I borrowed the title of this work from a design by the architect Zaha Hadid, made for The Hague Housing Festival in 1991. Her “spiral house” is essentially a two-part structure: the core of the building is a spiral-shaped, concrete floor plate which flows upwards from the entrance on the ground to form upper levels as it completes each circuit. Surrounding the floor plate is a glass cube, which makes the four walls of the house. The glass changes from opaque at ground level through translucent in the middle, to transparent at the top.
Concertos are also two-part structures: solo and tutti. In my work, the glass cube is the tutti, a block of grinding ostinatos and mechanisms in the orchestra. At the top of Zaha Hadid’s house, where the glass is transparent, all four walls can be seen at the same time, and at moments in my concerto you can hear up to eight different mechanisms pulling and pushing against each other.
The solo trumpet (and its accompanying group of orchestral trumpets, oboes and clarinet) is like the concrete floor plate, spiralling up between the glass walls of the orchestra and being reflected in their surfaces.
Spiral House was commissioned by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and premiered on 4 March 2006 by the BBC SSO at Glasgow City Hall, conducted by Zsolt Nagy, with trumpet soloist Mark O’Keeffe.