The first of a mini series of interviews with nominees for this year’s Ivors Classical Awards
Who or what are the most significant influences on your musical life and career as a composer?
A few people come to mind, all marking different stages of my upbringing and my experiences with music until now.
My sister, Lily – Our relationship when we were younger revolved around discovering and enthusing over bands together. When I was in my early teens, my excitement about live music and sharing a moment with other fans at gigs grew out of our shared love of seeing bands together like Bombay Bicycle Club, Foals and the Maccabees
My band-mates in a indie pop 5-piece, while I was at secondary school – our tragic name was ‘The IDEA’
Emily Segal, who was my A-level music teacher, and predominantly served as my way into classical music. She encouraged me to consider composition as a path.
My dear friend, Paddy Shand – In my late teens / early 20s, they were central to fuelling a voracious desire to discover and share strange and wonderful art, whether it was music, film or visual art (all of which were totally new and mind-expanding to me).
Charlie Kaufman, Céline Sciamma and David Lynch are all filmmakers / artists whose work I feel that I’ve absorbed in a deep way. I might not always be aware of it right away but when I look back at some of my pieces, I start to see how I’ve sieved some of these filmmakers’ influence through my own aesthetic lens.
David Fennessy, who taught me composition for 4 years in Glasgow. Can’t begin to go into the myriad ways that his teaching and his music have impacted me positively and influenced how I think about music.
Since moving to Denmark, my fellow ensemble members in Current Resonance (Joss Smith, Michael Hope and Dylan Richards) have pushed me in new directions both as a composer and as an organiser, performer and curator.
Arbitrarily, I decided to pick the first 30 artists / composers who come to mind now, whose work has been really important to me over the years: tUnE-yArDs, Joanna Bailie, Andrew Hamilton, Jennifer Walshe, Jessie Marino, Niels Rønsholdt, Juliana Hodkinson, Simon Steen-Andersen, The Beatles, Laurence Crane, Matthew Shlomowitz, The Books, Trond Reinholdtsen, Hannes Seidl, Julia Holter, Wes Montgomery, Dutch Uncles, Lawrence Dunn, Deerhoof, DRINKS, Peter Ablinger, Gerald Barry, Heiner Goebbels, György Ligeti, Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, Everything Everything, KNOWER, Aphex Twin, Harry Gorski-Brown
What have been the greatest challenges of your career so far?
Seems a bit absurd to answer this as I feel like I’m at the beginning of my career, but it has been challenging when I’ve had prolonged periods where I’ve felt unable to work on music due to difficulties in my personal life, whether that’s dealing with grief, poor mental or physical health, or any other big life adjustments. For the most part, my relationship with music is pretty cushty at the moment, and I’m really enjoying making things both on my own and with friends.
What are the special challenges/pleasures of working on a commissioned piece?
I think I feel particularly challenged working on pieces that have very specific briefs, whether that’s setting a certain text, responding to pre-existing music or dealing with odd restrictions related to instrumental forces or technical setups. I often feel resistant to prescriptive briefs, but I’ve come out of a few processes feeling really grateful that I’ve pushed through an initial reticence to accept making music for these contexts. Extremely banal to say, but the limitations that are put in place in these cases do force one to think creatively and to find interesting solutions.
What are the special challenges/pleasures of working with particular musicians, singers, ensembles or orchestras?
My practice feels like it’s consistently becoming more and more about working with particular people and finding ways to include both their musical and everyday personalities in the work.
Although I’ve written a small number of orchestral pieces, I feel most stimulated when working in smaller chamber settings or with soloists where you can really get to know the musicians you’re working with, how they sound, their performative idiosyncrasies and how their personalities outside of the concert hall can bleed into their performing lives and vice-versa.
Of which works are you most proud?
Right now, it’s easiest for me to think of the pieces that felt truly collaborative, such as Left Right, Left Right, which I wrote with percussionist Sam Wilson for Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and Riot Ensemble back in 2020. There was something extremely rewarding about feeling that the stakes were equally as high for both of us and that we had a matching level of investment and trust in the process.
How would you characterise your compositional language?
I think what a sound symbolises is usually more interesting to me than the sound itself. I work with an inter-disciplinary approach to music, making work between music for instruments and voices; electronic sound; text; video; and performance. My work regularly engages with a re-contextualisation of everyday sounds, objects, and automatic, repetitive behaviours to reveal the latently musical in the banal.
Recent pieces have involved, amongst other things, documentary techniques; self-reflexivity; audience participation; repetition; custom-built, tactile electronic instruments; instrumentalised staging; and choreography.
How do you work?
Sometimes in my bedroom, with my laptop; paper and pencils; and an endless scrolling notes doc. I feel like I do a lot of the important parts of my composing when I’m in the room with my collaborators, having meetings, workshops or just experimenting and having fun. Like a lot of composers, I regularly take walks when I’m feeling myself falling into a creative rut. If I’m out somewhere quiet (like Assistens Kirkegaarden round the corner from where I live in Copenhagen), I often take out my phone and start recording voice memos of me singing little things or rambling about ideas.
As a musician, what is your definition of success?
It probably sounds very egotistical, but recently I’ve felt that it’s simply when I genuinely like the music I’m making.
What advice would you give to young/aspiring composers?
If you’re a bit scared of music theory / notation etc. like I was when I was about 17, and you’re just getting into composing, don’t let that dissuade you from giving it a go. There’s so many ways to make music, many of them in no way involving writing down dots (even if that is really great too!)
What do you feel needs to be done to grow classical music’s audiences?
Probably ditching some of its alienating affiliations with exclusionary, class-related mindsets, activities and structures.
What’s the one thing in the music industry we’re not talking about but you think we should be?
I honestly don’t know. I think a lot of important of discussions are currently being had whether that’s around diversity and representation; barriers to entry; AI; digital rights; or funding structures for non-commerical art etc. – Rather than suggesting that there’s something we’re not currently talking about, I’d just say it’s important that we collectively stay critical, attempt to galvanise each other when important discussions start to lull, and continue to group together and apply necessary attention and sometimes pressure where it’s needed, in order to enact positive change for our industry and further afield.
Tell us more about the work which has been nominated for an Ivors Classical Award this year?
Silberblau for solo guitar, electronics and light (nominated for Best Small Chamber Composition)
This work was commissioned as part of a series of new works that respond to the compositions of Franz Schubert. Sasha Savaloni’s PhD at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland investigated the transcription and performance of Schubert’s lieder and other vocal works, arranged for guitar. As part of this project, the piece I responded to was Grab und Mond (D893) for a cappella low voices.
In the fine art and visual art worlds, the notion of ‘indexicality’ has been explored significantly (a physical sign, within the field of semiotics, that doesn’t bear a resemblance to the object that is signified, but that has a sensory feature that POINTS TO the signified). In some ways, I see Silberblau a bit like an indexical trace of Schubert’s Grab und Mond (D893). Acoustic preparations to the guitar, processed audio of Schubert’s music transduced through an additional, ‘floating’ guitar, and synchronised lighting work together to disfigure the listener’s sense of Schubert’s original, whilst simultaneously invoking a new, ghostly aesthetic that I find to be reminiscent of the atmospheric essence encased within Grab und Mond and Johann Gabriel Seidl’s chilling poem of the same name (the text of which Schubert sets to music).
This year’s Ivors Classical Awards will be announced at a ceremony at the BFI London on 14 November
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