A deaf composer (not Beethoven!)

(Picture of Sonia Allori taken by Donald Ellis Ross - @donaldross)

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. ​

Violet_notes · Curiouser

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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