This weekend, Los Angeles will be finding itself in the midst of a William Marsey moment.
The British composer, who was recently awarded the Arts Foundation 2026 Fellowship for Music, will be in the city to attend the American premiere of his orchestral work, Man with Limp Wrist, which will be conducted by his colleague Thomas Adès. It was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2019, originally for a Green Umbrella program that would have showcased individual sections of the orchestra; Man with Limp Wrist was to have been scored for winds and brass only.
As Marsey explained in an interview yesterday, some of those roots are still apparent in the finished score.
Even now, [Man with Limp Wrist] still has a lot of moments where it’s just brass, or woodwinds; the scoring still seems more [like a wind] band. When it was premiered in 2023 [by the Hallé Orchestra], we heard how, because it had developed from an original wind commission, it came out as a huge chamber piece, that happened to be scored for orchestra. There are very few moments when everyone is playing. It has a strange orchestration as a result of that history.
The following year, before the score could be completed, its trajectory to Disney Hall was disrupted by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I wouldn’t quite call [Man with Limp Wrist] a reaction to the pandemic”, Marsey said, “but [...] there are possibly some lockdown-type things embedded in it”.
These dovetailed with longstanding personal practices that came about through Marsey’s schooling. Being educated as a classical composer, he noted, is often “about finding your own voice among musical ghosts”. An example of this is heard in Man with Limp Wrist through its use of a Bach chorale, which originated from Marsey’s use of older music in order to develop ideas for his own work.
“My practice was based a lot on taking old Bach chorales and seeing how much I could squish them to create something new, while retaining something of their original character,” he said. “I wanted to find a strange and uncanny balance between those two things”.
Marsey’s creativity is further enriched by his appreciation of the visual arts, which he said helps him to reframe his attitudes towards music and composition. Little surprise, then, that the work of the Pakistani-American artist Salman Toor, whose eponymous painting was the direct inspiration for Marsey’s score, resonated with the composer. Upon first encountering Toor’s art on Instagram, Marsey recalled that “it made something in [his] head click”, resulting in an immediate reappraisal about his role as a composer:
There’s something that struck me about Toor’s paintings, with its recreations of techniques from the old masters, and constructing something about his personal identity, making something new in a way that isn’t nostalgic. It’s a very forward way of looking at the past, which has been useful in my own work. As much as I do a lot of writing that takes older music as a starting point, I’m really only thinking about the future and now.
Marsey’s score is the first in a program bookended by Adès’ Aquifer, another score being heard in Los Angeles for the first time this weekend. When asked about his own emerging leading role in contemporary British music, Marsey responded with commitment to bringing wider attention not just to himself.
“We have a rich culture of new composition in Britain”, he said. “I guess I hope to fill in the picture a bit of what’s going on, because there’s a lot of unique things happening”.