“They are probably some of the most willing musicians or performers that I’ve ever come across. They were very willing to put their preconceptions aside [to] really try to enter into our different worlds and what we were trying to create.”
Will Harmer
The National Youth Choir is an organisation at the forefront of choral music in the UK. Having recently celebrated their 40th Anniversary last year at the Royal Albert Hall, they run a variety of choirs, vocal ensembles, and choral projects, consisting of over 1000 members from across the UK. The choirs’ music has been released on labels such as NMC Recordings, and broadcast on BBC1, ITV, BBC Radio 3, Classic FM, and Scala Radio. Central to the National Youth Choir is their Young Composers programme — an annual scheme for composers aged 18-29 creating high-quality and imaginative new music for vocal ensembles.
National Youth Choir’s Young Composers of 2023 consist of Alex Tay, Millicent James, Will Harmer, and Emily Hazrati. Over the course of the year, all four composers participated in residencies, concerts, and collaborated with both the National Youth Choir and artists on their Fellowship Programme. Following the National Youth Choir’s 40th Anniversary theme of “celebration”, the four each composed two large-scale choral works which were recorded and released as part of an album with the choir.
Following the release of their album, ‘Young Composers 5’, on NMC Recordings in January 2024, Alex, Millicent, Will, and Emily are preparing for their 2024 Showcase, broadcasting on the 28th February from the VOCES8 Centre. Ahead of this Showcase, Patrick Ellis caught up with the four composers over Zoom, discussing the physicality of choirs, Gen Z, modern madrigals, celebrating community, openness, and more…
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Patrick/PRXLUDES: Hi Alex, Millicent, Will, and Emily! Thank you for finding the time to have a chat. What were some of your favourite choral pieces when you were growing up and/or starting out in composition?
Emily Hazrati: Ones that stood out to me were pieces that I listened to a long time after I started writing for choirs or voices. Writing for upper voices was one of my routes into composition – so I’ve always been quite familiar with [voices]. But [in] my second year of undergraduate, my composition teacher Toby Young introduced me to this amazing piece by Joby Talbot named ‘Path of Miracles’, and I remember listening to it and thinking, “Oh my god, the sheer scale of this!” The fact that you could get an excessive quality within such a large choir of voices was something that wasn’t really familiar to me at the time, and so I pinpoint that as something quite formative to me in the genre of choral music.
The other one that springs to mind is James MacMillan’s ‘Seven Last Words from The Cross’ for similar reasons. I think the two pieces both have quite religious themes to them, and I wasn’t necessarily interested in that aspect of the piece in a concrete way, not being a religious person myself. But it was more the sonic qualities and massiveness that were really inspiring.
Will Harmer: One that springs to mind which was when I was lent a CD called ‘Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares’ [The Mystery of Bulgarian Voices]. It was this series of world music from the 1980s and 90s (during the big commercialisation of that music); I listened to this music for upper voices which was really dissonant and unlike anything I had heard when I was singing in a kids choir or going to church. That was an eye-opener for what a choir could do outside of the English choral tradition.
Millicent James: For me, there’s a few pieces. ‘The Blue Bird’ [conducted] by John Rutter: I heard that when I was studying A-Level music, but I was blown away by how serene the whole feeling of the piece was. It’s because it’s quite a pastoral piece, it’s very nature [based] and I’m just a hippy sometimes for nature… -laughs- ‘Song for Athene’ by John Tavener, as well. Both of those pieces take you to a different place; those two pieces are really poignant for me and achieve a sense of calm in my head for however long each piece is.
Alex Tay: I did write some works for choirs, but I wouldn’t say I was a choral musician. I played the violin and I’d say I love Christmas music, you can’t get away from the choral Christmas Music, like Veni, Veni, Emmanuel – that’s top tier. I remember singing Monteverdi’s ‘Vespers’, I had an amazing head of music in my sixth form and we did Britten’s ‘Rejoice in the Lamb’. That was quite a surreal text when you are a teenager. Faure’s ‘Requiem’ was pretty formative…
I’ve gotten more into choral music now. I would say when I was younger I looked down on choral music, now I know how hard it is to write. I was just quite dismissive of choral music – King’s College has a B Choir and we sang stuff that made you want to puke a bit – but afterwards I discovered that there’s loads of really cool choral music like stuff by Pelle Gudmundsen Holmgreen, or Sciarrino, or Ruth Crawford Seeger. It’s just very exciting to find out a format that you pigeonholed in one way actually has the capability to do things that you didn’t think were possible.
Will: If I could add one extra: Benjamin Britten’s ‘A Hymn to the Virgin’. I remember screeching through the tenor part of that in my school choir, I don’t think we performed it very well. But I’ve since listened to it with the original manuscript in Aldeburgh when we went to the Britten Pears archives. But that simplicity and it’s really beautiful, like Millicent was saying, it takes you to a different place.
Emily: And I love the spatialisation in ‘Hymn to the Virgin’, as well. For me that amplifies the sense of taking you to another dimension within that piece, where you’ve got those two separate entities and layers weaving in and out with each other.
Has choral writing always been an intrinsic part of your compositional journeys so far? Or has it been an aspect of writing that you have always wanted to explore further?
Millicent: It’s been a side thing that I’ve always wanted to try. This programme has been such a great opportunity to workshop and see what it is like to compose for different ranges of voices and sizes of choirs, as well. You’ve got the full choir which can produce this massive sound, featuring people with all sorts of amazing ranges in their voices with such clear, precise technique, which is wild to witness.
I think choral music is a very physical thing, but to be in the room when that’s happening, is like, “Woah!”. It’s always been something that I have wanted to incorporate, as I mainly do orchestral pieces – but voices have always been something I wanted to figure out how to interweave into my music, and now I know how to do it. -laughs-
Alex: Not really. I wrote one choral piece – it was a setting of Wilfred Owen’s text of Arms and the Boy, I did that in Cambridge – but it’s been something that has been quite alien to me. So this programme has been a huge learning experience. What I learnt through the whole thing was that even though I have sung a lot in choirs, I am not a choral musician, whatever that means; and I wasn’t a naturally born choral composer when I started the scheme.
Will: For me, it’s probably both of those things. I grew up singing in choirs, and I really like working text, because it gives some kind of framework to structure your music around. So I’ve liked writing for voices in that sense, I do probably more choral pieces than I’ve had instrumental pieces before this programme. But for me, it was about thinking of more interesting ways of using voices that move away from that comfort zone of more traditional textures: that bed of sound, ways of using the voices, textures, that kind of thing. So that has been the thing that has really developed for me through this year.
Emily: I’d say I’m quite similar to Will in that sense. I’ve written for choirs and voices more than anything else before doing this scheme, but it was in quite a set way. Most of my experience in writing for choirs was in a liturgical context – and specifically, writing for chapel choirs. Like Will, I work really well with text and narrative more broadly, and I think what changed just before embarking on this scheme was I started to do a lot of work writing operas and working with artists from other disciplines. That gave me a lot more of a holistic perspective on who I was as a composer and what it means to make art from my point of view. I saw this programme as an opportunity to bring those sides of my practice into a medium I was already familiar with, and create something which was a bit more authentic to that very collaborative and multidisciplinary side to my work.
The big choir piece was an amazing opportunity to bring a writer into the process (for me, that was my writer-collaborator Nazli Tabatabai-Khatambakhsh) – and to think about ways to set the text in an authentic way, but also thinking about sound worlds in a broader sense as well. The piece for the fellows was using a process of collaborating and generating text from them, which I hadn’t really tried before in a choral context – because I had quite a set view of what that was before. So I guess that’s probably my perspective on where I’ve come from and where the National Youth Choir fits in to all of that.
Millicent: One really unique thing about the National Youth Choir programme is that I’ve never really experienced this before, but we all gelled and understood each other so well. So what makes this ever more special is that you find some live friends through this scheme. What Emily was saying completely sums it up so well; it’s such a friendly and open way to learn how to really get stuck into how to write for choral forces. Coming up with text is always fun as well, and having that collaborative space to be able to work with someone else or explore a different avenue of how to come up with text.
Will: They are probably some of the most willing musicians or performers that I’ve ever come across. They were very willing to put their preconceptions aside [to] really try to enter into our different worlds and what we were trying to create. It must be to do with the organisation that they do such a wide range of stuff and prepare the singers for that – and as a composer it is just the best environment to be stepping into.
Millicent: Its own entity in this little bubble: “Here’s a safe space, do what you want with that.” -laughs-
Emily: And that’s such a rarity when you’re working as a composer today. You come across an ensemble or an organisation, and there’s [often] a very set way of doing things where you have to adapt your practice to that. So for National Youth Choir to turn to us and say “You can do whatever you want, whatever helps you be creative”… I was always in disbelief at the free rein that we were given.
Millicent: It was like, “This was your space to shine and to truly be yourself.” You didn’t have to put on any facade to try and please the choir. It was more: no, you write what you like and we’ll work with you. It was really fun.
When it comes to The National Youth Choir, were you aware of their extensive body of work that they had done with both emerging composers?
Alex: The way the scheme is structured is very social. What they do a great job of is dovetailing the programmes [of the previous and current years]; so we got to meet Ben Nobuto, Claire Victoria Roberts, Tom Metcalf, and Sun Keting. You’re immediately aware that you are a part of this whole community.
Emily: I’d definitely agree with Alex’s thoughts – especially the dovetailing of the two cohorts that they do during the showcase each year. I remember finding it really inspiring listening to all of our predecessors’ music – both as pieces in their own right, but also thinking, “How are we going to follow on from this…” -laughs- which felt like quite a challenge at the time because they were all astonishing pieces.
But as you said, that history is very apparent. Even before that, I remember the first NYCGB Young Composers release coming out, and Shruthi Rajasekar’s ‘Numbers’ is the first track on that album. When I listened to it, I had never heard anything like that before in choral music; and I think from then on I had my eye on the music that was coming out of that scheme. And from that, I had a bit more awareness of what the National Youth Choir was commissioning more broadly, as well.
Millicent: When it came to my experience, I was very much living under a rock and had no clue about the previous programmes. -laughs- I didn’t know what a Conservatoire was until I was applying to UCAS until that very moment [of applying]: “Conservatoire? What is that? Okay, let’s have a look into it”.
As Alex and Emily have both said, the way they dovetailed the two programmes with the showcase was so good. On that day of the showcase when we were there; not only was it the first time I was meeting everyone else (because I wasn’t able to attend the first meeting) – which was so fun – [but] then listening to all of these amazing singers blast out all of these really intricate pieces… “Woah, there’s so many different techniques throughout each piece” that you kind of forget exists. -laughs- I’d say that for me, I really loved Ben’s and Rockey [Sun Keting]’s pieces; those two really stood out to me and I was like, “Woah, so that’s how high the bar is!” -laughs-
All of their voices were so cool. It was just such a nice and friendly environment to develop yourself not only as a composer, but also as a person and many other things as well. It’s a really good scheme. I would do it again if I could relive last year and make the most of the residencies – because I slept in too many times and I didn’t get to see the dancercise!
As part of the programme you all attended the 40th Anniversary concert for the National Youth Choir at the Royal Albert Hall. What were your highlights?
Will: [At] the Royal Albert Hall anniversary concert, there were several standout pieces. They performed Shruthi’s piece ‘Numbers’ but there was also Kerry Andrew’s ‘who we are’; that definitely stood out to me as a very powerful, communicative piece [ed. It was broadly written in response to the UK’s refugee crisis in 2015] – and like Millicent said earlier, [that piece] really embraced the singing being part of the whole body.
The National Youth 15-18 Years Choir performed Eric Whitacre’s ‘Leonardo Dreams Of His Flying Machine’ about Leonardo Da Vinci’s experiments with flying. I don’t think that was composed specifically for the National Youth Choirs, but their approach to that was “wow” – as an organisation, they’ve got a really exciting thing going on, there are 16 year old singers nailing these quite complex textures.
Emily: I think I felt really similar to Will about Kerry Andrew’s ‘who we are’, with the way that they used body percussion in that piece. I often find that body percussion in choral music is used as a tag-on, which is sometimes not as meaningful as a choral piece that really utilises the whole body. The other piece that the 15-18 Choir performed was by Haitian-American composer Sydney Guillaume, titled ‘Kalinda’ – which means “dance” – and I remember listening to it and feeling so invigorated not just by the piece itself, but also the performance.
For all of us, that piece and the different commissions and young composer programme alumni pieces that we came across; they definitely galvanised us to make what we did.
Millicent: In addition to those pieces, I think we all had a similar reaction to when we heard Until It’s Gone [with The Swingles] – that was so good!
Emily: I still listen to that loads now.
Millicent: And ‘Precious Lord’ as well, when we all listened to that in Aldeburgh – that was beautiful.
Will: It’s probably some of the catchiest music that I’ve ever heard. I sometimes get that piece stuck in my head and I haven’t listened to it in months, but then suddenly… -starts signing-
Emily: But also, we sat in on so many rehearsals during the Easter Residency. You could tell how much they loved the music through the way they performed it. That in itself was quite emotional, let alone the subject matter. If I had just heard that piece [Until It’s Gone] as a record for the first time, I’m not sure I would have been as emotional about it as having experienced it in the rehearsal process and then seeing the choir put it together.
Alex: I think it was something that was really worthwhile – experiencing all of those pieces and seeing them be put together. I don’t think you would be able to tell by just listening; you really had to experience it. I remember we’d go and watch these rehearsals – and in those sessions, we would be studying the score, looking at the chord spacing. I just remember Millicent looking at the score of Ben Parry’s ‘Flame’ and saying, “There’s no extensions, there’s no extensions, it’s just triads!” -laughs-
With ‘Precious Lord’ there’s a really epic chord; it’s something about the spacing in the arrangement which you can only perceive when you are in the room. You can feel it vibrating through you. It was really important for us to be there and realise “that really works” – even if our pieces were completely different. But if I want to gesturally achieve a similar thing, then I’m going to take it from here.
When you were announced as the four names, were there any immediate ideas that you wanted to explore with the choir?
Millicent: Initially for me, I said to Ruth [Evans] it would be great to get some African percussion in my piece. I love including djembes and that sound world in general; I think because I grew up watching The Lion King so much and I was like, “I really like this soundworld…” -laughs- So I was like, “I want to have the choir and then all of these djembes in the background”; it didn’t happen, but it was always an idea to have a lead choral voice. But for the future of that piece, it doesn’t have to be “me”; it can be anyone that can just sit into that role.
And in the fellows piece, I always wanted to have a Bobby McFerrin acapella style. -sings- It was inspired when we were walking around Aldeburgh – I took a little video and we were all just jamming, just friends jamming together, and we were all just singing what was coming into our minds…
Alex: When I first heard the news, I was like, “Why have they picked me? I don’t really write choral music…” And then immediately I thought about how old I feel compared to the National Youth Choir – which immediately gave me ideas for the larger choir piece. It came instantaneously. It was a case of: “They’re young, they’re going to mock me” – and I just thought they’d probably like the stuff I write if I let it loose. I decided to meet them halfway and just let them roast the shit out of me.
Emily: I think that what I ended up writing on the scheme was quite different from what I had envisioned writing. When we had our introduction session we were all asked to send a couple of choral pieces in advance: one [of] which was a work that we felt an affinity to in some way, and then another which connected to the theme of celebration, which was the creative theme we were given for the programme. I brought along two pieces which are both environmental. [One was] Caroline Shaw’s ‘and the swallow’, which is such a stunning piece; it’s quite simple material, but the way she’s voiced it is so evocative of these big spaces and the birds flying through. I also brought along ‘The Blue Bird’ by [Charles Villiers] Stanford, which had a tangential link to celebration, even though it doesn’t sound like a very celebratory piece.
What I actually ended up writing for National Youth Choir 18-25 was quite upbeat and driven, even though it has this air of urgency. It was about the connections between people and the power of that collective when they come together, as opposed to the qualities of each individual. Nazli and I had this shared image of a fraying Persian rug [that] I guess enforced that narrative I feel we had. But at its core, it’s a piece about protest, and how that links to people as a collective. Often, I don’t really have a set idea that I go forward with until I’ve really embedded myself within the ensemble. Because the National Youth Choir was so great at facilitating this open environment, I think that’s how my pieces emerged so different[ly] from my initial ideas.
Will: Similarly to Emily, I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to end up writing when I first found out. But one thing has stuck through: when we found out the theme was celebration, one of the pieces I brought along was a madrigal, because I thought of the music I had sung before [and] it was often quite celebratory. My choir director at uni was very into madrigals from the Elizabeathen period, so he got us to sing lots of those and I think that was a bit of an influence on me.
So I thought to myself: “Well, the challenge could be that because the theme is celebration.” It would be quite different to what I write in terms of choral music. I’ve often been drawn to the quite atmospheric and ethereal sounds of choirs, and so it’s quite a different thing having to think about “could I do something quite upbeat?” – the madrigal idea seemed like a good way into that. My fellowship piece ended up being all about that; I took text from existing madrigals (or translations from the Italian versions of madrigals) and then put them into a completely different musical context. I enjoyed that meeting of old and new. I felt that I was able to put my own spin on it with a sense of still taking in some of the characteristics of that music.
Alex: I thought for your big choir piece [Will], it was such a great response to the theme! It was like a single image of fireworks, and that allowed you to delve into all of the extended techniques and the concept of the album. But I think what really blew me away was that you really understood what a big mass of voices can do when you tell people to do a similar thing but give them the licence to add their own dimension to it – like the whistling and clusters, which are so timbrally and colouristically rich.
Will: The whistling thing was something I had no idea [of] how it was going to sound. I think in Millicent’s piece [‘Children of the Forest’] it works really well. But it’s one of those things that I think you can only really know when you’re in that room.
Millicent: I know that I always wanted to incorporate some sort of nature, celebratory theme, so figuring out how to do the bird song was quite a fun challenge and they all just lapped it up. -laughs- It was so cool just to hear that.
Alex: I really liked your approach to how you did that as well. I remember you showing me sketches in Logic, where you would sing it in yourself – which was a very different approach to me with that initial starting point in writing – and as a result, the outcome was going to be different.
Millicent: It’s really cool to hear how everyone’s pieces came to life. I remember when we were all sat outside and going through each other’s scores, and it was really nice just to have a peer go “This works really well here”, [or] “this maybe needs to be translated onto the paper in a clearer way that the choir can understand.” It was just really nice to have that moment of just working together in an almost collaborative way.
Emily: I think that was when we had our workshops in late July or early August. We were sitting on a bench going through the recordings of our workshops and giving each other feedback. But we also did the same in The Red House on our retreat at Aldeburgh. I remember just feeling so unbelievably grateful that all four of us could really openly talk to each other about all our different ideas, [and] how we could really refine what we’d written.
I’ve never been in an environment where we’ve had that space as composers; where we can just chat through each other’s music in real-time and make these little tweaks. You also got to see into people’s minds in a way you never would normally. Even when composers are talking to each other, a lot of the time it’s when you are going to a concert – you’re going through the motions of discussing the usual stuff that you do at a composer work-related event. It’s never been quite so honed in and focused as what we’ve experienced being on that retreat and the residencies. I think it is also fortunate that we gelled so well as a four; it really does feel like we’ve been able to be open with each other. It can be quite wearing in an environment where you’re spending lots of time together, so it was nice to get along so well.
The theme of the programme year was “celebration”; how did you take that theme and use it as an impetus for the two works that you each wrote?
Millicent: Celebrating people, community; celebrating everyone’s individuality and celebrating one’s self, celebrating a safe space. Again, that was in the background – just channelling the whole year, making sure that everyone’s individual voices can be heard and [that] you make wonderful memories when you meet new people and when you find new friends.
Alex: For me, I’m too British to do anything too earnestly. So that’s why I went [for] this Gen-Z piece with this quite circular meta-ironic thing of, “Okay, I’m going to uplift you [the choir] by letting you make fun of me” – and in the process, letting Gen Z clown upon us [Millennials]. And I guess the Fellows piece was a celebration of my mum and my sister; again I couldn’t really do it head on – it was a very poetic text with lots of images. When writing the text, I was really inspired by E.E Cummings who writes really earnestly about love but in this coded and hyper-condensed way. I wanted to do a similar thing, and fill each word with so much meaning that you couldn’t really know what it was about – but somehow could only mean what it does because of how it’s written. I wanted to show my love for them in a way that felt genuine; but the only way I felt I could do that authentically was by coding what I meant in these Sad Nature Images, which incidentally I think would be a cool piece title.
Emily: It’s interesting how the theme of celebration translated quite differently in our fellows pieces. I guess [that] the interpretation was a lot more intimate, hearing both Alex and Millicent talking just now. For my fellowship piece, I took the idea of celebration from a slightly different angle; I wanted to celebrate the fellows and who they are as people and their background with what they had to say about things. So I gave the fellows a prompt on the subject of home and got them to record themselves in a location which they see as their “first” or “true” home; talking about the qualities of this place, what it means to them, what they’re curious about. And all four of the fellows came up with such different, but really detailed responses, which gave me so much of an insight into them.
The term “celebration”, when you look into the etymology of it, can mean “honoured by a great assembly” – which for me resonated as a gathering of people in one place, all “honouring” the same thing. So that’s why I was inspired to do these prompts about place for the fellows. Essentially I took their responses and used fragments of them for the text I would set, and the whole of their responses as inspiration for the four sections of my piece.
With the 18-25 choir piece, there were two things that were particularly inspired by the theme of celebration. One was this dance framework, very inspired by the Sydney Guillaume piece that I had heard at the Royal Albert Hall; but I had also been listening to lots of Iranian folk music at the time. There was one track – ‘Botorai’, by this amazing [group] called Rastak – which takes a specific Iranian folk music from Kurdistan and arranges it on traditional Persian instruments. I just felt so inspired by this particular track in the album and that kind of went into the mix as well. I suppose I approached the theme from a similar place to Millicent, but with a different take on it; in both Nazli’s text and the way that filtered into the collaboration, but also more generally with the way I used the voices. There’s a big difference between the way I wrote for the voices, when I wrote these full chordal textures, to some sections where you have the voices split in all sorts of different layers and this kind of fabric of different fragments breaking apart from each other.
Will: For me, it’s two quite clear celebration images [that] came to mind. The main choir piece was fireworks, and the bringing together of people through celebration. That was something where I thought fireworks encapsulated an event – it’s something that is quite visual, but also auditory. I explored those sounds, but also the shapes and the explosions [from fireworks] in the choir through different textures.
The text that I chose for it was from travel writing, which was fun to use, because it’s talking about a particular celebration that really had an impact on this person writing (Charlotte Anne Eaton). [It] had that feeling of trying to place the listener in a particular time and place. I combined that with chemical elements – so that it is a very contrasting set of words.
[I explored] a more intimate view of celebration through the madrigal idiom. There was a bit more influence of folk and close harmony pop songs coming into that, which I enjoyed working with and I think was a nice foil to the very old music of madrigals. Madrigals often are used for celebratory occasions – elements like the spring and celebrating the love between two people – and then the final one [text] is about celebrating singing as a thing. So it was quite a nice reflection on some of the good things about the programme, as well as the madrigal form in general.
How important was it to have regular sessions with the choir and amongst yourselves throughout the programme? It’s rare to have an opportunity that encompasses workshops, residencies, recording sessions and promotion. How did this have an impact on your pieces and your development since as composers?
Millicent: I still didn’t know what I wanted to do up until the Aldeburgh residency. There were so many things going around in my head, there’s so many amazing pieces that we’ve heard, and I was just a bit overwhelmed by it – a good overwhelm. There was just so much to do. But what was really nice about Aldeburgh is that we all kind of composed in the same space as each other; Alex was sat on the desk by the door, Will was on a massive table, I was taking ownership of the little corner by the window and Emily was by the piano at first, but then eventually moved to upstairs…
Emily: I ran away to my room… -laughs-
Millicent: But it was so funny because we could just hear you stomping and clapping things in the distance – and it was really nice, “Emily is trying to figure out the rhythm again…” -laughs-
Alex: I really should mention my mega-talented collaborator Alice Frecknall, who wrote the text for ‘DEEP (HUH?!)’. The important thing was that it was a mutual process; we just wouldn’t have the text of the piece without the choir – they have access to a culture that’s totally separate from us [the differences between Gen Z and Millennials]. We had this questionnaire for the choir which was full of things like photos of J.Lo, Justin Timberlake, Britney, people wearing jeggings and jeans, [with questions asking] “What do you think of this?”, “What do you think of Millennials?” In the piece, there’s a bit that goes, “woke illuminati, with a penchant for lattés, (slurp, sip)” and that’s from an answer to “describe a Millennial?” by a member of the choir.
A huge moment for me was when I was feeling really down about the piece after the first workshop, and then just one member of the choir coming up to me and saying: “Look, we know it’s really chaotic, but we know there’s something here” – an expression of investment for the piece – which I had not really had before from people who I have worked with. And then of course, we would show each other our scores, etc. during the process; I remember with Millicent, I’d asked her what her thoughts were with the vibe of the piece, etc. and I’d asked Will and Emily, “How do I make this idea which I have chorally feasible?”
Will: For me, it was hearing the ideas and the textures. Knowing that we had the opportunity to do the workshop means that you have a bit more confidence to say “I’m going to try something that I’m less than 50% sure is going to work.” Whereas for the fellows piece, that was more of a case of communicating with them individually and working out earlier in the scheme what you were going to do with that. Particularly with the main choir piece, I remember [that] the members were very open about things that weren’t clearly notated – which is the response you really need [as a composer] – so that’s a testament to them and to the National Youth Choir that there was a space for them to be able to express that.
There were a couple of things [from the choir] asking me to clarify things, to simplify things, working out what I wanted to do and having people asking questions about the music. It then helps you to frame that and say “actually, I’m doing this because of this” – but there might be something else where you think, “why am I doing that? Why on earth is that in the piece?” It makes you think about it a bit more. So having those discussions were massively helpful for just honing the ideas.
Millicent: Ben Parry and Emily Dickens were really good at asking the right questions in the right way .They would ask things like, “What’s the overall feel that you would like us to convey?” – and that just helped you think “what is it that I am trying to express here?” It was that open and friendly space to really try things; if you were in your comfort zone, they would encourage you a bit further from that. [It] felt like they showed genuine interest in helping you compose a piece that you would be happy with and be a new challenge (for me at least) with writing on that scale for choir.
Emily: I definitely found that experience of being guided by the conductors and Emily [Dickens] was really important in conjunction [with] working with the choir. One specific example I would give is for my 18-25 choir piece ‘One Thousand Threads’; there is a dance section where it really starts to fully break out into some energetic material, with all of the parts taking on different ostinato figures and rhythms. I had started to write it out, but I’d not penned in quite a few of the details in terms of articulations and expressive markings. I had the choir do it for the first time and asked them “is there anything you want to see more out of what I have given to you so far?” and they all said instantly: “We really like this last dance section.”
So I expanded that out for the second workshop – which Emily led – and in that session, she really talked into a lot of detail about colour and really pushed me in that moment to think, “What do I actually want here? What kind of sound am I going for with these figures and textures I’ve written?” That meant when we were finalising our pieces in The Red House, I could really pinpoint those details a little bit more and also tell the singers what I wanted; so that when it got to the recording process, a lot of the choir knew what it was that I was going for. That made such a big difference to all of our pieces in terms of how they got recorded, just by having the sounds in their minds, which really honed in our ideas a lot more.
Alex: Ben [Parry] was very generous, and sat down with me for an hour and helped me make the score so much more readable. The choir feedback as well: I remember in an early draft during the workshops, members of the choir felt that there wasn’t enough of the word “slay” in the piece – because it’s such an integral word to Gen Z vocabulary. It was just quite fun with how that came out.
Millicent: I found looking at each other’s scores was one of the most helpful things. Alex, for example: your score was so detailed, you zoomed in on exactly what you wanted and you could see all of the detail on a micro and level of things, it was really quite amazing. And so that was really helpful to see how others articulated, communicated and conceptualised what they wanted, and to share that with other people was really good. There was a lot of nice collaboration from everyone basically, from the choir inputting some really useful things as well: just like – “Oh, this section is really nice here”, “I think you should develop that bit there”, “Oh, it sounds like a lullaby” – and then you would go off on the little things that the choir would say. All of them were just so friendly – during lunchtime and dinnertime, we could just sit amongst the choir and gather feedback from them there as well.
Alex: It was great to see the choir really understanding the piece conceptually; I really wasn’t sure if that was going to be the case, so it was a relief when talking with members to hear them tell me my inner thoughts about the concept. Honestly, I also just thought I was writing normal choir music, but members seemed to find something kooky about it and frequently told me that it was a pretty direct expression of my personality, which doesn’t always happen.
Will: It was definitely the highlight of the whole scheme for me to have both works professionally recorded – it was certainly the pinnacle of an amazing working relationship with the groups that each of us had as the Young Composers. I have gained a lot of confidence in my composition for voices through the scheme, and the disc I feel showcases a more personal idiom than I had achieved in previous works for choir. I aim to push further to create a unique sound with voices that makes me more distinctive as a composer, and I can’t wait to start on my next choral piece very soon!
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Reserve your place at National Youth Choir’s online Showcase 2024 here:
National Youth Choir’s Young Composers 5, featuring music by Alex, Millicent, Will, and Emily, is currently available now on NMC Recordings:
Check out our previous interviews with Alex, Millicent, Will, and Emily:
- https://prxludes.net/alex-tay
- https://prxludes.net/millicent-james
- https://prxludes.net/cheltenham-2
- https://prxludes.net/emily-hazrati
References/Links:
- Joby Talbot, ‘Path of Miracles: I. Roncesvalles’ (2005)
- James MacMillan, ‘Seven Last Words from the Cross’ (1993)
- ‘Le Mystère de Voix Bulgares’, full performance at KEXP (2017)
- Charles Villiers Stanford, ‘The Blue Bird’ (1910), performed by John Rutter and the Cambridge Singers
- John Tavener, ‘Song for Athene’ (1997)
- ‘Veni, Veni Emmanuel’, performed by the Gesualdo Six
- Monteverdi, ‘Vespers of 1610’ (1610)
- Benjamin Britten, ‘Rejoice in the Lamb’ (1943)
- Gabriel Fauré, ‘Requiem’, Op. 48 (1887-1890)
- Benjamin Britten, ‘A Hymn to the Virgin’ (1930)
- Wilfred Owen, Arms and the Boy
- Shruthi Rajasekar, ‘Numbers’ (2019)
- Ben Nobuto, ‘Sol’ (2023)
- Sun Keting, ‘Máng Gǔ’ (2023)
- Kerry Andrew, ‘who we are’ (2016), performed by the National Youth Choir
- Eric Whitacre, ‘Leonardo Dreams of his Flying Machine’ (2010)
- Sydney Guillaume, ‘Kalinda’ (2003)
- National Youth Choir and The Swingles, Until It’s Gone — Music for Our Planet (2022)
- Thomas Dorsey (arr. Arnold Sevier), ‘Precious Lord’, performed by the National Youth Choir
- Ben Parry, ‘Flame’ (2012)
- Caroline Shaw, ‘and the swallow’ (2017)
- Rastak, ‘Botorai’ (2016)
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[…] is currently a composer on the National Youth Choir’s 2025 Emerging Professional Artists programme, writing two new pieces to be premiered and […]