Dwawar (“dwah-wahr”, roughly translated as “spinnings” or “revolutions”) is a work that circles around familiar and sentimental sounds with a subtle, personal resonance.

Rooted in a recent obsession with using found sounds or existing music as a starting point for a new piece - from weathered records to recordings of unpolished performances - here I draw on what have so deeply shaped the way I listen and write music from early on: amateur church choirs, scratch orchestras, guitars, bells, hymns, all carrying a sense of intimacy.

More broadly, these are also inherited sounds, passed down through generations and museum-like in that, although routinely made live, they also belong to the past. They carry a soft personal hüzün (in Orhan Pamuk’s sense): a quiet, shared melancholy bound up with memory, decay, and persistence, a way of finding beauty not despite agedness, but through it. These sounds and music never stayed with me as fixed notes or harmonies, but as music-performed, shaped by imperfection and my own inflections over time. They sit somewhere between remembering and (re)inventing.

In Dwawar, that in-between quality is set in a repeatedly unfolding motion, spinning and blurring like a turntable alongside live music. It’s closer to sitting in a salon or a living room, at the piano, playing along with the radio or a half-remembered tune. It isn’t an act of restoration but of playful, affectionate recasting and animation for one’s own amusement.

The recordings I worked with for this piece date from the early 1930s and form part of Andrew Alamango Collection Malta’s Lost Voices (courtesy of Filfla Records), the oldest surviving compendium of music recordings from my native country. Recently rediscovered, these fragile tracks are being archived by the Magna Żmien Foundation (www.magnazmien.com), and the excerpts used here have not yet been republished.

This work was written for the London Symphony Orchestra between November and December 2025 and early January 2026. It was premiered at LSO St Luke’s, London, on Saturday 21 February 2026 by David Alberman (violin), Chihiro Ono (viola), Colin Alexander (violoncello) and Mark Knopp (piano).

The premiere formed part of a programme curated by the composer around the theme of ħsejjes iduru, iduru (“sounds spinning, spinning”), alongside works by Daniele Ghisi, David Fennessy, Liza Lim, Julia Wolfe, Cassandra Miller and Clarence Barlow.

With heartfelt thanks to Joyce Lam, Joanna Bailie and Chris Rogers, the musicians and the tech team at LSO St Luke’s, as well as Andrew Alamango and Magna Żmien Foundation.

Alongside materials from Malta's Lost Voices collection, the tape part includes some field recordings and music recordings made by the musicians of the premiere performance.

Photography by Mikiel Farrugia, from the Giovanni Bonello Collection. “A picnic in 1920s Comino, with musical accompaniment.”