Alex Groves: DANCE SUITE

When pianist and technologist Zubin Kanga got in touch a couple of years back to commission a new piece from me, I was at an interesting junction in my career. I’d recently finished an MA, which I’d started over a decade after my undergrad, and the extra time and space it had given me felt like a kind of mini sabbatical. That chance to step outside of my usual routine and see how all the different parts of what I do fit together brought about a shift in my thinking and a change to my compositional practice. 

During my MA, I started to realise something. I was siloing different parts of my musical experiences in a way that was cutting off certain creative avenues. My training has always been routed in classical music, but my listening habits range far and wide. I’m just as likely to be walking down the street listening to Debussy as I am to Lorde, Julia Wolfe or SOPHIE, John Luther Adams or Charli XCX, but I was only reaching for the classical music when I was seeking inspiration or guidance. It occurred to me that if all of these composers are part of my sonic life, they should all be part of my creative life too. 

This commission then, with its use of the ROLI Seaboard (a hyper expressive MIDI keyboard) and live electronics, was the perfect place to test it out. To do that though, I wanted to swing the dial all the way over and see what it was like to make a set of house, techno and hyperpop inspired dance tracks for the concert hall. Deliberately creating a clash of context and content, and bringing a completely different energy to a space that I feel could do with a bit of livening up.

As I started exploring ideas for the piece, I decided I wanted to create a multi-movement work so that it felt like a cohesive EP of tracks. That wasn’t something I’d done before so I started looking for models from which to work. The idea of a Baroque suite for the 21st century emerged one day and I knew that was the one. These suites are based on dance forms - allemandes, gigues, sarabandes and courantes - and, at the time they were written, would have been recognisable as such.

Nowadays we don’t have a physical connection to these dances. They’ve become almost crystallised as musical ideas over time, losing the physical relationship people had with them and becoming something to stimulate the mind instead. It also dawned on me that so much of classical music is dance music - waltzes, polkas, the list goes on - and yet we listen to them almost exclusively seated in a concert hall, unable to move to the music and connect with it through our bodies. 

So DANCE SUITE was born. Four tracks each with a little side eye back to an original baroque dance and each inspired by the heady mix of emotions I’d felt on the dance floors of queer clubs around the world. There’s lust, longing and loathing, flirting, f***ing and fighting, but above all there’s a desire to move the mind AND the body, and to reconnect classical music with the dancing that has always flowed through it. 

Alex Groves, August 2025 

New Music Biennial 2025 - PRS Foundation and Southbank Centre's new music festival in partnership with Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture,  BBC Radio 3 and NMC Recordings. 

New Music Biennial 2025 will be released on Friday 29 August on NMC Recordings. You can buy the full album here: https://nmc-recordings.myshopify.com/products/new-music-biennial-2025