Kate Sagovsky on her creative practice focussing on mishearing and awkwardness

​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.

Composing with kids.