James Wood is an English percussionist, composer and conductor; he is also a musicologist and instrument designer.

Tongues of Fire is a large-scale work for choir and percussion quartet that weaves together an extraordinary range of cultural forms and ideas, from Latin-American Spanish to the works of Hildegard of Bingen, in order to mystically evoke New Testament descriptions of Pentecost. Wood’s expertise in percussion is evident in the musical representation of tongues of fire and rushing wind, in addition to the symbolic import of choral parts in eight different languages. 

By contrast, Cloud-Polyphonies is a three-part percussion work exploring the movement of natural entities – starlings, clouds and buffalo – an unlikely triumvirate at first glance, but a combination that works spectacularly. Starlings evokes the “extraordinary aerobatic displays” made by these birds before migration using marimbas and woodblocks, and 66 drums conjure the thumping of buffalo hooves on changing earthen terrain. The textures created by Wood and brought to fruition by the Yale Percussion Group are mesmerising and hypnotic, and complemented by a spacious, reverberant acoustic in which the many overtones and subtleties created by the instruments are gloriously evident.