First Person
Edward Gardner
“If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.”“What is best in music is not to be found in the notes.”With these two quotations from Mahler, I already feel like putting my pen down. I had intended to write about my approach to the upcoming performance of his Second Symphony with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, but the more I thought about words, the more reductive my thoughts became.Journalists trying to unlock Claudio Abbado’s genius in interviews on Mahler were met a smile, nod, and just “schöne Musik”, “beautiful music”. As ever Read more ...
Carol Williams
I have always had a fascination with concert programmes. I did my Doctorate thesis on this subject. I remember vividly as a youngster attending many uninteresting programmes and thinking “there has to be more exciting, exhilarating, interesting music for the concert goer!” What type of repertoire makes audiences come back to solo organ concerts?The varied repertoire kept me alive and my studies at the Royal Academy of Music with David Sanger were priceless. I came from a musical family - Dad had an amazing ability to play the theatre organ, Mum the piano and Aunt Olwen played organ in church Read more ...
First Person: mezzo Stephanie Wake-Edwards on open dialogue and shared goals in the new show 'FEAST'
Stephanie Wake-Edwards
“Do you actually speak like that?” was the first thing a senior colleague said to me during my initial week at a prestigious UK opera house. I’ve always had a tricky time understanding who I really am.As a culture, we are obsessed with class. By fitting criteria, ordering ourselves, relating to a prescribed list, we find our place in the world, supposedly. I would hear people talking about it as a kid and think “what the hell does it all mean?”. Working, middle, upper middle, upper, new money, “oh they have cultural capital but not necessarily economic”. It all felt very confusing, but Read more ...
Marc Burrows
In a very real sense, Terry Pratchett taught me how to write. I first came across his work when I was 12 years old, in the early 90s.My parents had been given copies of two of the earliest books in his Discworld series, Guards! Guards! and The Colour of Magic, by a bloke down the pub – which is how you’re supposed to get Discworld books – and, knowing that I was an utter nerd with a preposterously overactive imagination and a love of silly humour, passed them down to me.I loved them from the word go, and not just because there’s (unusually for Pratchett) swearing in the opening pages of both Read more ...
Elgan Llŷr Thomas
“No one makes money from CDs anymore”; “Remember, once it’s out there it’s out there forever”; “Everyone’s making recordings these days, it’s a very cluttered market”; “You’ll struggle to make a mark…”These are just some of the things uttered to me when I first told people I was thinking of recording a new album. Are these statements untrue? Not entirely, but neither were they reasons enough to stop me from embarking on what has been an extraordinary voyage of self-discovery.The last few years have been a difficult time for musicians, but they also gave me a lot of space to ruminate. I Read more ...
Lukas Ligeti
The music of various African regions and cultures has played a significant role in shaping my own music. My exposure to African traditional music, which started not long after I began my own composition studies, helped me develop my unique artistic voice as a composer, and I owe this influence in part to my father and, indirectly, to his composition class in Hamburg.After graduating high school in 1983, I discovered a passion for music that I had never explored before. Despite never studying with my father, I did attend his composition class a few times over the years, including a final visit Read more ...
Tom Fowler
Recently, having just shared the rehearsal draft of my current Royal Court play Hope has a Happy Meal with two close friends, I found myself slightly offended when one of them said, "you can tell you were playing the Nintendo Switch obsessively when writing this." They then proceeded to talk about the play and its structure in video game terms. The plot of my play [favourably reviewed last week on theartsdesk] revolves around a woman called Hope returning to the People’s Republic of Coca Cola to find the family she left behind 24 years ago. As my friend (rightly) pointed out, the play Read more ...
Isata Kanneh-Mason
My entire childhood was punctuated with music. I just can’t remember a time without it being present and I think it’s shaped me enormously. I have varying pieces of music for the different times in my life and they all evoke very powerful memories for me.As a child I used music as an escape: I had a very vivid imagination and listening to music was like entering a new world. When I perform music now, I want to bring the audience into the world of that music. to feel and view the music in the same way that I do. This affected the choice of repertoire on the album because it was Read more ...
Kate Whitley
We at the Multi-Story Orchestra have been writing a new piece of music about social media. In one of the writing sessions I remember one of our musicians spending every second she wasn't playing on her phone, checking likes and comments as she'd released something that day. That feeling – being at the mercy of an unwinnable urge to be validated by other people's approval - is what our new piece is about.It was so cool hearing our young people's takes on it. They've grown up with social media in a way I can only imagine, and the original idea for a piece about social media was theirs. We wrote Read more ...
Russell Hepplewhite
Taking a book and lifting it from the page so that it works on the stage is daunting. When the target audience happens to be children aged between about four and eight, the challenge is magnified. As I write this, a brand new company, Ignite Music, is about to embark on a nationwide tour of an opera I wrote back in 2014 that was composed specifically for this audience - the ones with the very youngest of ears. So as I attended final rehearsals very recently I was reminded of the creative journey that was taken to bring Borka: The Adventures of A Read more ...
Bjarte Eike
BBC Four is broadcasting our Alehouse Sessions which filmmaker Dominic Best filmed in Battersea Arts Centre one snowy night in December. I know it feels very unlikely that we, the Barokksolistene, a Scandi group of baroque specialists, have made a programme for British TV singing sea shanties and folk ballads alongside Purcell.In fact, we are recreating the anarchic spirit of Oliver Cromwell’s lockdown London when the theatres and playhouses were shut down by the Puritans and the musicians surreptitiously crept into the backrooms of alehouses and inns in protest. Nothing about the Read more ...
Chris Brooke
Having started my musical journey with the clarinet at the age of seven, I’ve enjoyed 12 years of making music since, playing in recitals and concerts both as a soloist and in an array of local ensembles. I have always had an interest in writing music – experimenting with it for about as long as I’ve been playing – but I started studying composition formally in 2017 with David Stowell at Guildhall Young Artists Norwich.I’ve since been lucky enough to continue writing music both to develop myself as a composer, and also for competitions, commissions, and fellow musicians. As a musician I’ve Read more ...