….with piano
VORTEX
Stephen Altoft donald bousted double bell trumpet
Richard Whalley piano
A Microtonal Projects young composers’ Initiative with support from the Donald Bousted Edition.
New compositions by young composers performed alongside existing contemporary works. The new works will form part of the Donald Bousted double bell trumpet Album to be published later in book form.
The project takes place over an academic year, in three stages: beginning with online sessions on the double bell trumpet, followed by in-person workshops with the duo from VORTEX , before being brought to completion by rehearsals and a recorded concert.
The first edition of this project will take place with postgraduate/ graduate composers who have recently completed, or are about to compete their studies at Manchester University: Scarlett Henderson, Adnan Marafi and Malachy McCormick.
Composer BIographies
Scarlett Henderson is a composer and sound designer based in London. She is currently studying a master’s degree in Composition at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama with a Vaughan Williams Scholarship. She is interested in experimental, microtonal, and granular forms of composition, both instrumental and electronic. Her recent electroacoustic work Voice/Break was selected to represent British EA music at the CIME AGM, and she won the 2025 Max Brand Composition Award Special Prize for her graphic score CURFEW for instrumental ensemble and live electronics.
Malachy McCormick is an instrumental composer based in Manchester. Malachy’s pieces are built off of close collaboration with performers and focus on timbral exploration, often with an emphasis on driving rhythms and irregular metres. His style is fluid and open, varying in accordance with the subject matter he is exploring. Typically inspired by natural phenomena, he draws from a mix of scientific literature and anecdotal accounts to piece together unique interpretations. He will often use colour as an abstract blueprint for musical material, be it a soft shifting hue or a violent kaleidoscope.
Adnan Marafi (b. 18th April, 1994) is a Kuwaiti composer whose work encompasses acoustic music for solo instruments, voice, chamber ensembles, and orchestra. Drawing on his Kuwaiti and Arabian Gulf heritage, he explores how traditional music can be transformed and recontextualised within the concert setting.
Recent performances include Dreamscape for solo piano, and Al-Hudhud (“The Hoopoe”) for orchestra, performed by the MUMS Orchestra. His string quartet Sukoun (“To be still, to be at rest”) was recorded in Poland by the Messages Quartet.
Marafi graduated from the College of Basic Education in Kuwait in 2017. Initially a self-taught composer until his Master’s studies, his musical background began with the guitar, followed by the cello and piano. In 2020, a concert at Kuwait’s Academy of Arts and Media for Youth was devoted to two of his compositions. He subsequently received a scholarship from the Public Authority for Applied Education and Training (PAAET) to pursue further studies in composition.
He completed a Master of Music in Composition at the University of Manchester in 2022 and attended the 24th Summer Academy of Music in Kraków that summer. He also attended the Synthetis Summer Course in 2023, lead by composer Zygmunt Krauze. He has recently submitted his PhD in Composition at Manchester, examining the recontextualisation and transformation of music from Kuwait and the Arabian Gulf.
VORTEX
Originally coined as ’The Vortex Ensemble’ by Donald Bousted, the founder of Microtonal Projects, VORTEX arose out of an ad hoc pool of musicians performing both composed and improvised microtonal music as part of Microtonal Projects’ events at The Vortex Jazz Club, UKMicroFest, Colourscape Festival and the Tate Britain Late@Tate ‘Microtonal’ event co-curated by Donald Bousted and Stephen Altoft.
The ensemble was reformed in 2025 during the Hyperchromatic Festival, and also includes the accordion player, Lore Amenabar Larrañaga and composer/ singer, Sarah Keirle-Dos Santos. Alongside duo projects, they perform the cross-genre performance, ‘Inside Lud’s Church’ and ‘Listening with trees’ with Improvisor/ composer, Henry McPherson.
Performer Biographies
Stephen Altoft is dedicated to the creation of new repertoire for the trumpet. As a solo artist, and with percussionist Lee Ferguson as duo Contour, he has given concerts throughout Asia, Europe, the United States and Canada. For over twenty years he researched the microtonal possibilities of the trumpet with composer, Donald Bousted, and at Musik Gillhaus (Freiburg, Germany) has developed a fourth (rotary) valve mechanism to enable the conversion of his existing trumpets into microtonal instruments (a 19-division B flat trumpet and quarter-tone C trumpet). More recently, he has also been developing programmes for trumpets and flugelhorns in 12-, 19-, 24- and 38-divisions of the octave in an harmonic environment, including new projects with the microtonal and improvisation ensemble, VORTEX.
The scope of Stephen’s work as an improviser began with the experimental (new music) and now includes what has been referred to as ‘intuitive music’: being open to a variety of styles, sounds and spontaneous influences. He currently has projects with the accordionist, Karin Fleck, the double bassist, Johannes Nied (FLOWduo, microtonal music) and the guitarist/ lutenist and composer, Gilbert Isbin. The scope of Stephen’s work as an improviser began with the experimental (new music) and now includes what has been referred to as ‘intuitive music’: being open to a variety of styles, sounds and spontaneous influences. He currently has projects with the accordionist, Karin Fleck, the double bassist, Johannes Nied (FLOWduo, microtonal music) and the guitarist/ lutenist and composer, Gilbert Isbin. His work with Isbin include the Soundscapes, and Rencounter and Echoes albums, which have been released on YouTube, and also on Bandcamp by the Belgian label, Jazz’halo.
Stephen is Artistic Director of Microtonal Projects and teaches trumpet and improvisation at the music school in Waldkirch, near to Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany.
Richard Whalley is a composer and pianist living in Manchester, where he is a Senior Lecturer in Composition at the University of Manchester. His compositions often take their inspiration from close observation of nature, using fine gradations of timbre and tuning in the process of depicting textures and painting portraits of specific places. Many of his works are microtonal, or incorporate microtones in some way. As a pianist his practice includes performances of classical and contemporary music as a soloist and ensemble player, and he has given numerous premieres. Recent performances have also included improvisation and playing the lumatone.
As a pianist he has built a wide-ranging repertoire extending from Bach and Beethoven to George Crumb, Helmut Lachenmann and Judith Weir. He has premiered numerous new works by composers including himself, Chiu-Yu Chou, Tom Coult, Chia-Ying Lin, Kevin Malone, Maria Palapanidou, Adnan Marafi, Camden Reeves and Peter Swinnen. An important part of his identity as a performer is long-term collaborations with musicians including Helen Tonge (violin), Eric Robberecht (violin), Dimitra Ananiadou (violin) and the Quatuor Danel, indeed most of his piano performance tends to be chamber music. In 2024/25 he recorded with violinist Dimitra Ananiadou three Beethoven violin sonatas: op.23, op.30 no.2 and op.47 (the ‘Kreutzer’). Between 2010 and 2019, whilst teaching composition at the Aram-Poitou summer school in France, he performed regularly as a chamber musician in the Concerts en nos Villages series. Recent performances have also included improvisation and playing the lumatone. His piano teachers were Kate Elmitt whilst growing up in Hertfordshire, Karen Evans whilst a student at the University of York and Stephen Drury during his PhD at Harvard.