Sounds from the desert

During New Year’s Eve fireworks at Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, British composer Joanna Marsh watched in “open-mouthed awe”. Soon after taking up residence in the Gulf emirate in 2007, she had written The Tower, a choral work for the BBC Singers that likened Dubai’s soaring needle to the hubristic Tower of Babel. Yet when…