The Man who Painted his House, a short film I wrote the music for, is having its first public screenings this month and next. Its subject is Victorian art-workman David Parr, who worked for Cambridge firm Leach & Sons, who realised interiors for the likes of William Morris. In his spare time, Parr decorated his modest terraced house in the same Arts & Crafts style of the much grander and larger interiors he worked on for a living. He painted intricate and elaborate patterns directly onto the wall (that’s not wallpaper!), working long into the night – often by candlelight – over a period of more than 40 years. The house was preserved by the next generations of Parr’s family, but its inner treasures were brought to public attention only after having been discovered by chance in 2009. The house is now a Grade 2* listed building, with an arts centre next door offering guided tours. The film tells the house’s story, along with that of Parr and the ‘art-workman’ in the late 19th / early 20th century, using archive documents, readings from Parr’s notebooks and William Morris’s writings, and footage from the house and All Saints (“The Painted Church”), one of the significant projects Parr worked on. The film has no dialogue, and relatively few voice-overs, so the music plays a prominent role.

The film was made in collaboration with the Derek Jarman Lab and Birkbeck, University of London. It was researched and produced by Dr Victoria Mills, and directed by Lily Ford. I wrote the score for viola and piano, and recorded it with violist Rosalind Ventris.

When I visited the house, a sign bearing the words, “There is room for fresh creations,” stood like a beacon in the garden. This sculpture, by Adam Bridgland, was commissioned by David Parr House in 2024. The words are taken from a text Parr painted onto one of his walls, and they encapsulate much of what the House is about today. A museum and testament to Parr’s work, but also a centre that inspires and facilitates new creative work. This ideal, together with the playful and intriguing style of Lily’s filmmaking – which complements the unusualness (eccentricity, perhaps) we discover in Parr’s work within his own home – shaped my approach to the project. During our initial conversations I asked Vicky and Lily why not use either existing recordings (music by Vaughan Williams for example), or ‘library’ music (generic pre-recorded music available to licence), but it became clear that they wanted the film to be something more surprising, unusual and bespoke – like Parr’s house itself – than these solutions would have allowed. They also wanted to avoid a straightforward documentary-type feel.

There were many things I loved about the film’s subject that I wanted to pick up on in the score. Inspired by William Morris’s influence on Parr, I took elements of the music by composers I would associate with the Arts & Crafts movement as a starting point. RVW and Gustav Holst were my primary reference points, but I also thought of Rebecca Clarke and Michael Tippett: all of these re-embraced folk music and worked with it in new, distinctive ways. The concepts of layering and time – spanning the late nineteenth and the twentieth century to today – are also important within the film, and in fact the film contains numerous contemporary shots such as the rooms being ‘dressed’ for the film and visitors exploring the house. As such, I tried to use the music to orient the film as a view from today of the house and Parr’s work, by refracting those old musical languages through a more contemporary lens. The score reflects on its own material, echoing the sense of endurance, ageing and – in places – nostalgia we might feel from the house.

Patterning is of course central to Parr’s decorative style, but the fact that his patterns are painted by hand makes them susceptible to variation (whether deliberate or happy accident): I tried to recreate this musically, through patterns that never quite settle into precise repetition. These patterns, and their occasionally unpredictable ruggedness, also helped me convey the way the walls of Parr’s house strive to bring the natural world inside.

There is an interesting tension between the grand opulence of this decorative style and the modest domesticity of the setting, which I hope the music helps the film suggest; it is difficult to sense this through the visuals alone (a true sense of the scale and perspective comes only from visiting the house), but I tried in the music to give a sense of the constant close proximity of the patterns inside those small rooms. Different patterns are juxtaposed in many of the projects Parr worked on, and so I also had fun experimenting with superimposing musical patterns on one another.

The crafting and grafting that goes into creating that beautiful decoration was another feature I felt the music should encourage the viewer to think about, since we have no footage of Parr at work. As such, there are places in which we hear the mechanics of the viola, or where the music implies the effort and mess involved in the process of decorating. The obsessive persistence of Parr’s work ethic seems to me the other side of the coin to his noble ambition and love of aesthetic beauty: his days must have been as densely packed as the patterns on his walls.

I wrote for piano and viola because there is a piano at the Parr House and this seemed to give a legitimacy to its use on the soundtrack. I would have loved to have recorded on that specific piano but sadly it was not in too temperamental a condition. The alto-voiced viola – rarely in the spotlight ordinarily, but capable of deep, complex expression on its own given the chance – felt appropriate to the often-overlooked nature of the art-workman profession. This chamber, parlour style combination also matches the small scale of the house.

Above all I tried to capture the sense of charm and wonder that those walls instilled in me when I visited the house, and the sheer love, aspiration and highest-level craftsmanship that went into decorating them.

The film previewed as part of Cambridge Festival on 2nd April. It will be screened at Birkbeck Cinema on 7th May, and in a special event with the music performed live – for which I will be joined by violist Kinga Wojdalska – at All Saints church on 20th May.