, explores how olfaction shapes listening and incorporates compositional/curatorial practice, scent-making, audience research, semantic analyses, and conceptual metaphor theory. His Masters thesis, Quiet Music, explored intimate, unstructured, and non-teleological listenings. He is a PhD candidate at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and holds degrees from the Royal Academy of Music, London (M.Mus) and Temple University (B.Mus.).
Goi Ywei Chern
Composer, On Destruction and Death in Ancient Times, Singha, OVERLOAD
Guitar, Confluences
Goi Ywei Chern (b. 1996) is a Singaporean composer and guitarist currently based in London. He is undertaking a DMus (Composition Route) in the Guildhall School of Music and Drama under the supervision of Professors Richard Baker, Matt Kaner, and Julian Anderson.
In 2025, his opera Medusa, composed with a libretto by Jess McNulty, was premiered in the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London.
Goi has taken part in numerous performances and competitions, winning the 11th International Antonin Dvorak Composition Competition (Senior Category) in 2023 and the Leong Yoon Pin Composition Competition in 2016. His compositions have been performed in Singapore, London, Leeds, Bangkok, and Ayrshire.
He previously studied in the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA) School of Music, receiving his Diploma in Music Performance in 2016 and NAFA-RCM Undergraduate degree (funded by the OCBC Local Undergraduate Scholarship) in 2019, and the Royal College of Music, where he achieved a Distinction in the Master of Music in Composition degree . He has studied the guitar under Manuel Cabrera II and Hunter Mah and composition under Dr Zechariah Goh, Professor Kenneth Hesketh, and Professor Alison Kay.
Goi participated in MusicFest Aberystwyth in 2019, and he was selected as one of eight composers to participate in The Cumnock Tryst International Summer-School for Composers 2024 under the guidance of Sir James MacMillan and Oscar Bettison, where his piece Charybdis for contrabass clarinet and string trio was performed on the Dumfries House estate. Also in 2024, his song, Letter from Heaven, composed for the Composers & Poets Forum Showcase: A Leeds Songbook in collaboration with poet Yvonne Ugarte, who wrote the lyrics, was performed in the Leeds Lieder Festival.
More information at www.goiyweichern.com.
Efe Yüksel
Composer, Resistances, Confluences
Efe Yüksel (1999) is a composer, electronic musician, and melodica performer from İzmir (Turkey), based in London. He is currently undertaking doctoral studies in the Guildhall School if Music, supervised by Julian Anderson and Aaron Einbond, looking into the structural organisation of inharmonic sonorities and formulating a personal theory of working with noise. His work involves exploring the physical capabilities of instruments and voices via close collaborations and the use of live electronic processing. Alongside composing he is also active as a melodica performer, with a particular focus on the bass melodica, writing and commissioning new works for the instrument.
Pernille Faye
Composer, Penumbra
Pernille is a Norwegian/Irish composer based in London whose work explores a diverse range of musical styles, often inspired by the vivid landscapes of rural Norway and other natural images. She has previously drawn upon the vocal traditions of the Sami as inspiration for her cello solo, Shadows and experimented with the natural music of gibbon song alongside ‘human’ music in her piece Rhapsody for Gibbons, a collaborative project with Monkey World Ape Rescue Centre.
The winner of the GCNA Franco Proposal Contest, her two pieces for solo carillon (Moonglades) were premiered at the GCNA’s annual congress in Massachusetts and subsequently toured by Joey Brink. Pernille’s other notable prizes include the British Double Reed Society Composition Competition Under-19 Prize for which she wrote a cor anglais solo (Embers) for Henry Clay, and an Honourable Mention in the Composers Concordance Annual Composition Competition for her jazz sextet Responsibility. She was a three time Martin Read Foundation Young Composer, receiving commissions for their Festival of Contemporary Music and has since returned for a performance of her piece Roots: Carrot Music. Recent works include her low string trio Penumbra, commissioned for the Budleigh Salterton Music Festival which has since received its Finnish premiere at the Sinetän Musiikkijuhlat, and “Smiling Doesn’t Win You Gold Medals” which was performed at Dumfries House by members of The Cumnock Tryst Ensemble.
Pernille recently graduated from the Royal Academy of Music where she studied under scholarship with Helen Grime and is now pursuing a Master of Composition (Guildhall Artist) at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, studying with Dr Sylvia Lim as a Guildhall Scholar. She is a former pupil of Morgan Hayes and Dr Pande Shahov and has worked with James MacMillan and Oscar Bettison at the first Cumnock Tryst Summer School.
Soloists and Conductors
Mezzo-Soprano - Eva Stone-Barney
Saxophone - Lydia Kenny
Guitar - Goi Ywei Chern
Alto Flute - Lara Ali
Conductor - Jacob Cavendish (On Destruction and Death in Ancient Times)
Conductor - Jon Paul Mayse (Singha, OVERLOAD, Confluences)
Ensemble
Flute - Jess McNulty
Clarinet - Birce Kayhan
Bassoon - John Pope
Piano - Efe Yüksel
Violin - Argyro Meleniou
Viola - Rebekah Dickinson
Cello - Kim Ji Hong
Double Bass - Aaron Aguayo
Rehearsal Pianist - Emanuel Samant-Crampton
Concert poster made by Tianjing Zhu