Barrett and Harvey at Huddersfield Festival

Inspired by artefacts found on ancient archeological sites, Richard Barrett’s Mesopotamia has a dense, multi-layered structure that imitates the successive destruction and re-building of communities throughout history.

Scored for 17 instruments and electronics the piece forms the fifth part of a series of compositions collectively entitled resistance & vision. It consists of 11 sections or ‘successive layers’ each of which retains some kind of trace of the preceding ones. As the ‘history’ of the musical materials accumulates through the piece, the boundaries between successive sections, which at the opening are as clear as separate ‘movements’, become blurred and overlapped so that the ninth and tenth take place simultaneously.

Mesopotamia has been commissioned by the London Sinfonietta with generous support from the London Sinfonietta Commissioning Circle..

Jonathan Harvey’s Bhakti is a reflective, spiritual exploration of Sanskrit hymns, some of the world’s oldest religious texts.

UPDATE- Richard Barrett's Mesopotamia will be broadcast LIVE on Hear and Now on BBC Radio 3 on Saturday 28 November at 10:30pm.