 So now I'm delighted to say a few brief introductory words about tonight's speaker, Sally Beamish. Many of you will have heard Sally's music on the radio, CD or live. Only two weeks ago, on the 27th of January, her sea vagers was performed at the City Halls as part of the modern day Celtic Connections concert. Sally is no stranger to Scotland, having lived here for several decades, just down the road as it happened, I just discovered. She now lives in Brighton, where at this time of the year there is more light. She has composed music for various genres, orchestra, film, ballet, theatre and smaller groups, classical and folk. The sound sights and stories of the natural world are clearly heard for me in her music. She has received many honours and is very modest. The title of her talk is Inspiration, so big breath in. Sally Beamish. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Inspiration literally breathing in, breathing something that you breathe in. And I think inspiration also implies that it's then breathed out, having been processed in some way. So a landscape or a seascape or a poem or a story that has come in might then be processed in some almost sort of synesthetic way and come out as words, as colours, as notes. But it's not just those beautiful things, paintings and landscapes. It could be a joy, a loss that could be processed in the same way. It could even be panic. It could be a deadline that actually gives you the impetus to create something because you have to. And for me, there have been so many different inspirations of all different kinds, the chance to write for a great player, a request for a birthday gift. And also, as I've got older and more experienced, I found that there's a confidence that I feel has breathed into me that is also making it a more joyful and natural process to compose without those voices on my shoulder telling me it's rubbish and the contemporary music police are going to get me. And I'm just much more relaxed with everything that I do. I've always responded well to inspiration from any quarter. In fact, when my children were small, I realised quite soon that I needed child care in order to compose. I couldn't simply compose while they were sleeping. And the inspiration there was that I was paying for my precious four hours every weekday. I knew I'd feel pretty annoyed if I hadn't produced any notes during that time. So I wrote. And sometimes it felt as if I was sometimes it felt as if I was just throwing notes onto the page. It felt hopeless. But in general, I would find I somehow had the germ of an idea and something which sparked enthusiasm, which sparked the inspiration of wanting to continue to explore. But I thought I'd start with my own childhood, which was when I started writing music. And my mother was a professional violinist. She taught me to read and write notes when I was about four. So she gave me a little book and encouraged me to write in it and I couldn't write yet. So I drew pictures in it. I drew pictures of faces and flowers and my first pieces. I don't think she particularly thought I was going to compose, but because I was creative, that's what I thought it was for. So I made my own tunes, which she played back to me. And I think the inspirations there were very much story, words, pictures, things that I wanted to communicate in my own way. I wanted to tell these things to a listener. And that was my inspiration then. I was surrounded by music, particularly my father's family. In fact, his two sisters and mother were all professional musicians. And so the concept of a female musician was not strange at all to me. My mother was out every day playing in concerts. In fact, it was interesting that one of my aunts had a real problem with me composing. She didn't think that I should be able to do that. And that was quite a problem between us in our relationship. It was not something that she expected. And I think we do have preconceived ideas of what a composer should be. And I think I even think of composers as male. Even now, I catch myself thinking that. I needed a role model, which I didn't really have. But I decided it was going to be Clara Schumann, because she was the only woman I'd ever heard of who wrote music. I didn't have the chance to hear anything of hers, because I don't think anything had been recorded in the 60s, in the 50s and 60s. But there she was. That was enough for me. I went to girls schools, which I think was a very good thing for me. Primary school, I was writing music for the school plays. I was giving the teachers gifts of little pieces. And secondary school, also girls school, there was an inspirational head of music, Peter Morgan, who just gave me loads of opportunities. He gave me commissions, in effect. He told me to write for the orchestra, for the choir, to conduct my own pieces. And there was also very high standard of playing there. A lot of players who were contemporaries of mine who went on into the profession. So I was really lucky from that point of view. The decision to become a musician was not a decision. I just knew I was a musician. I knew I was a composer. But it's so interesting looking back, because I don't think it ever occurred to me that I could be a professional composer. It just didn't enter my head. It wasn't that I thought, oh, I can't do that. I just thought that's not an option. So I thought playing the viola, which was something the head of music had encouraged me to do in order to get more playing. I was a pianist, really, but he said, if you play the viola, you know, you'll get more playing. And that was true. And I thought, well, this will work earning a living so that I can compose. So I went to the Royal Northern College as a violin and viola player. It was a fantastic networking opportunity, because I was surrounded by very good players who got to know that I wrote music and I would write for them. I was also playing the piano and accompanying in masterclasses and things. I was learning about all the different instruments. I might play in a trumpet masterclass or something. So I'd be listening to how these instruments worked. And I think that was really, really important. I'm going to play you a little piece, which I wrote as a gift for my beloved violin teacher, Bronislav Gempel, who was a Polish violinist. And I'd heard him playing the Vinyowsky Concetto. And I can hear in this piece that I was really influenced by the opening phrase of the Vinyowsky. So this is a student, in fact, playing my violin sonatas. That's tip number one. And sadly, Bronislav Gempel never played it. He died before the concert that when he was going to play it. But I've got this lovely recording. So I was writing a lot when I was at college. And I did think, well, maybe I could do a postgrad as a composer. Unfortunately, it was really not very fashionable to write pieces like that. And I was actually told by one institution I applied to. I don't think we would ever take a student who writes in a minor. So it was the new complexity. It was serial music. It was very, very difficult stuff, which I didn't understand. And it didn't particularly interest me to find out more about it. And I think it was quite good because I just carried on in my own way. And I just waited until it was okay to write in a minor. So I studied, I did a postgraduate on Viola in Germany. I've always been passionate about languages. So I wanted to go somewhere abroad. And I studied in Germany. And I think because of those extra two years, I became a player. I had been thinking that I would somehow make a living. But in fact, I was able to do work, which was really, really stimulating for a composer. I was playing in a lot of contemporary music groups in London, Sinfonietta, Lantano, and meeting composers who were conducting their own pieces. And I would cheekily ask them to look at my scores. And so I was sort of gathering a bit of tuition. I was, of course, completely self-taught. But this was really, really useful. And I think my only course in composition was on train journeys between London Sinfonietta concerts with Oliver Nusson, who said, right, come on, bring some scores along and we'll look at them on the train journeys. And he gave me some tips and advice, which I've never forgotten. It was absolutely invaluable. He also gave me a lot of confidence. And I again started getting commissions from fellow players who, I think, felt maybe safe with me because they knew I knew what it was like to get out there on the stage and have to perform a new piece. And if it wasn't well written, it was the player who got to look not so good. I think people trusted me that I understood about performing. And a lot of them asked me for pieces, maybe because I was a string player. And one of the turning point for me was when a cellist called Mark Stevenson asked me to write some background music for readings of poems by Irina Ratyshinskaya, Ukrainian poet, political prisoner. And I asked him if I could make this into a piece of music so that there would be interludes between the poems and it would be one piece rather than either background or short. And this gave me huge confidence. Suddenly I found I'd written a 20 minute piece of music. And this was performed, I think, nine days after my first baby was born. And it was it was in every way it was it was something that kind of began to take me through to the next stage of my life. So I will just hear one of the poems in a recording where I actually recorded the the text in English. No, I'm not afraid. After a year of breathing these prison nights, I will survive into the sadness to name which is escape. The cockerel will weep freedom for me and here knee deep in my my gardens shed their water. Northern air blows in drafts. And how am I to carry to an alien planet? What are almost tears as though towards home? It isn't true. I am afraid. My darling, that belongs to the next clip. No, I'm not afraid. So yes, so this piece was a real turning point for me. And I began to think, well, I'm not really writing as much music as I would like to write. I was getting very involved in freelancing in London and my Scottish cellist husband Robert was saying, well, you keep saying you're a composer, but actually you're not really composing. And how about we move up to Scotland? And I resisted for ages because it was it was too scary, you know, to give to leave that freelance world behind me and be a composer. But then my viola was stolen. And that was just it was such an awful thing to happen. And I remember thinking, I have to make this a turning point of some sort, I have to make something positive from this. And that was it really, that was what that was what convinced me that we should we should do it. And we moved to Scotland. And what took me by surprise was the fact that this was a completely different country, a different environment. I was used to being surrounded by classical music. I wasn't used to music being part of everyday life. And the culture of Scottish music. This was something that was a revelation to me that everyone around me knew their culture of music. And it was, it was something that became really, really important in my work, not to mention the landscape, we were living in a very beautiful place. And it all it all came together in an amazing way. We had been encouraged to move up by Peter Maxwell Davis, who we'd worked with and James McMillan, they said, come up, there's lots of opportunities. And there really were lots of opportunities. It was one of the first things I was asked to do was one of the Strathclyde Concerto projects with Max and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. And that meant I was going into schools and writing for school bands, but the school bands were pipe bands and fiddle bands. And this was something I had no experience of. And one of the first pieces I wrote for for pipe band, I had to discover what a Pee Brock was, this amazing variation form, which was just such an inspiration in itself. And when I had this incredible chance to write for Orchestra, which again was completely because I was living in Scotland, and there was an Icelandic Scottish connection exchange, and they were looking for someone to write an orchestral piece for the Reykjavik's Symphony Orchestra. And I got it. Yeah, I got the gig on because I'd never written for orchestra. They wanted to give someone a chance. I mean, that would never have happened in London. But it was pretty terrifying. I'd never studied orchestration. I'd never written for brass or percussion. I really didn't know what I was doing. So I decided to take this Pee Brock idea and make that the bones of this symphony so that I knew where I was. And the wonderful thing about Pee Brock is the variations get more and more and more complicated so that the ornamentation completely takes over because the bagpipes have no dynamics, no no lads and softs or no softs. So the ornaments gradually become more and more exciting. So I'm going to play you just a little bit of the symphony where you'll hear the last variation and then the final statement of the Pee Brock melody. So this is the end of the symphony. And I think you can hear there the influence of Scottish music in general, but also a birdsong and landscape in a way that this piece was a real celebration of being surprised by the joy of being in such a beautiful place. I was still in touch with a lot of players. I'd been playing in the Raphael ensemble, which was a string sex set. And the leader was Anthony Marwood, a wonderful violinist. And he asked me to write him a violin concerto and we got a commission from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. And this was one of the first examples of an amazing inspiration coming from the commissioner from the player. He sent me a copy of All Quiet on the Western Front by remark that the very powerful story of a German soldier in the First World War. And this really, I was a bit surprised that you know sending me a book, what's that about, you know, and I read it and I thought, Oh, absolutely. I mean, not only is there musical imagery in it, there's Russian prisoners of war singing hymns, there's a violinist playing in the night, there's all sorts of things, but also very, very strong pacifist feeling. And I think that chimed in very much with my own feelings about war. And so this piece became absolutely a protest about war and with Anthony as the lone voice of the soldier. I was also asked to write a concerto by Douglas Boyd, oboist, who I'd again been playing with in chamber groups. And we talked a lot together about what that piece would be about. And he was fascinated by the idea of transformation. And I found this ballad, a boarder's ballad, Tam Lin, which is about a woman holding her lover through a series of terrifying transformations in order to win him. And so, you know, the beast told the story of Tam Lin. And of course, there was music there as well, because there are melodies that go with that ballad. So it was like having the ingredients for a piece of music. And particularly at the beginning, when I was really binding my feet writing for orchestra in particular, but in general, you know, having to do high profile commissions with very, very little experience, it was so helpful to have a starting point, a story or something in my head and the sound of a player as well. It was very much to do with Dougie's sound. A very important thing that happened towards the end of the 90s, I think was I had a phone call. I remember I was standing in the kitchen. I had a phone call out of the blue from Dr. Jerry Mattock. And he said, I want you to write a piece for my 70th birthday. I didn't know who he was. He'd heard something of mine on the radio. And I don't know how he got my phone number. But he wanted me to come down to his cottage in the forest of Dean, which was going to be the inspiration for the piece. It was very clear. And it was going to be in sea major. And I was a bit circumspect about going down. I actually ended up taking all three children and my mother with me. And it was the beginning of the most fantastic association with Jerry, who became like a grandad to the children and a dad to me and was incredibly supportive of our family and went on to commission with his partner, Beryl, 25 pieces from me, as well as starting to commission other composers as well. He didn't know anything about music, but he just loved doing it and making things happen. And he was full of ideas, which was fantastic and irritating in equal measure. But I'm going to play you a bit of bridging the day with Robert playing. And this is a passage that describes the Heron. And again, Jerry said, you should see that Heron along the riverbank. It's like jazz. It's like it's dancing. And that went straight into the music. So this is number, yeah. Yeah. So that was not a song, but bird movement, which is another thing that has inspired me quite a lot. Another important commission was actually from the university in Pat Monahan, asked me to write a piece for the retirel of Keith Vickerman, who was an expert in research in sleeping sickness. And there were so many ideas there. So I was brought along to be shown the labs where I looked through microscope, the trypanosomes. I looked at the sexy flies. I learned why it was such a difficult illness to treat because the microbes were changing all the time. So you couldn't kind of find a treatment. And then African, it was a disease in Central Africa, mainly. And so the idea of African drumming of the African harp, his daughter was a harpist. And so we brought her over from America and she played the piece. But above all, a lullaby called about a little girl called Awuya. And I'm going to play you a clip, which actually my son made this film. And he's put the text of the lullaby there so you can see that it actually describes the symptoms of sleeping sickness inspired by the flies. And that's something that recurs later, which I'll talk about later. But the idea of taking the ideas of the commissioner were very strong there. And it's a gift. If the commissioner comes to you with a really strong idea. And I felt this very much in 2016, I found myself writing three piano concertos in the same year. And it was just something that happened by chance because three pianists had approached me. I said yes to all of them thinking, well, they weren't all happened. And they did all happen and they all happened in the same year. So I had to move smartly on from one to the next. And luckily, each of those pianists had a really strong idea about what they wanted. I'm just going to play you a little bit of the first piano concerto. So they were all for different sized orchestras. So that helped. So the first one was just with strings. The second one was with symphony orchestra. And the third one was with chamber orchestra. The first pianist wanted something about the Cairngorms. And I just read The Living Mountain by Nan Sheppard. And this was the starting point for the piece. But also the folklore, the magic of the Cairngorms. And this particular clip I'm going to play you is a take on the real deal among the tailors. It's a story of three tailors who challenged each other to dance in three different spots in the mountains, and in fact died of exposure. It's a true story. And so I wanted that darkness. I wanted the weather. And here you'll hear the influence of the tune, which I expect you know. And also the way that I've tried to create the clouds, the thunder coming across the glen, which is number eight. You may not have noticed that I was playing viola in that performance. And that marked the beginning of returning to the viola, which is something I never thought I would do completely because my daughter grew up and became a violin maker and made me a viola. And I was invited to play in that festival. And I just thought I would go for it, not having played for 25 years. So it was an amazing gift to find myself playing again and to realize how much I'd missed it, how important it had been to be on the stage and to perform and to communicate with people through an instrument. And this coincided more or less with returning to England, marrying my second husband, a playwright, an English playwright, who was also had been a music theatre singer and who knew all the songs that had passed me by in my misspent classical youth. I didn't know, I never heard of cream. I just about knew about the Beatles, but he persuaded me out onto the doorstep with a wonderful guitarist and we performed songs during lockdown. And this was a revelation to me. It was playing without music in front of me. It was communicating with people walking up and down the street. And it gave me a whole new perspective on performance. Also, because he's a words man, we talked a lot about the setting of words and we shared the same dissatisfaction with the difficulties of hearing words when they're set for a classical singer that is often very difficult to hear them and it can be very disappointing compared to music theatre where you hear everything. And we talked about different ways of setting words. And in fact, Jerry's last commission, he said, I want you to write something for the viola and I want you to play it. And it was to involve Peter as well. So I set three poems for Spoken Voice. Well, I set the first one for viola. It was a poem by Carol Anne Duffy. The second one, I've set it for viola and then Peter speaks it. And then we'll just hear a tiny bit of the blues at the end. So these are songs. These are very much to do with playing on the doorstep of direct communication through lyrics. This is number nine. And wrote with golden and silver light of night. I would spread the clothes under your feet. Being poor have only my dreams. I have spread my dreams under your feet. So of course, I should have told you before, the Yates, the famous Yates, Fred Softley poem. I do work with classical voices and I love writing for singers. And a piece I wrote in 2007 for Mark Padmore was initiated really by the artist Gila Peacock who was born in Iran and who had made very beautiful translations of poems by Harfes to go with her monoprints of the poems. And because they were made in a completely unselfconscious way, these translations, they're just perfect for setting. They're just very, very straightforward. And this has led to, I think I've set about 15 or 20 of her poems now of her translations. And so at the moment, I'm working on orchestrating the first four of these songs for Roderick Williams and Symphony Orchestra. So that's what I'm doing at the moment. And I think what I've been leading up to telling you really is that I think I found my home in dance in ballet. It's kind of got everything for me and it goes right back to those early days with my mother of making stories with music and the costumes, the designs, the story and the structure. But mainly I think the choreographer, the collaboration with another artist. So having those phone calls going backwards and forwards and discussing how it might be. The first one I did was with David Bentley with Birmingham Royal Ballet and it was The Tempest, which was just the most fantastic thing to write music for. I then did Little Mermaid with David Nixon, Northern Ballet. And then David Bentley came back and asked me to do a Christmas Carol, which is what I'm doing at the moment. And the fantastic thing is with this amazing software called Tobalius, you can actually share a mock-up of an orchestral score with somebody else. So not only can I discuss my work with Peter, who is a playwright and can hear the structures and advise, there's something wasn't possible 10 years ago even. But I can do it with a choreographer. So I can send each scene to David and he can then say, no, that's not quite working. I think we need a bit more of that. I think I'd rather have trumpet there than oboe. And it's just a fantastic way to work. It's like writing film music, but you don't have to keep out of the way of the dialogue. The music is centre stage, quite literally. And you see your music on the stage. You see it coming to life quite literally in bodies. And the way David choreographs is I can see everything that I've written. Every little nuance and trill and harmony, he puts it on to the shapes of the bodies. So this has been just fantastic. And I've been working on it since 2020. So I had a project during lockdown, which was a blessing really. But I thought to finish, I'll just play on wonderful Sibelius playback. I'll play you a bit of The Overture 12. So the curtain goes up and who knows what's going to be next. But it's been it's been really fun telling you about the journey and all the different. It's really made me think about all the things that are fed in that I've breathed in over the years and then breathed out again. So thank you very much for listening. And I look forward to chatting with you and hearing your questions. Thanks. Right, folks. I'm a quick break for those who wish to get the toilets, buses, etc. And then the question and answer session. And could I remind everyone? Not. Right. Okay, folks. Right, we're ready for questions now. Could I just ask you to give your name when you or give your name if you want, but speak slowly, clearly, and try and keep your questions, the text of your questions sort of brief. Okay, so here we go. Gentlemen, you said you went back to playing after 25 years of not really playing on the stage. Was it really difficult? I take it that you practice all the time anyway. It's a big gap. It was a big gap and no, I hadn't been practicing. So after my viola was stolen, I did buy another viola and I played for a couple of years, but it just got too much. And it was actually when I was expecting my daughter that I sold all the instruments. And I just thought there's no point because I just didn't have time to practice. And I felt very grateful that I was earning enough by composing. I couldn't quite believe it. And I thought, well, it'd be greedy to try and play as well. And it's difficult playing when you've got small children and it's difficult going away and touring and all those things. It didn't fit. So I just thought, right, that's it. And I tried not to think about it. But I think there was a lot of grief there, which I didn't really realize. I used to avoid listening to chamber music, for instance. And then when Stephanie made the instrument, I remember Robert and Stephanie sort of encouraging me to try it. Come on, come on, mum, just give it a go. And it was awful. I just, you know, nothing worked. It was like one of those nightmares when you're trying to run away and your legs won't move. You know, I knew how it should feel, but I couldn't do it. And it took me about nine months, I think, to get back to some sort of state where I could play a few pieces in this festival. And then I just kept going and it's gradually coming back. And I think now I'm sort of back where I was, but no, it was a long process. And it was really difficult. And I kept nearly giving up. Lady with a hand up. Thank you. I'm not a musician. And you'll be able to tell that from the question. But when you're writing a score, do you have to write separately for each instrument or to just write one piece of music? And then the musicians adapt from that one piece? And I'd love to be able to show you a score. But all the instruments are like that. And the music goes across. But it also goes that way. So all the instruments are playing at the same time. So you do, I write straight into a full score. So if I'm writing for orchestra, I start straight away writing for the orchestra, because I need to know what colors I'm using. I don't write it for a piano or something and then score it out. I write straight into the score for orchestra. And yeah, it's, you have to, because you hear the sounds in your head, like that symphony I played at the beginning, I had no idea how that was going to sound until I went to the first rehearsal. I think that was one of the most terrifying moments of my life. But in fact, I did, I did know how it was going to sound because it was in my head and that's all I needed to know. So once I'd heard, once they started to play, I thought, all right, okay, yeah, that's what I thought. And that was the moment that I needed just to give me the confidence to know that I could write for orchestra. And I played in orchestra a lot as well. So I was always listening. So I kind of knew what to do. But not having done a course in composition and done all the orchestration, studying scores and learning exactly how it works. I didn't have the confidence at the beginning. Just to follow on from that very point. You didn't have any formal compositional training, you said, were there times when you felt that was a hindrance in your composing? Or was it simply freeing you to do things your own way? I think it did free me to do things my own way. And I'm glad that I was allowed to develop at my own speed. And I wasn't the sort of pushed through a university or a music college system where I had to write in a certain way. It's different now, I think it's much more open, you can write how you want to write now. But in the seventies, you really had to write in a certain way to be taken seriously. And I didn't want to write like that. So I think it's very good that I didn't. But I learned so much from listening. I was so lucky because I was playing all this new music with the conductors who had written it. So there was an insight there. And I was just using my ears. And I think I still just use my ears. You said in various points that people commissioning music had strong ideas about what they wanted. And you implied that was a good thing. But presumably sometimes that's a bad thing if you don't actually agree with what they want. Are there times when somebody wants to pay you to do something and actually you can't be bothered or you don't agree with the kind of music that they want? Yes, that does happen sometimes if they're too prescriptive. I once had a commission from, he was asking about a piece and he had actually given me pretty much the programme note of the piece. It starts with oboe and then the horns come in and then I just thought, okay, maybe you could write it. But in general, it's a gift. It isn't usually as precise as that. I mean, Jerry's, it's got to be in C major. Well, I took that with a pinch of salt, but it was actually quite fun to try and start a piece in C major and see where it took me. So generally, it's a positive. Yeah. Like your first question, and I have no knowledge at all of music, and I have a two-part question. One in the piano piece, which was very enjoyable. Why did you have seven violins? One or two violas and only one bass? And the second part to that, if, as you said at the beginning, you know how instruments work to compose, will chat, G-H-T and artificial intelligence do away with the requirement for composers? Because they simply learn it all and regurgitate much faster than anyone else. Yeah, we're all worried about that. So your first question is about the orchestration of that. And so that was for string orchestra. And a string orchestra, to get the right balance, it has more violins and then fewer and fewer as it gets lower. So you very often just have one bass. The other thing about that piece, which you probably noticed was that there was no conductor. And I knew that when I wrote the piece. So I knew I was writing for an orchestra that were going to have to pull it together themselves. And so that affected the way I wrote it as well. So it was led, you probably saw, between the leader of the orchestra and the pianist. And I was meant to help as well, but I was a rabbit in the headlights because I was useless. And I think they expected me to have more input, but I was still rediscovering the viola. So yeah, so that's how an orchestra works. And you'll see that in a symphony orchestra as well. There'll be six desks, that's 12 firsts, and eight seconds, and six, four, five, three, or whatever, it'll move down through the strings. What was the other question? Oh, about artificial intelligence. Well, I mean, isn't it amazing that last clip, it's really quite frightening how good that sounds. And that's not even real samples of instruments, that's just a computer that's made that. Of course, it can't really express anything. So the players, it's that fantastic process between the composer, the score, the players, and the audience, which I love. It's like a kind of alchemy that you hand over your score, which makes no sound. You hand it to the players and they bring it to life. And they also communicate it to an audience. And that's something that artificial intelligence can't do. So the magic of performers is never going to leave us. I just wanted to ask you about your ownership of the piece. Once you've got it, you've had it in your head, you've then written it, then you hand it over. And how do you feel when people reinterpret what you wanted them to do? And they do something different with it? In general, I love it. I love that process because it's so fascinating and they often do something better than I would have thought of because they're wonderful performers. And I particularly felt that when I wasn't playing and I wrote a lot of music for viola because I was asked to write viola concertos a lot because they knew I had played. And these soloists were just amazing. And it was like, oh, I had no idea that was even possible. So I think I would have even have limited myself if I tried to play it myself. And that was quite good. So it was just going straight from what was in my head to this amazing, the hands of this amazing player who was a real communicator. And I find that very, very exciting. But also, I don't know if anyone heard Seaveggers a couple of weeks ago, but that was a piece I wrote for the folk musicians, Katrina Mackay, Harpist and Chris Stout, who's a Shetland fiddler. And I wrote it. It's one of the very few pieces that wasn't a commission. I just wanted to try it. I wanted to do it. I love their playing. And I didn't talk about that very much. But actually working with traditional Scottish musicians has been very, very important. And I wrote the piece so that it could be played by a string orchestra. So everything was notated for them because classical musicians don't improvise on the whole. They need everything written out. And they will read it straight off the page with no problem at all. But traditional Scottish musicians like Chris and Katrina do improvise and they're not used to playing exactly what's on the page or even having a page. So I didn't really write them any parts. I wrote some ideas for what they might do. And of course, when it came to the first rehearsal with the Scottish Ensemble, the leader, they were all very suspicious of each other. Chris and Katrina had never worked with a classical orchestra before. And the Scottish Ensemble were a little bit kind of, what's this going to be like? And at one point, the leader said to Chris, I've got a cue here in my part. That means you can see what Chris was meant to be playing. And you're not doing it. And Chris just said, didn't the fans see that bit? And that was the beginning of a wonderful relationship. And I loved the fact that they just took the music and they learned it by ear from my Sibelius file. And they did what they wanted to do with it. And then you might think, well, that piece could only be for them. But in fact, it's been played not only by different musicians, but by different instruments. So it's been played on the Swedish nukal harper. It's been played on recorder, on accordion, and all by musicians who want to make it their own who improvise. And improvising was something that, I mean, most classical musicians have never learned to do that because we are so good. And I've been reading notes since I was four years old. So I never played an instrument without being able to read the notes. And we missed that whole process of learning to play by ear and of improvising. And that's something that I learned much later when I started collaborating with Kristin Katrina and then started playing the viola. And they used to come around to my flat in Glasgow Street and we'd have a session and I would play and I was playing with no music. And it was just an amazing experience and like playing on the doorstep as well. Also working with jazz musicians. I've worked quite a lot with Branford Marsalis, saxophone player. And he wanted me to do a project with his jazz quartet who don't read. And so I had to learn, I had to learn the language of how do you communicate? What does it mean when there's a solo? What do the chord symbols mean? And I did a jazz course. And that was actually really the beginning of me letting go and that was on the piano before I was playing the viola. But I learned to get away from the page and to improvise. And that was incredible because it actually speeded up my composition process because I realized that you play a solo in a jazz performance and it is composing in real time. And you have composed something and it took the time it took to play it. And I thought, well, I could compose like that. I could just, you know, and I speeded up and I started just being confident and just writing onto the page, not trying to work out what it should be or endlessly changing things. I just started being much freer. So it was a very important process. And that came from the performers. You know, that comes from collaborating with performers and actually being fluid and being able to take from them and they take from me and it's the sum of the parts. And I think that's the most exciting thing about being composer in fact. Thank you. You may or may not know that Gina Peacock used to be a regular tender at these lectures. Question is, and you may, if you wish, choose not to answer it. You clearly have an unusual musical brain rather special. But what are the other components of your brain? What are your strengths and weaknesses regarding numbers, words, three-dimensional space, sociability? Because some musicians have a particular set. Wow. I remember once, they always say that maths and music are connected and not in my case. But I remember once when I was a student playing with Northern Ballet, which I did to earn extra money and I'd play in the pit. And so you'd play the same ballet like a hundred times. And I think it was Capellia I was playing and was so bored. I decided to try and work out how much I was earning per bar. And I mean, I was used to my mind wandering and I was sort of making my shopping list and all that and that was fine. As soon as I started to work out that mathematical calculation, I just stopped playing because of course what you're doing when you're playing music is doing tiny mathematical calculations the whole time. That's what music is. It's all about numbers. So I realised then that that's quite right. My maths brain was being taken up by reading the music. But as far as other things go, I get lost all the time. I don't recognise spaces. I have all sorts of fairly typical aspects to my personality which are often associated with composers and musicians. So maybe a slightly different awareness of reality. Is that what you were asking really? Okay. Yeah. Thanks Sally. That was really interesting to hear your journey from the start. But education obviously was very important at school and the opportunities you got from music at school and the encouragement you got. And I just wondered if you had any strong feelings about music education now and if we were getting into trouble? When I was at school of course all music was free. You could just choose an instrument from the cupboard and learn it and I think a lot of musicians of my generation might never have encountered classical music if it hadn't been for that. I used to drive my parents mad by coming back and saying can I learn the harp now? It was all possible. There was a harp brought in. I did percussion with Heather Corbett who was the principal in the BBC Scottish but she was teaching in my school in London. Fantastic. Harps are called. So I was just able to explore. But I think what I think is wrong with our system is that we start schooling children too young so that in Germany for instance and in Scandinavia they don't really start learning to read or doing maths and things like that until they're maybe six or seven. And up till that point they're doing the creative arts. They're singing, they're acting, they're painting and there's no sort of failing when they're doing those things. They're not getting it wrong. They can't get it wrong. So they're building their confidence and when it comes to the time that they are sat down in front of a book and talk to read most of them already can anyway because they're interested and they're free and they're just exploring but if not they learn in a few weeks apparently. Whereas our little children go to school in a uniform at four years old and they're sat in front of a desk when all they want to do is play in the sand and paint and that's kind of squashed somehow. And then those artistic things become part of what is judged as well. So that painting isn't good enough or that music isn't good enough. And so they actually lose their confidence and it affects everything. It affects the whole spectrum of what they're learning at school because they don't have the confidence to know that what they do and what they want to express is valid and important. Thank you. Thank you very much. That was a wonderful talk. A couple of times you've said you've referred to the color of what you're creating and I wondered whether that's a metaphor of different wavelengths and things mixed up together if it's a metaphor or if you actually see the music as color when you're writing it. I don't think I do it in a very specific way although I do have a color in my head for every key. Like C major for some reason is red for me but I'm not sure if I mean I suppose orchestral color for me for instance is color. I hear it as color. So yes I suppose yeah I mean I also paint and use color in that way in a more literal way but it feels when I'm writing an orchestral score and I create the piece and maybe put a few lines in and take myself through to the end of the structure and I think right that that's the shape. Now I'm going to color it in you know and that's when you start choosing and you choose your little bit of triangle there or your harp or your oboe solo and I absolutely love that and I think that experience with that first symphony I kind of never looked back because after that it was I just wanted that symphony orchestra all the time you know I wanted those choices and yes it does it feels like being a painter it feels like putting them you know you put your pencil sketch in and then and then you color. I apologize for asking another question but in my youth I attended a lot of jazz things with George Penman and the Clyde Valley Stompers and they were almost always improvised but every week they played the same thing. So how do they remember if they don't note it down? Well mostly if it was um if it was jazz they were probably playing songs which they which have a chord structure and the the solos are improvised over that same structure but they might do something slightly different each time but but they'll follow and actually some jazz musicians if they find a good solo they'll play the same solo again um or they might or they might not but but the the thing about playing a jazz standard for instance like if you played autumn leaves or something you know you know the structure of autumn leaves you know what the chords are and so you you keep within those chords as you improvise and so it will sound it is the same song and it'll sound like the same song but every bit different yes yeah whereas they're you know free improvisation could be um you know there are other kinds of improvisation where someone might might just just play with no with no structure and and you know just just be very free with that and then there are all sorts of different ways of improvising but jazz is a very specific way of doing it and and I mean in contemporary jazz they go so miles away from from the structure that that you probably you might not even recognize the song in the end so they take it so far away. Thanks for a charming talk and um your joyous journey and what I my question is how do you move how did you move from playing piano I think you said and viola into the complexity of writing for an orchestra and I described it as painting and you know using bits of this and that but it must be quite a lot to learn about the different components and how to put them together. I think I learned by by playing and listening because I used to when I was in London I did freelancing and so I was often playing as an extra player in an orchestra like the Philharmonia or something and I'd be at the back of the violins as an extra player right in front of the woodwinds so you'd hear them sort of complaining about their reeds and and and complaining about some of the music that was difficult to play or you you've got a sort of feeling of what they were enjoying and what they weren't so you've got a sense of each instrument I think simply simply by listening and I often think I write rather better for instruments I don't play than I do for instruments I do play because I know what's possible and I've had complaints from all my viola soloists and you'd never know she was a viola player and because I really pushed them because I know I know it's possible but if I'm writing for oboe for instance I've never had an oboe in my hand I don't know how that feels but I know how it sounds and I know what sounds good so and and it's a matter of building confidence and that that first symphony you know I had no idea and I just had to guess and I did make some mistakes and you know things that didn't quite sound as I expected but broadly I kind of knew what what an orchestra sounds like and I just I just used my ears. Thank you very much. How did your harmonic language evolve? I think I think it evolved through copying like many composers learn I mean quite literally sometimes Bach learned by copying out bookstahooda you know so you learn by imitation and it's like like a child might be um invited to to do a picture inspired by van Gogh's sunflower or something so I and I remember my mother saying um why can't why can't you do something that sounds original you know that just sounds like I I sort of did the um the whole progress from from playing shant when I was four right through sort of Mozart-y at age eight or nine to sort of Mendelssohn-y when I was 17 and and then I just gradually sort of started opening up as I heard new music which I loved as I played it I think and I heard composers like Oliver Nussin and and and and also Stravinsky Prokofiev people like that and I just loved the sounds and so I think I just took what I wanted and um it's just like we're talking about ideas feeding into something also the music that you've heard will feed into what you're doing so it's like ingredients a bit of that and a bit of I very often when I'm composing um and I get stuck I'll um I'll just go to a bar talk string quartet or something you know I I know that that'll always spark something and I'll listen to it for like two seconds I think oh yeah you know and immediately gives me a sound to go with could you comment on how easy or difficult it is to get work performed I imagine that when something is commissioned a first performance is is guaranteed yeah but but I imagine that there's also an interest in how long lived a piece is after the initial performance I wonder what your experience is of that yeah well particularly the orchestral pieces it's it's really hard because there isn't the interest and once it's had its premiere it's crazy really it's you know because actually the the piece needs to have a life and what is it that's so special about the premiere I used to work a lot in Sweden with the Swedish chamber orchestra and the the manager of the orchestra Gregor Zubiki who's a wonderful um commissioner of music and and he used to say I don't want the premiere I want all those mistakes ironed out before I get the performance you know so he would always want the the second or third performance and that was just so sensible because the composer would also have had time to think about it and maybe make a few adjustments and but yeah the orchestral pieces I've got quite a lot of orchestral pieces that have only had two or three performances because there isn't the interest in until you become so established that your music is repertoire and those pieces might sit there and they might always sit there you know maybe one day someone will be looking at lesser known British composers and find my second symphony or something I don't know but um the great thing about commissions is is that you are guaranteed that performance I'm not writing speculatively like I would if I was writing songs you know pop songs or or music theater they're they're all I I don't know how they do it they're writing speculatively so they're just kind of thinking of ideas and then and then trying to get someone to sing it or trying to promote what they've written and I would never be motivated enough I need to have that deadline I need to know that there's a performance happening otherwise I think I would sort of lose my mojo a little bit so and and also more recently when when funding has been so very difficult in the arts and the last two concertos I wrote had four or five way commissions so five different orchestras or co-commissioning so that's five premieres in five different countries and that is so useful for a composer because the first one you might think well that didn't really work and but then the second time you think well it worked work with this orchestra and and vice versa you know you might find that something goes really well in one performance and the next performance it doesn't quite work and you realize you need to make something clearer in the score or or whatever so you're learning all the time you're learning from the performances and it's so difficult for composition students for instance who are not going to hear their work and unless it's played by the the orchestra the student orchestra and then they might get the chance to workshop it and learn from that but yeah performances are really what we need as composers to to learn about our own work well what a marvelous talk Sally's given us a really keen and great insight into composition and and into inspiration and we've had this the talk side of it and we've had the question side and answer side of it and it's been I think it's been really really informative and inspiring inspiring breathing spirit into the idea of music but also exploration breathing the spirit of music into us not an easy task but I'm wonderfully achieved tonight and aided greatly by Geraint and Neil with the tech which involved a little bit of work yesterday so I think a great marker appreciation thank you very much