Colin Broom's The Big Freeze is the 2023 McEwen commision and was premiered in the University Concert Hall on Thursday June 8th 2023 by Red Note Ensemble.
2023 McEwen recipient, composer Colin Broom
Listen to… the 2023 McEwen Commission - Colin Broom's The Big Freeze…
Programme note
Colin Broom - The Big Freeze
In researching for this piece, I was brought back to the phenomenon of Entropy: the tendency of all matter and energy to proceed towards a state of maximum dissolution and disorder. Since some of the musical material I was writing was concerned with the idea of dispersal, or of the gradual decay in intensity, it felt to me to be close to the concept of entropy.
'The Big Freeze' is a colloquial term for one of the predominant theories on how our universe might end: the so-called 'heat death of the universe'.* The idea being that over billions of years, long after we're gone, all matter and energy will continue via the process of entropy to disperse further and further apart until no further interaction between matter is possible, no new stars, no life, no new phenomena of any kind- just an infinitely slow descent of the cosmos into its final slumber.
The piece features at various points gradual decelerations in tempo, achieved in different ways at different times. Sometimesjust one or two instruments, sometimes the whole ensemble; sometimes all players slowing down all playing together, sometimes in a more disorderly manner. However unlike the actual so-called Big Freeze (if it turns out to be the correct theory as to the universe's demise), my The Big Freeze does feature some increases in intensity and energy, sometimes quite dramatically so. This brings to mind something else I read in relation to entropy: this time in Erwin Schrodinger's writing. He proposed that living systems and organisms had means of creating and maintaining order and to a degree staying the natural increase of entropy, by harnessing the energy from their environment. He called this Negative Entropy. I like to think that the creation and consumption of Art is in its own way an act of negative entropy.
* As an aside, it's interesting to note that a primary contributor to the heat death hypothesis was William Thomson, i.e. Lord Kelvin - a physicist with strong ties to the University.
Colin Broom 2023
Performer biographies & full details of the 2023 premiere can be found in the McEwen concert programme 2023.
Colin Broom
Colin Broom is a composer based in Scotland, UK. He studied Composition at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music & Drama. He was co-founder of amplified new music group Invention Ensemble, and co-director 1998–2003.
His PhD, received in 2016, was entitled An Investigation through Composition of the Relationship between stasis, Goal-direction &drama, and resulted in a number of new compositions, the largest of which was the multimedia work Pictures of an Electronic Life.
Colin has composed worked with various ensembles and musicians, including the Maxwell String Quartet, Orchestra of Opera North, Icebreaker, Hebrides Ensemble, Ensemble Thing. Edinburgh Quartet, Gamelan Naga Mas, Red Note, Tyrolean Ensemble for Contemporary Music and South Bank Gamelan.
His music has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3, Radio Scotland, BBC4, Radio Magnetic and Radio Icebreaker. Colin is Jazz Coordinator at the Roval Conservatoire of Scotland, and is a Tutor in
Composition and lecturer in the School of Music.