I often begin and end my conversations about music with grandiose claims. Why? And what if? This blog will be no exception.

A long time ago, as an early teenager, when I decided to become a composer, my main concern was whether I was a good enough person to master such a powerful tool—one that speaks directly to people’s subconscious and can transform their entire being without them even noticing. With such a great and potent skill, I wondered: would I use it for good?

Fast forward many years, having practiced composition for nearly three decades, shaped and reshaped not only by the music I compose but also by the environments and societies I have lived in, I still regularly reflect on the transformative power of music. And I still question my integrity as a composer.

I often seek answers in ancient folk music. Partly because this music was created long before capitalism shaped our minds and habits. Partly because, as I imagine, music in those times served a different purpose—it was not necessarily meant to elicit joy or melancholy but to induce specific states of mind. It could transform a person into a warrior, a self-healer, or a silent observer of the world and universe. The power of music to bind communities together, attuning them with nature and their surroundings, and still regarded as a scientific tool some centuries back, I find, to be largely underestimated nowadays.

Through my interest in ancient folk traditions, I became increasingly fascinated by the onomatopoeic words found in folk songs—words that do not serve a conceptual meaning but rather ‘mean’ the sound they create. These fragments function like mantras, used purely for musical purposes. Scientific literature refers to onomatopoeic words as ‘fossils,’ remnants of a prehistoric time when music and language were one in our brains—before language migrated to its own center in the brain, while music, it seems, continues to activate the entire brain to this day.

I have discovered traces of this cross-over between word and music in Lithuanian sutartinės, Inuit kattajaq, Sami yoiks, Indian konnakol, Scottish puirt à beul and canntaireachd, and many other cultures.
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My research on this subject is deeply experiential—I practice music, read, and speak with people in remote communities about their musical experiences. Through this, I build an intuitive understanding of what different musical gestures mean and convey. These insights sink into my music practice, and today, almost every piece I write is influenced by this journey.

​[The Lithuanian Culture Institute and Music Information Centre invite you to the Lithuanian Art Music showcase, which features some of the most outstanding Lithuanian composers of art music today. This episode introduces composer Rūta Vitkauskaitė and her musical inspirations]

​I recently completed my Violin Concerto, my most ambitious concert work to date, with a singular goal: to encapsulate my compositional skillset and philosophy in a way that transforms the audience toward a deeper, more authentic way of being. The journey of music, shared between the audience, the soloist (Dalia Kuznecovaitė), and the orchestra (Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Modestas Pitrėnas), is intended to expand our perception of the world. It offers the kind of lived experience that shifts our perspective on life and values—creating space for wiser, more conscious, and more generous actions in our daily lives.

​[A short film created by videographer Ilmė Vyšniauskaitė depicts composer Rūta Vitkauskaitė's journey in creating her large scale and most personal symphonic work, Violin Concerto.]

Immediately after completing my Violin Concerto, I began working on my Illuminate Women’s Music Commission. A much smaller piece for a chamber setup (soprano and cello), this project, with its highly collaborative timeline and interaction with performers and composers, gave me the opportunity to explore elements I might not have otherwise.
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For some time, I had wished to incorporate texts from Gaelic hymns and incantations, inspired by Alexander Carmichael’s Carmina Gadelica, a book recommended to me while staying in the remote village of Bragar in the Outer Hebrides. Earlier in my compositional journey, I had written a vocal work using Lithuanian healing spells (Rūta Čiūta—and yes, my name, Rūta, appears as an onomatopoeic word in ancient Lithuanian songs, possibly used for healing). That piece was dedicated to the well-being of people during the COVID-19 pandemic. When I later encountered the Gaelic collection of hymns and incantations, they resonated deeply with my already established interest in such chants.

During my stay in wonderful village of Bragar, I also saw, for the first time, a traditional Black House still standing. Conversations with the locals helped me understand the profound meaning of the fireplace—traditionally at the center of the home, the most sacred and essential place. Peat, kindling, the blessing of fire, and the mystical aura surrounding it all, so I've been told, gave birth to the ancient Gaelic tales and songs.

Thus, my Illuminate piece, Song of the Shadows, seeks to summon that spirit—so fragile and rarely encountered in today’s modern world. I incorporate authentic Gaelic incantations for the blessing of the fire, as well as an authentic Lithuanian spell used to protect homes from burning (a short palindrome of words). The piece also invites audience participation at both the beginning and the end, creating an environment of semi-present spirits in the house. The singer (Stephanie Lamprea) moves in a triangular path, bowing to an imaginary kindling, imitating the original ritual of laying peat in the fireplace. Meanwhile, the cello (Jessica Kerr) joins the audience in imitating fire sounds, eventually bursting into ‘full flame’ through music.

This audience participation and reenactment of the ritual serve to transport listeners into the deep Gaelic night of a pre-modern era, where visions were as real as the physical world. A stark contrast to today’s noisy, visually overstimulated city life. Through a musical narrative that evolves from whispers and noise into ‘heavenly’ singing before returning to whispery fire sounds, I invite listeners to experience the state of mind one might have had when blessing the fireplace—the most sacred space, upon which life and well-being depended.
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The original Gaelic lyrics embody the transformative power of word and music, once deeply interwoven into every aspect of life. Through this piece, I have sought to bring them back to life through my own sound.

​[Song of the Shadows, composed by Rūta Vitkauskaitė for Illuminate Women's Music Scotland tour].

​As a composer, I am deeply passionate about exploring the intricate connections between music and the world around us. My compositional voice focuses on musically mapping aspects of the natural world, science, visual arts, dance, and politics, creating a rich tapestry of sounds and textures that resonate with listeners on multiple levels. By drawing inspiration from these diverse sources, I craft unique and captivating compositions that challenge and inspire.
My creative process is fuelled by an insatiable curiosity for gestures, shapes, and sounds, and how they relate to the world and other art forms. I often engage with extra-musical sources, such as visual art, poetry, and scientific concepts, to stimulate my composition thoughts and structure my work. I find that these sources provide lenses through which I can conceptualize form, colour, and texture in my music, creating a multi-layered and immersive experience for the listener.
Over the last few years I have become increasingly interested in collaboration and influence of different practitioners or artforms, whether this is with individual musicians – such as through the development of my concertos, such as Through the Fading Hour or my piano concerto Tautening skies - or more recently working with texts; existing poems, my own poems, and my collaborations with librettist Kendra Preston Leonard.
My first collaboration with Kendra was on a work called a tulip iron, which was developed at the Creative Dialogues festival in France (2023). I wanted to write a work that grappled with difficult memories and could become something that sat between a song-cycle and an opera scene. I began trying to write my own poetry but was finding myself hitting a brick wall. My own poetry is usually very short, crystalline and perhaps because of the nature of the topic I was lost for words, which is why I speak so often with my music. When I approached Kendra for a unique text to set, I asked her to explore memory as something difficult, questioning why certain things happened the way they happened, questioning yourself and whether things were your own fault. I wanted the text to draw on the deep intense emotions that still bubble under the surface from the bullying and gaslighting I experienced at school.
 
Kendra writes about the work:
a tulip, iron is about the fear and horror created by psychological and emotional abuse, the relief of escape from abuse, and the work required to contend with traumatic memories of it. Using Perle Fine’s work The Early Morning Garden (1957) as a focusing device for this lyric, I work with elements of the natural world as well as my own personal history. The mezzo soprano and tenor serve as protagonist and antagonist, respectfully, and I’ve made it deliberately unclear as to whether their texts and interactions are taking place in the present or are memories. The text is in three loose sections, through which the protagonist moves from fear and intense self-doubt into greater agency, grapples with the causes and extent of her wounds, recognizes how trauma has shaped her, and becomes able to distance herself from it. The antagonist diminishes and humiliates the protagonist, causing her to hesitate and sing in fragments of sentences. He calls her simple and an embarrassment, disparaging her mind and body and abilities, even as she begins to communicate more fully and lyrically and draws on
a wider world for her outlook. Finally, he—or the memory of his words and actions—falls silent, becoming nothing to the protagonist, as she leaves the scene—or memory—with self- determination.
 
I have found this text deeply emotionally powerful to set. Alongside this, I engaged with the visual stimulus of Perle Fine's work ‘The Early Morning Garden’ as this had inspired Kendra’s text and served as a visual stimulus for the emotional canvas of the work. Taken together, these helped me find a soundworld that is a mixture of fragility and strength, whilst exploring the nuances of colours and distinct gestural shapes for both the string players and the vocalists. The piece should be treated as an imagined scene from a larger narrative trajectory, set ambiguously in memory or somewhere real; perhaps it is both.
 
Performance of work at Creative Dialogues:

​In 2024 I was selected for the Aspen Music festival. As part of this there was an option to develop an opera scene that engaged with political themes. I have been increasingly interested in writing for opera and have been trying to find opportunities to prove I can write opera, having had my first taste of this at Creative Dialogues the previous year. I have always wanted to write an opera with a strong feminist story, and so I approached Kendra with a few ideas and then she came back with the suggestion of writing a scene based on the story of The Jane Collective. The Jane Collective were an underground Abortion Counselling Service that supported women before the monumental Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision. Between 1969 and 1973, Jane performed more than 11,000 abortions, without losing a single patient. When faced with the anti-abortion laws of the United States and the enormous inequalities in abortion access, they worked together across racial, class and religious divides to help pregnant people obtain safe abortions. This important story represents a universal struggle of women against the constraints put on them by society, showing how together they can help each other overcome seemingly impossible situations, and fight for a fairer world. It is a story I am honoured to tell through music and setting Kendra’s powerful text. 

Our latest collaboration is on our new work My Skin: A Selkie’s Tale written especially for the Illuminate Women’s Music tour 2024-25 in Scotland. This commission asked the composers to engage with themes of Scottish folklore, landscape and ancient people. As I researched, I came across a story unfamiliar to me about these unusual creatures called Selkies. There was one story that seemed to keep coming up in various guises called ‘The Fisherman’, about a Selkie having their skin stolen and being captured by a fisherman. All these retellings were written from a narrator’s perspective. Many stories across history rarely tell a story from a female protagonist’s point of view, and so I thought it would be great to hear from the female selkie; how does the story feel when it told directly by her? I approached Kendra with this idea in mind and was delighted to find out she knew the story very well already and this idea of exploring this narrative from the perspective of the female Selkie really resonated with her.


​Words on My Skin: A Selkie’s Tale – Kendra Preston Leonard
 
I don’t remember how old I was, or where I lived, when I first read or heard about selkies, but it had to have been early in my obsession with Celtic myths and legends, which began when I was perhaps 6 or 7 and has never really ended. Then, the selkie represented a wondrous way of escaping the difficult and noisy and often overwhelming human world; if only I could change shape and disappear into the water, hearing only my own heartbeat and breath, I would be able to feel calm and safe. The more folklore and stories I read, though, the more it became clear that the story of the selkie is almost always a tragic one. While there are stories about love between humans and selkies (the 2014 film Song of the Sea is one example), many selkie stories focus on what happens when a man steals a selkie’s sealskin in order to trap her in her human form in bondage to him. In those stories, the selkie is desperate to find her skin and return to the sea above all else, often including the well-being of her children. These selkies were often isolated by their abductors as well as by geography.
 
When Angela proposed using the story of the selkie for our piece for Illuminate Scotland, part of the Illuminate Women’s Music project, I was excited to give the selkie’s story a different ending, one that speaks to the power of women working together to help other women escape abusive relationships without diminishing the horror of those relationships, one that speaks to being persistent in seeking freedom, and to being empowered by being one’s true self. The narrator of My Skin is trapped and raped, and her children are mutilated by a man who kills her sister when she comes to rescue her. But the narrator’s clever, attentive, and sneaky daughters find their mother’s skin, and from her sister the narrator crafts them their own seal-coats so that she can take them with her into the sea when she flees. When this work is done, three tough and dedicated friends aid the selkie and her children in their escape and cry with joy to see them restored to the water. 
 
Angela’s setting of the text captures the selkie’s despair and anger and fear as well as her guile and cunning in finding a way to escape and take her children with her. We can hear her love of the ocean and her desire to be reunited with it, and her three friends—the lookout, the driver, and the one with a gun (based on a friend of mine)—get their own characterizations. One day we hope to write an opera that expands this song, an opera about the friendship and bravery of the women and girls introduced here, and about women being there for one another. 

​This blog post introduces readers to the work of Hildegard of Bingen, as well as to the work of multiple present-day Hildegard of Bingen Scholars, including Jennifer Bain, Honey Meconi, Barbara Newman, and Alice Clark. Suggestions for further reading are given at the end of this post.
 
INTRODUCTION
Neither medieval composers nor women composers are particularly widely known outside of specialist circles. But if people know only one medieval composer, it is likely to be a woman, and if they know only one woman composer, she is likely to be medieval. I am talking, of course, about Hildegard of Bingen, a polymath German nun whose compositions have enjoyed an enduring revival since the 1980s, almost 900 years after her birth.
 
BIOGRAPHY
Hildegard was born in 1098 in Sponheim, Germany, to a family of the lower nobility. She was the youngest of 10 children, and was sickly, experiencing visions from an early age. Today we might interpret these visions as migraine auras, or perhaps a form of epilepsy, but she perceived them as spiritual visions (Foxhall 2014). Regardless of whether their origin was biological or divine, their effect on her was undeniably spiritual. 
 
Hildegard entered the Benedictine monastery at Disibodenberg as a child, sometime between the ages of 8 and 14, alongside her friend and mentor Jutta von Sponheim. There she learned to read and write, play the 10-string psaltery, and perhaps to notate music, skills not often accessible to women (or indeed to many men) in 12th century Germany. When Jutta died in 1136, Hildegard was elected abbess of the community. She later founded monasteries in Rupertsberg (1150) and Eibingin (1165), which she led until her death in 1179 (Embach 2021).
 
WORK 
Hildegard was prolific in many areas, writing extensive volumes in fields as diverse as theology, philosophy, natural history, and medicine, as well as music. She wrote both words and music for at least 77 monophonic chants: this is more extant, definitively attributed works than for any other composer of that era. Hildegard’s chants are distinctive in style, employing a larger vocal range, freer use of melisma (multiple notes sung on a single syllable), and greater length than most contemporaneous works (Hughes 1989; Bain 2021). They are also notable for their rich intertextuality—their extensive use of borrowing from and references to works including biblical texts, chant texts and music by herself and others, and hagiographies (Bain 2021). 
 
Hildegard’s hour-long musical morality play Ordo Virtutum, composed shortly after she moved to Rupertsberg, is even more unusual in form and scope. It’s the earliest surviving morality play—a popular form of medieval drama in which a human protagonist must choose between personified good and evil attributes—and the only one with both words and music attributed (Burkholder et al. 2006). Telling of the struggle of a soul (Anima), torn between the Virtues and the Devil, Ordo Virtutum calls for an extensive array of singers, including Anima (solo female voice), the Virtues (17 solo female voices), a Chorus of Prophets and Patriarchs (a male chorus), a Chorus of Souls (a female chorus), and the Devil (a male voice that grunts and yells but does not sing). 

​Because of its large size—and perhaps because morality plays are no longer a theatrical staple--Ordo Virtutum it is rarely performed today. For many centuries, Hildegard’s chants, too, had fallen out of widespread usage. In the 1980s, however, Hildegard’s work rose again to prominence, when the early music ensemble Gothic Voices’ recording A Feather on the Breath of God unexpectedly topped the charts (Bain 2004, 2017). Since then, hundreds of recordings have featured one or more Hildegard’s chants. Many performers strive for a historically informed interpretations, aiming to recreate the performance style(s) of Hildegard’s time. Others incorporate them into in New Age, jazz, electronica, instrumental, and/or film music. It’s important to note that even the most “authentic” performances of Hildegard’s music are only speculative, however. Hildegard notated words and pitches, but not rhythm, tempo, timbre, or dynamics, and of course we there are no aural records from the 12th century to guide contemporary interpretations (Boyce-Tillman 1999; Bain 2017). If there now seems to be an agreed-upon performance practice for Hildegard’s work, it is because contemporary musicians influence each other, and not because we know definitively how her music sounded in the twelfth century.

​REVIVAL
Hildegard was of course an incredible musician, and her works are well deserving of their current popularity. Yet music played an enormous role in the lives of all nuns: all sang, typically at least eight times a day (more often than they spoke), and many would have composed as well (Beach 2021). Monks were equally active musically, as were many people outside of the church. Why do we know Hildegard’s music (and writing) so much better than that of her contemporaries?
 
There are always multiple factors behind the revival of a composer: the quality of the music is important, of course, but it’s never the only factor (Bain 2004, 2017). At the very least, the music must have physically survived, and the revivalists must have the resources and social influence to bring the composer and their music to wider awareness. As a nun, Hildegard already had access to advantages unavailable to much of the wider population: education which allowed her to read, write and notate; writing materials and parchment; buildings which protected her manuscripts over centuries; a ready community of experienced performers willing to sing her work; the institutional power of the church. But the fact that we know Hildegard as the composer of her music has as much to do with her eventual canonisation as a saint as it does with the music itself. Twelfth-century chant collections were typically anonymous, with the included chants attributed to a place rather than to the composers who wrote them. Portfolios for sainthood, however, contained evidence of the proposed saint’s holy output, which for Hildegard included her compositions (Clark 2021). 
 
Beyond the significance of Hildegard’s music and writing, Hildegard herself has been and continues to be of symbolic importance for many. In Eibingen, where the Benedictine community she started continues to flourish, Hildegard’s popularity never waned. In religious circles, her beliefs were considered mainstream enough to appeal to traditional Catholics, while her individualistic and mystical approach to Catholicism helped her appeal to radicals too. Many in the church were (and in some cases still are) disinclined to listen to women, but the (perceived) divine origin of her visions lent credence to her voice (Newman 1985). Her keen interest in natural history and herbal medicine ensured her work was of interest in secular contexts as well. Indeed, Germany still has a number of “Hildegard” apothecaries which dispense her herbal remedies and lifestyle prescriptions. More recently, Hildegard’s life story has appealed to feminists looking for predecessors with artistic, philosophical, literary, theological, scientific and/or political clout. Hildegard had all of those. Though Hildegard’s spirituality fell strictly within the boundaries of medieval Catholicism, her mysticism gives her writing broader appeal, not only in contemporary Christianity, but also in ecumenical, interfaith, and New Age contexts (Boyce-Tillman 1999; Bain 2004, 2017; Clark 2021).

CONTEXT
By focusing on the multiple factors which have led to Hildegard’s current renown, my intention here is not to downplay her accomplishments, musical or otherwise. She was a brilliant, prolific, and inventive composer whose music is fully deserving of the attention it currently receives. Rather, my intention is to ask: if even such an accomplished and prolific composer as Hildegard has required so many extra-musical supports to be known today, whose music do we not know that we should? Whose music was washed away in a flood or burnt in a fire? Who was second-in-command at an abbey and could never convince the other nuns to sing her music? Who came from a country that was destroyed by war? Whose visions were so far outside church norms that they were denounced as heretical? Who came from a religious tradition that was never given the wealth and infrastructure to flourish? Who composed brilliantly but never learned to notate? Whose music sits moldering in an attic, and will it be “discovered” while it is still salvageable?
 
We may never know the answer to these questions, but I find it intriguing to speculate that Hildegard was not so much a lone genius as a representative of the many brilliant and compelling musical voices throughout history, one of the few that we have the privilege of continuing to know and celebrate today.
 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY
 
A Modern Reveal (n.d.). Hildegard von Bingen. Retrieved November 5, 2024, from https://www.amodernreveal.com/hildegard-von-bingen#von-bingen-
 
Bain, Jennifer (2004). Hildegard on 34th Street: Chant in the Marketplace. Echo.
 
Bain, Jennifer (2017) Hooked on Ecstasy: Performance ‘Practice’ and the Reception of the music of Hildegard of Bingen. In The Sounds and Sights of Performance in Early Music. Routledge, 253-274.
 
Bain, Jennifer (2021). Music, Liturgy, and Intertextuality in Hildegard of Bingen’s Chant Repertory. In: Bain J, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Hildegard of Bingen, 209-234.
 
Beach, Alison (2021). Living and Working in a Twelfth-Century Women’s Monastic Community. The Cambridge Companion to Hildegard of Bingen, 37-51.
 
Boyce-Tillman, June Barbara (1999). Hildegard of Bingen—A Woman for Our Time?. Feminist Theology 8(22). https://doi.org/10.1177/096673509900002
 
Burkholder, J. Peter, Claude V. Palisca, and Donald Jay Grout (2006). Norton Anthology of Western Music. W.W. Norton.
 
Campbell, Nathaniel M., Beverly R. Lomer, and Xenia Sandstrom-McGuire (2015). The Symphonia and Ordo Virtutum of Hildegard von Bingen. Retrieved November 5, 2024, from https://www.hildegard-society.org/p/music.html
 
Clark, Alice V. (2021). Uncovering a Diverse Early Music. Journal of Music History Pedagogy, 11(1), 1-21.
 
Embach, Michael (2021). The Life of Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179). The Cambridge Companion to Hildegard of Bingen, 11-36.
 
Foxhall, Katherine (2014). Making Modern Migraine Medieval: Men of Science, Hildegard of Bingen and the Life of a Retrospective Diagnosis. Medical History. 58(3):354-374. doi:10.1017/mdh.2014.28
 
Hildegard of Bingen (12th century), recorded on Gothic Voices (1982). A Feather on the Breath of God. LP. Hyperion 66039.
 
Hughes, Andrew (1989). Style and Symbol, Medieval Music: 800–1453. Ottawa: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 30. 
 
Meconi, Honey. Hildegard of Bingen. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018. 
 
Newman, Barbara (1985). Hildegard of Bingen: Visions and Validation. Church History 54 (2):163-175.https://www.jstor.org/stable/3167233
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​I am a composer from rural Stirlingshire, currently studying for a PhD at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. My research explores mishearing and awkwardness. I tend to be distracted by the prosody of voices when people speak, often losing track of what they’re actually saying (especially with new people). With three small children, however, much of what I hear in a day is less ambiguous: clear, competing petitions for undivided attention.

My compositional work is often collaborative, exploring how my collaborators perceive the world through how they hear or think about sound. Recent pieces include:

• On G, for chamber ensemble and electronics which explored a former classical pianist’s (my mother’s!) changing relationship with repertoire, piano and disability;

 

• Glean, for flugelhorn, guitar and electronics, written with a forensic psychologist friend, which used his ADHD software to create a piece inspired by his attempts to glean what he needs from life; and

 

• The shrine keeper’s shop, for chamber ensemble, written with a medieval art historian. From her visceral world of disembodied wax body parts and badges filled with saintly effluent, we created a cynical sales pitch by an imaginary shrine keeper trying to flog such objects. Her spoken, sung and written voice shaped the musical material. 

 
I was very pleased to receive this commission from Illuminate Scotland to write a piece with a folklore or heritage connection. I turned to my oldest friend, Iona - a writer (when she’s not running a hotel and raising her child) – who, like me, has returned to raise a family near the place she grew up. We reflected on the pull of, and simultaneous disconnection from, the stories and rhythms of folklore and heritage language that shaped and were shaped by those landscapes.

As is often the case, I was drawn more to the sounds of words than the stories themselves. I come from a village whose elegiac Gaelic name holds a myth of a wolf coming from the moor to devour all the children. I took recordings of 16 Gaelic words for "wolf" and drew musical materials from their beautiful cascading contours, long vowels, and light consonants. I was captivated!
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But as I worked, I started to reflect on why Gaelic has so many words for wolf, what it meant to strip these words of their meaning, and why I was so intent on isolating their sounds. While shaping wolf words into cello lines, I had intuitively removed much of the prosody from what the soprano sings – almost as if holding words in one place would allow me to hear them more clearly.

My piece we have cried for so long is my first “proper” composition. I have made sketches of my improvisations, and have recorded improvised performances for theatre and film, however, not until now have I written music for others to interpret and perform. 
 
The process of creating this piece was extremely slow and started mainly with me trying to figure out how to translate the music in my head into notation for others to read. For some context, I’ve spent the last 6 years developing my improvisational practice, focusing on sound creation and finding joy in playing the cello after years of seriously studying classical music. Improvisation helped me to remove the barrier of “it must be perfect”, and allowed me to create a new foundation of thinking centred around curiosity and playfulness. Improvisation has changed the entire way I play my instrument, from feeling stiff and stuck, to relaxed and fluid. I no longer care about creating the “most beautiful” tone, and am deeply interested in all the gnarly sounds that can be made to express the complex feelings we all experience. And I wanted to translate this sense of freedom into musical notation, a medium which as often caused some mild level of anxiety. 
 
So, I decided to incorporate the elements of my improvisational style that make me feel the freest: poetry and weird little sounds.

​Dearest, a poem I wrote and an improvised music response 

​Blush Bloom (music by Rylan Gleave, poetry by Simone Seales)
 
When I received the prompt for this commission, to write something relating to Scottish folklore, I had a quick google search of Scottish tales and ‘monsters’. The one which instantly grabbed my attention was the caoineag, a banshee in the Scottish Highlands who cries for death to come. I found myself enthralled with the idea that they, like us, can see beyond the Highlands and are crying for all the tragedy we are inflicting on one another through our action and inaction. We are constantly exposed to horrific images of death and destruction through our phone screens, and sometimes it feels like too much to bear, but these creatures, they are the ones whose duty it is to bear witness and weep. 
 
This inspired me to write a poem from the perspective of the caoineag, imagining how tired they must be of constantly crying, and that we humans must surely know their song so well by now. I set the poem (below) to a soundscape and wrote a lament to represent their cries. The music accompanying the poem is more textural and soundscape-y to create the atmosphere of tension and grief. The sounds are there to enhance and highlight the text rather than overpower it. The music for the lament is from an improvisation I recorded after the results of the US election; I then transcribed it using notation software and wrote the soprano line to complement that cello. 

I feel that, after this piece is premiered, I can properly allow myself to say I’m a composer. 

​A blog by Simone Seales

When sound is the central driving force of your life and work, and you are deaf and disabled this presents an interesting challenge. I wasn’t born deaf and so have a library of remembered sounds and music in my head, however, any tunes released after 2018 I have only a bare impression of…….. As a composer I have music written before I lost my hearing (which was very much in a contemporary classical idiom) before moving into writing mostly electroacoustic work. I think I meandered into using electronics as I had started to wholly plan and construct new work in my mind without actually hearing anything with my ears and my mind sought a sound palette with almost infinite possibility. Could it be that I write more imaginative work now that I’m not beholden to what things actually sound like? In my case anyway, I think this could be true! 

My practice is very much centred around the combination of words and music, and I did a PhD which explored this under the lens of gender studies and the influence of Italian musical culture (having grown up with a soundtrack provided by a persistent and wonderfully expressive singing Italian dad!). As well as composing I also perform (usually with wind instruments/ voice), research the intersection of deaf studies/ disability studies with performance (at The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland) and work as a community music therapist. I’m also endlessly fascinated by the mundane and ironic rhythms of human existence, of nature and the humour of everyday life. Another central theme is that of inclusion which is truly at the heart of everything I do. The pursuit of inclusion is not an easy one, it’s also an ever-evolving one where you are constantly learning from past mistakes to improve and make things better. The learning never stops really ….. 

Some recent work ….  

Curious(er) (2021) – a single movement work written for electronic wind instrument as part of a residency with Drake Music (London) which explores real and imagined sounds. You can listen to Curious(er) here. This was the first work in which I explored my hearing loss combining sound I remembered with new sound I can no longer hear. ​

Room to breathe (2022) – a multi-movement work which imagines a series of rooms each treating breath and breathing in different ways post-Covid. The work was commissioned by Drake Music Scotland for performance at Sound Scotland Festival in Aberdeen and scored for wind trio, digital instruments and electroacoustic track. You can watch Room to breathe here. 

Random eddies (in the space-time continuum) (2023) – a work commissioned by Drake Music Scotland together with 6 other composers from around the UK through the PRS Beyond Borders funding programme. The work is scored for live prepared piano (performed by Siwan Rhys), clarinet/ electronic wind instrument and electroacoustic track.  As a collective of composers, we descended upon Cardiff in November 2023 to perform the works in concert and also record them in an album (Letting the light in) released by NMC in October 2024. You can listen to Random eddies and the rest of the album here. 
 
Creative captioning
 
During the pandemic when we all moved online I found it to be problematic as a deaf person and it was firstly with Drake Music (London) and then Sonic Bothy (an inclusive experimental music ensemble based in Glasgow) that we began to explore the use of  creative captioning to describe music and sound. I happened to work with 2 captioners who could caption not just speech but also sound and music in wonderfully descriptive stream-of-consciousness prose. This has led to a pioneering creative process whereby I can improvise live with the ensemble due to the depth and innate detail of the captioning. We have been finessing this process for 3 years now and it has been the source of new music including a new work I’ll write in 2025 called (funnily enough!) Adventures in captioning. 

Illuminate – The Goddess of Ballachulish

I am delighted to be part of the cohort of composers writing new music for soprano Stephanie Lamprea and cellist Jessica Kerr for the Illuminate Scotland series 2024/25. The Goddess of Ballachulish imagines the reawakening of a 2,500-year-old, 5-foot wooden effigy of a woman dug up from under 6 feet of peat on the shores of Loch Leven in the 1880s. I have really enjoyed writing this work, found the story to be a great source of inspiration and have had fun adding in interesting performance notes and a dash of the theatrical. As the Goddess awakens she is at first tired and lethargic and much given to sighing …. I appreciated the opportunity to imagine the sounds that could be conveyed by voice and cello to depict this heaviness, lethargy and sighing. Influenced by word-painting and Dido’s Lament (Purcell – Dido & Aeneas – c.1689) I’ll be working with creative captioning in rehearsals where the qualities and timbre of the sounds being played live will be captioned so I may know if my performance notes are conveying my intentions to the fabulous (and game!) performers. It is really interesting to take creative captioning into rehearsals for a scored work and I look forward to learning more about how this will unfold. As I said earlier, it’s all learning and it never stops! 
 
 
Sonia Allori - https://soniaallori.co.uk
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About my work:

I am a composer of broadly contemporary classical music. As a composer, I have always been fascinated in the dialogues between science, visual arts, dance and politics. I have endless curiosity for gestures, shapes, sounds and their relation to the world, and how these relate to other artforms. When composing I find engaging with extra-musical sources whether this be visual art, poetry, the natural world or a scientific concept to be an extremely useful way to stimulate and structure my composition thoughts in the writing process. I find this helps me to map out the form of the piece, and to think about colour and texture.

How did you originally get into music?

I grew up in a large village called Cotgrave in Nottinghamshire. Thinking back to my childhood I can’t really remember a time when I didn’t know about music. Even before I was at an age where I could have piano lessons I was always drawn to play on the piano and would mess around, probably disturbing my brother’s practise. Later I would write little pastiche type pieces, which then transformed into pop-songs in my teenage years and then melded back to classical music, though now of a very different kind of course. I was always distracted through my childhood with the sounds of music and would more often than not end up being drawn away from practising because I was found a strange chord by accident.
 
What or who inspires you?  

Music itself, the natural world and other artforms particularly poetry, dance and visual arts.
 
What piece of advice has helped you most in your career? 

To stay true to the intentionality of your idea, don’t let it be watered down or compromised. That of course doesn’t mean not thinking about practicalities or idiomatic writing, but don’t shy away from writing the ideas in their fullest and most clear form.
 
What has been the most rewarding project so far in your career and why?  

There have been many but most recently being on London Philharmonic’s Young composer programme working with Brett Dean and Richard Waters on my viola concerto Through the Fading Hour was a wonderful combination of time, space, mentorship, with the highest levels of musicianship and dedication which led me to write what I think may be one of my best works and also have an amazing performance of it.

Who or what are the most significant influences on your musical life and career as a composer?

My mum is perhaps one of the most significant people in forming who I am as a composer today. She introduced me to music when I was young, nurtured my music learning, took me to endless piano and flute lessons over the years, helped me write some of my most early piano works down, and encouraged me when I was a singer-songwriter in my teenage years.

Even before I was at an age where I could have piano lessons I was always drawn to play on the piano and mess around, and probably disturb my brother’s practise. Later I would write little pastiche type pieces, which then transformed into pop-songs in my teenage years and then melded back to classical music, though now of a very different kind of course. I was always distracted through my childhood with the sounds of music and would more often than not end up not practising because I stumbled upon a strange chord by accident.
I loved music and especially creating and composing music. However, I didn’t initially go into music. I had been taking science A-levels and I was drawn to perhaps what felt a more secure path so I started to do a Pharmacy degree at the University of Nottingham. In the first term I did not manage to find any time for music until one weekend when I went home to visit my parents. I started composing something on the piano, and my mum said how good it sounded. It probably wasn’t the most genius of things, but it helped me have a really important realisation that I needed to do music, because I needed to compose.

My mum helped me swap degree within the university and the next year I started my music degree and went onto do a PhD in composition.

What have been the greatest challenges of your career so far?

I have faced a number of challenges in becoming a composer over the years. I am originally from the East Midlands and had a state-school education. The educational practitioners through my school years, though many trying their best, did not have the expertise to prepare someone to do music at degree level. This has left me at a disadvantage to my more privileged colleagues over the years and I have always felt like I am catching up and on the back foot. To be honest, I did not even realise that people could still become composers. However, I was always certain that I wanted to create music. My background meant I didn’t have many connections to the professional industry, nor knowledge of creative pathways.
This lack of connections to the industry and forming of vital creative partnerships continued in my undergraduate and PhD, where I didn’t get much of a chance to work with professional ensembles. This made it difficult to break-out into the industry and get opportunities as my initial track record, and network, was limited. During my university years I was also discouraged from continuing my compositional studies for reasons grounded in misogynistic views. I have found comments like these comments, and the male-dominated composition sector, to be a challenging mental barrier to deal with. I have so often been the only woman, and the only person from a state-school background, on a composition course or development scheme, certainly in the UK.
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Not being able to see myself reflected in the people above me in the industry also contributed to difficulties in becoming a composer. It was a few years later I set up Illuminate Women’s Music, a chamber music touring and commissioning project, with a mission to illuminate living women composers through commissioning and performances. Our work demonstrates there is a rich heritage of music written by women in the past, and we are supporting the next generation of musical role models.

What are the special challenges/pleasures of working with particular musicians, singers, ensembles or orchestras?

Overall, it is usually an absolute pleasure to work with musicians, singers, ensembles and orchestras. It is what composers work towards and how our works come to life! We work in collaboration with performers to bring new soundworlds and pieces into the world. It can be challenging – sometimes things don’t work straight away – but these can be overcome if the performers on your side and they want to make something as close as possible to your vision happen. Of course, this takes compromise on the side of the composer as well.
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Once in a while you come across performers who are closed off and not willing to help find solutions and engage with a work properly. When this happens it is a good lesson for all, take note, and learn. And going forward, you can work with the musicians you do trust, and who trust you, in striving forward on creative and potentially unchartered territory.

Of which works are you most proud?
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I am very pleased to say as the years go on I am increasingly proud of more and more of my works, which seems to be a far more difficult thing for composers to say than you would hope!
One of the first pieces I was really proud of was my string quartet piece Eye o da hurricane. This piece foregrounds the viola as the protagonist in a story about a crofter’s wife trapped by the turmoil of the First World War and in a storm that surrounded her on Shetland. I was captivated by the way the viola could carry such impassioned, dramatic, and mournful lines and I knew I needed to return to writing for the viola.

How do you work?
When I compose I find it extremely helpful to have a clear concept for the piece before I begin. I often find the title for the piece before I start as this can give me a lot of stimulus from which I can develop musical ideas and a framework. I often first sit down with a blank piece of paper to plan the structure of the piece. This can take the form of written words and timings, but more often than not there are shapes, sketches and notes to myself about instruments or timbre. As much as possible I like to feel a connection to the instruments for which I am writing and will try to compose ideas on the instrument as much as I can, even if I can hardly play the instrument at all. This allows me to feel how the fingers sit and how the sound really resonates.

Can you tell us about your new Illuminate commissioned work?

My new work for Illuminate's spring season is called Tangled breath in winter air written for Trio Sonorite. It is divided into three movements - I. Breathe II. Inhale and III.Exhale

The work is a reflection on the sense of exhaustion I have been feeling, serving as a reminder to take time to breathe; to inhale and exhale; to be calm and reflect; to allow myself to be lost in the flow of creativity; to enjoy the beauty and emotion of that. The outer movements explore a reflective calm world rich in colour, expression and emotion, both in timbre and harmony. The middle movement - ' Inhale' - evokes a sense of failing to be calm, a reflection of being overwhelmed by the world.


Illuminate in conversation with Angela Elizabeth Slater

WATCH Kristina's vlog on her new work Two Pieces for Clarinet, Violoncello and Piano ​below:

I am a British-Sri Lankan composer, violinist and DJ based in London, due to begin my PhD research in Sri Lankan ritualistic and religious music at the University of Manchester, in September 2023. After receiving what I would now deem a life altering Christmas present at the age of seven, I trained as a Western Classical violinist in London. This passage into the world of music led me to perform in orchestras and smaller ensembles throughout childhood, while also studying the subject throughout school, sixth form and University, always with a keen interest in the creation of new sounds, while also deeply inspired by previous composers’ techniques and styles. My ambitions now lie in carving out my own compositional practice. 
 
Over the last three years, my compositions have been centred around the combination of Western and South Asian music idioms, old and new. My interest in cross-cultural composition was first sparked by a commission I received for the Commonwealth Resounds Awards Ceremony. The brief specified for the piece to take influence from the composer’s heritage, and so my duo for tabla and cello, ‘Sri Pada’, was born. Due to my training as a Western Classical violinist however, it was only after writing this piece that I discovered the tabla is not a common instrument in the southern region of the subcontinent. A very similar instrument does exist, however, in the Carnatic (South Indian Classical) music tradition: the mridangam. To me, this experience demonstrated the gap in my knowledge of South Asian music traditions, and so, given my Sri Lankan heritage, I became extremely eager to learn more.

​In 2020, during the final year of my undergraduate degree at the University of Manchester, I used the available, virtual resources to learn more about Carnatic music, a music tradition also practiced widely in Sri Lanka. I dedicated time to familiarising myself with the Carnatic ragas (modes), talas (time cycles), composition structure, performance practices and techniques, and everything else that interested me about this music idiom. In this year, I took a shining to Konnokol, an ancient art form which can be described as a verbal performance of percussion syllables. This practice formed my inspiration for the duo I submitted as part of my portfolio, ‘The Second Quarter of the Night’ for violin and percussion, which has yet to be performed!
 
 
During my part-time master’s, now focussing solely on Composition, I continued to take inspiration from both Western and South Asian music idioms. Still under lockdown restrictions, my compositional output during 2020/21 comprises of solo works, most notably, my ‘Caprice in Raga Kharaharapriya’ for solo violin – a virtuosic solo, centred around this Raga, which explores numerous timbres of both Western and South Asian violin performance. I am most pleased with outcome of my muted, senza vibrato, sliding main theme of the piece, which pays ode to the timbre produced by the Ravanahatha – an ancient Sri Lankan stringed instrument, also bowed; suggested to be an ancestor of the violin. This piece was premiered by the brilliant Marc Danel in April 2021. It was a dream come true to work with Marc, having watched him perform alongside The University of Manchester’s quartet in resident, Quatour Danel, throughout my undergraduate course. Owing much to his support, the piece has since received multiple international performances.

​Fast forward to the summer of 2022, where I was grateful to receive premieres of two new works. The first, a commissioned string quartet,  performed by the ADAM Quartet at the Nederlandse StrijkKwartet Academie (NSKA) Strijkkwartet Festival, in Utrecht, for their 20th Anniversary. ‘Flight UL505’ is named after the flight boarded by my cousin and her family as they immigrated to the UK in early March 2022. While composing the piece, I reflected deeply on the different challenges faced by my own parents, and the life they were leaving behind, when they had journeyed to the West. Given the emotional context of the work, it truly was a full circle moment when my parents and I drove to Utrecht for this first performance, where we resided between 1998-2001.

​The second piece to be premiered was my trio for Carnatic Indian vocalist, violin and vibraphone. This piece was written as part of the Manasamitra Mentoring Scheme 2021/22. The very talented Supriya Nagarajan not only mentored me throughout the year, but also performed my work alongside Sammy Okumachin (violin) and Tom Hall (vibraphone). Supriya was great to work with and I learned how to collaborate with musicians who do not read Western notation – a necessary skill for cross-cultural composers! She guided me on what information was needed in order for her to perform alongside others who would be reading from a score, and thus, I devised my own notation which worked very successfully! This piece focussed on the three types of Carnatic vocal improvisation: Alpana, Thanam and Swaram. Using the meditative Raga Bowli, I composed music for instruments which complimented both the strong attack and rhythmical of Thanam technique, as well as the melismatic and sustained nature of Alpana improvisation. Recording day was the make or break moment, and I’m pleased to share that this day, despite the challenges that came with it being the hottest day in 2022, filled me with confidence in my ability to bring these two contrasting music idioms together.
 

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Due to the meaning behind Carnatic Ragas, my recent compositional process has used the choice of Raga as a starting point for any piece. I had previously been interested in exploring the numerous musical languages which could be assigned to the various properties of water and its infinite forms; to this end, I began the compositional process by searching for an appropriate Raga. It was almost too perfect when I discovered Raga Amritavarshini, a pentatonic Raga which holds a legendary association with causing rain or showers. Although much of the imagery and initial inspiration for Varshini, the title of the work meaning goddess of rain, was derived from such ancient and programmatic tales, the repetitive musical material is drawn from the composer’s love of two contrasting, yet appropriate, musical traditions: Techno and Konnakol. Both music idioms are monotonous and enchanting, which I felt fitting for a piece essentially inspired by the idea of a rain dance. Both musics lend themselves to unapologetic repetition, creating the sense of ritual and inducing rain. The added challenge of recreating these musical elements for a concert hall performance was extremely satisfying. To compose a piece for Trio Sonorité which combines such an eclectic range of my musical inspirations has been extremely fun. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Illuminate Women’s Music for commissioning this work!

Written by Vinthya Perinpanathan

My music is often characterised by an exploration of timbre and the use of a small amount of material. I love creating intimate pieces which explore the materiality of sound, notions of close listening, perception, rawness, and instability.

I love working with unstable sounds - I think they are full of rich possibilities and remind me of things in our world which change over time without human control (e.g. rust). However one thing I’ve been grappling with is how to give performers more freedom to respond to, and embrace, the unpredictable ways in which unstable sounds can behave in performance. This has meant making sure the effectiveness of a piece does not depend on a sound being played in an overly defined and fixed way, when what it wants to do is change or be elusive.

In Overlapping Transformations for prepared baritone electric guitar, bass clarinet, violin and double bass (written for Prague Quiet Music Collective), I created sound maps for each instrument with carefully chosen sounds and potential relationships with other players. Each player decides how to get from one sound to another - they are encouraged to discover the malleable boundaries of their sounds and how these sounds might transform into one another. They also have prompts to explore certain variables should they wish. With duration and form more open, the players have more space to follow their curiosity and their ears, to be responsive to the sounds and each other in the moment. 

Score excerpt 1: Bass clarinet part from Overlapping Transformations 

In another piece, flare for solo piano (written for Ben Smith), space is also given for the pianist to make their own explorations with the sounds, though unlike Overlapping Transformations, these periods are more brief and are woven into a fixed structure. This piece investigates the natural harmonics found on only two keys of the piano. 

Score excerpt 2: flare (note: 8vb always, harmonics notated as sounding)
 
What I enjoyed about these two pieces is that they encourage the performer to listen closely and curiously to the intricate details of their sound and to explore its possibilities within a clearly defined sound-world, harmonic field and atmosphere.
 
For Illuminate’s Spring Season 2023, I’ve composed a piece called (left detail) for Trio Sonorité, consisting of clarinet, cello and piano. It’s a set of five miniatures, with all the material contained within the opening. What follows is a zooming in to this material as object - an invitation to look at it in more detail. Splinters of the opening are magnified, drawing our attention to the near synchronicities and rhythmic instabilities of the opening. 
 
This piece is a little different from what I’ve been making recently. Where my starting point would naturally be to explore the inside of the piano, with clarinet multiphonics and preparations on the cello, I gave myself a creative limitation to use only the conventional sounds of the instruments. Having not explored these sounds for several years now, I wanted to challenge my default ways of working and see what would happen. There’s also a return to shorter, more precise forms which seem to dissect the material, and intricate rhythms play a bigger role.
 
If you’d like to discuss any of the above in further detail, feel free to drop me an email: [email protected]
 
To read/hear more about my music, please go to: www.sylvialim.co