Since its invention, the orchestra has been used as a metaphor for smaller entities that work together to produce a greater whole—for civil society, the army, the human body, nature, and machines. I wanted to update these metaphors for the twenty-first century when I wrote my last orchestral piece, Hive Mind, in 2015, so I devised a survey in which the orchestra made suggestions such as the brain, a giant jigsaw, a multi-layered conversation, and a railway terminal, and the European Union. The last of these suggestions now seems hopelessly quixotic after the Brexit vote, the Trump presidency, and the rise of the alt-right in America and populist movements across Europe. All Against All is the evil twin of Hive Mind; a Mr Hyde to the latter’s Dr Jekyll. The title is derived from the seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s famous description of human existence in the state of nature as

… that condition which is called War; and such a war as is of every man against every man. […] In such condition there is no place for Industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continual Fear, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. (Leviathan, Chapter XIII)

In All Against All, instruments are pitted against each other: in a nod to the title of Hobbes’s masterwork, the heart of the piece depicts the stately battle between two sea monsters (the heavy brass vs the celli-bass); the war is waged on multiple levels: at first between families of instruments, and then among instrumental families, and then, finally, all against all.

I am fascinated by the centuries-long tradition of using the orchestra as a metaphor—for heavenly choirs, civil society, the army, the human body, nature, machines—so I wanted the input of the Kensington Symphony Orchestra to update the metaphor of the orchestra for the twenty-first century; to this end, I devised a survey where the players suggested modern metaphors for the orchestra, which included the brain, a giant jigsaw, a multi-layered conversation, the European Union, and a railway terminal. Most of the suggestions, however, chimed with my own idea for an orchestral metaphor, of a collective intelligence or a unified consciousness, a Hive Mind.

I wanted to convey this idea of swarm intelligence by giving the music the appearance of a natural emergent process. An emergent process is that by which larger patterns arise through interactions among smaller and simpler entities. Think of an elaborate ant-hill ‘cathedral’, or the regular patterns of the Giant’s Causeway, or the ripples of sand on a beach—all examples of emergent structure in nature. Thus, the music consists of individual repeated melodic cells that are interwoven to create a larger pattern. No larger pattern, however, repeats exactly; in each of the piece’s three sections the repeated interactions of the smaller parts always combine to progress from chaos to order.

Hive Mind opens with iridescent waves of sound, that gently break over each other, which eventually coalesce. Momentum builds until the swarm breaks into an off-kilter dance. Malcontents rebel against the hive, and struggle against its constrictions but are soon subsumed back into the hive mind.The delicate flute solo that begins Debussy’s L’après-midi d’un faune is co-opted into the role of an alarm call that summons the hive to swarm once more.