Amber Alchemy was commissioned by Nomura Holdings in celebration of its 100th anniversary. Written for the London Symphony Orchestra and Sir Antonio Pappano, the work is premiered in Japan, followed by further performances in London.
The starting point was unexpectedly concrete: discovering Nomura’s rooftop beekeeping at its London office. A beehive is an astonishing society—hyper-organised yet organic, built from thousands of small, precise actions. Individual gestures accumulate into something larger than any single bee: a living architecture, a shared intelligence, a system of labour, communication, memory, and care.
The word “alchemy” suggests transformation—value changing form, circulating, and becoming something newly usable. That idea connects the hive to the city: nectar becomes honey; wax becomes structure; foraging becomes nourishment; movement becomes meaning. In a different register, value also transforms and circulates through human systems—through exchange, trust, risk, time, and collective belief.
In the music, I wanted to evoke these processes rather than illustrate them. Although the material remains fundamentally melodic and lyrical, it is often set in motion as a community of voices: busy individual lines, each with its own contour and direction, interweaving and clustering into a larger social body. The piece moves between close-up detail and wider perspective—flickering activity, clustered motion, sudden coordination—and moments where the texture aligns into a single organism, creating a harmonious world.
Dai Fujikura