“I try to think about what the music world will look like in 50 years — and if we don’t focus on female composers who are alive now, will the same thing happen to them, and they’ll only get acknowledged once they’re dead?”
Rose McLachlan
We’re incredibly excited to speak with Rose McLachlan, prize-winning pianist and one of the pioneering forces behind 22 Nocturnes: an anthology of pieces published by EVC Music in 2023, focused on celebrating new works by women composers. In collaboration with London Piano Festival, the set of 22 new works will be premiered in its entirety on the 5th October at King’s Place.
22 Nocturnes for Chopin by Women Composers, published by EVC Music in 2023, is a creative project supporting the pitch by Rose McLachlan. Each piece in the anthology is inspired by a nocturne by Chopin; almost every Chopin piano work has a dedication to a woman, and this anthology of piano pieces written by women composers completes the circle. Combined with the EVC’s idea to publish previously unpublished women composers, the anthology became a “landmark publication, one which deserves to make a huge mark in our musical lives, and which I believe will make a seminal impact in the piano world.” (pianodao.com)
EVC created a wider a social media campaign, #CallToWomenComposers, receiving 80+ submissions from women aged 14+ from around the world; a panel consisting of Rose, Vick Bain, Andrew Eales, Anna Heller, and Kathryn Page selected the final works. More information about the idea for the anthology and selection of the pieces can be found here.
Born in Cheshire to a family of musicians in 2002, Rose McLachlan studied at Chetham’s School of Music and the Royal Northern College of Music with Helen Krizos, and currently studies at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. She has performed in venues over the UK, including the Bridgewater Hall, the Stoller Hall and St-Martin-in-the-Fields. She has appeared as a soloist with orchestra on numerous occasions, including with the BBC Concert Orchestra and the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra.
We’re joined by Rose McLachlan, alongside two composers on the 22 Nocturnes project — Lucy Hackett and Charlotte Botterill — to discuss jazz harmony, incorporating diverse styles, audience accessibility, and tackling the gender disparities in classical music…
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Zyggy/PRXLUDES: We’re talking ahead of the performance of your 22 Nocturnes project with EVC Music at London Piano Festival, taking place on the 5th October at King’s Place. Rose — can you tell me a bit about how your involvement in this project came about, and the impetus to work with 22 women composers?
Rose McLachlan: It started in my final year at the Royal Northern College of Music. One of the requirements of the degree was to create a project. I was thinking about what I would do. At the beginning, I was thinking of playing all the Chopin Nocturnes; but then [after] discussing with people, the idea of commissioning compositions to go alongside the Nocturnes came about. [ed. More information about Rose and EVC Music’s conception of the project can be found at this article by Andrew Eales.] I’ve always been very inspired by women composers — I’ve played quite a bit from the past — but I was very interested in exploring new compositions. I’m inspired by my father, who’s done quite a lot of this — recording composers that aren’t known at all.
All [of] the Chopin Nocturnes are dedicated to women — a lot of romantic interests of Chopin — so I thought it would be interesting to flip it. Actually, some of the compositions are dedicated to men; one is dedicated to someone’s husband.
Zyggy: Lucy, Charlotte — how did you both first learn about the 22 Nocturnes project, and what spurred you to get involved?
Lucy Hackett: I’m a member of the Fawcett Society; and I read about it in one of their email newsletters in the ‘Women’s Voices’ round up section at the end. I’m not very involved in the classical music world anymore, though I had a classical music background when I was younger, and used to love playing the Chopin Nocturnes. I’m now a composer writing music for various ensembles and mixed media projects, and I don’t play solo piano much anymore either — so I thought this would be a lovely opportunity to go back to my classical piano roots and write a piece inspired by Chopin.
Charlotte Botterill: I was trying to remember how I came across it. I think it was on the Piano Network UK Facebook group, which is mostly for piano teachers and piano fanatics. Elena [Cobb]’s quite active on there; I think it was a post from her. Similar to Lucy — I loved playing Chopin when I was a teenager. When you’re a bit of an emo teen, there’s something about the darkness of the Chopin Nocturnes which really works, which really speaks to you. When I compose, quite a lot of the time, I use composing to express myself emotionally; so being able to tap into the emotional element [of] Chopin’s Nocturnes appealed to me as well.
Zyggy: On a similar note — Rose, what is it about the Nocturnes particularly that you were drawn to, and what was it about Charlotte’s and Lucy’s compositions which appealed to you as a performer?
Rose: I’ve always been [a] massive fan of Chopin. I started playing the Nocturnes at 10. They’re accessible to everyone. The mood they capture is immediate — you feel like you’re drawn into this sound world. A way I was looking at choosing the pieces was to try and have varied atmospheres — some of the [pieces] are very inspired by Chopin, some of them not as much.
For example, Charlotte’s piece [‘Nocturne in Fm: waves collide with the precipice’]: when I first listened to it and played it, it really stood out, because it was not what I was expecting at all — in a very good way. All the textures, tonality, and harmony [were] really interesting, but still had the same elements of Chopin: lyricism, cantabile in the melody. The left hand was very similar, [with] arpeggios and broken chords. So that really stood out. And Lucy’s [‘Nocturne: The Moth’], I think I was immediately taken into the atmosphere in the first few bars. It had a very improvisatory feel, which I think was a nice contrast to some of the others; this felt very free, and I loved the atmosphere it created.
Zyggy: Lucy and Charlotte, how did you approach the brief of writing something inspired by Chopin’s Nocturnes, and how does that relate to your wider compositional practice?
Lucy: It’s really interesting to hear Rose talk about it, a number of the elements she has mentioned were certainly part of my compositional process. I’m a musician who improvises a lot, in my performance work and in the compositional process; and since moving on from my more classical background, I’ve diversified into other genres, jazz included. I think this shows in my piece — how the third section builds upon the first section melodically and harmonically, and expands upon those earlier musical ideas, is quite an improvisational technique. So it’s interesting to hear you picked up on that, Rose!
In my current work, I would probably describe myself as a media composer and music producer. I often write music to visuals, so it’s not unusual for me to use my visual imagination when composing without moving images. So the night time imagery that a nocturne conjures up inspired me. I also quite like to create a narrative with my music, whether I’m writing to picture or not; so I called my piece ‘The Moth’, and I was thinking about a moths’ nocturnal journey. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the idea of celestial navigation — navigating by the stars, and the moon — but some people say that moths use this technique and I love that thought. So I had all this imagery going on, which I hope translated a little bit through the mood of the music — the dark, to the light, and back to the dark again.
Charlotte: I approached it as a sort of “challenge” — not [a] challenge exactly, but from the viewpoint of: how can I create something which is like Chopin, but without composing a pastiche of Chopin? How I can do something that has the feel of Chopin, but is more contemporary, more relevant, and that sounds like me — not just a nice piano piece that could have been written by anyone who knows how to compose. So I started it off very much [as] a Chopin-istic sort of thing, so it’s clear who the piece is inspired by. And as the piece goes along, I try to move away from that as much as possible harmonically, and add in different dissonances, jazz harmonies — but at the same time, trying to keep something which ties everything together, to keep the piece somewhat related to Chopin. It’s exactly what Rose said: I kept these lyrical melodies and left hand arpeggios, but changed things harmonically [and] rhythmically.
When I’m composing now, I like to write music which takes a place — or particular moment in time — and has my memory, my interpretation, or some kind of emotion which is meaningful to me. Which is why I think Chopin appealed to me. My particular nocturne is about a moment sitting on a cliff, overlooking the sea — that’s why it’s got the subtitle ‘waves collide with the precipice’ — everything that was going on around that time and place, and the memory [of] that. It’s a little bit turbulent, like the sea. I guess it’s a nice lived metaphor; the place and the life situation matched up quite well at that time.
Zyggy: Something that’s struck me is that both of you [Lucy and Charlotte] mentioned jazz as something that influenced your compositions. I understand a couple of the other pieces in the ‘22 Nocturnes’ series have jazz influences, as well…
Rose: I love listening to jazz, and I’m so glad that a few nocturnes have this influence. One of the nocturnes in the book is by Zoe Rahman, who’s a well-known jazz pianist. Playing her piece was something very new for me. I felt it was very inspired by Chick Corea; I love his piano music. And playing Lucy’s nocturne, as well — I think it really has offered a new style of playing to me. I’ve had to try and embody being a jazz musician.
Lucy: This particular project was an interesting one for me because as I mentioned earlier, I’m not really in the classical world anymore; and as a composer now, outside of this project, my musical influences are drawn from everywhere and everything. So I think elements of that do come through in my piece, though I was keen for it to reflect Chopin’s earlier influence on me too.
Charlotte: I like using lots of different influences and different styles, because I listen to so much different music. You subconsciously take on elements; things will filter in, you will absorb them, and then they’ll come out in your own music in some form, whether or not it’s the way you were intending it to — or if you were even intending to at all. From a conscious perspective, I like blending different styles of music in my own composing practice; by blending different types of styles, you’ve got a greater harmonic palette to choose from, you can express yourself in different ways. You’ve got this whole extended toolkit you can use — and whatever it is you want to say, you can pick and choose the right sounds, and you start mixing them together.
Lucy: It’s quite an exciting process, isn’t it? Bringing these different elements together. I rarely write for solo piano these days, writing more for ensembles and quite a bit of music production work. So creating soundscapes using different instruments, and developing ideas through the use of music technology, forms the basis of a lot of my compositional work currently. So I was trying to bring ideas of texture and form from my electronic music into this piano piece as well. I really enjoyed doing my own interpretation of that.
Zyggy: Rose — tell me a bit about what it was like bringing these works to life?
Rose: Some of the composers wrote a small paragraph about their piece, which was really interesting to see — my first impression of what I thought the piece might be based on, and comparing it to theirs. They’re all so different; learning them has been really exciting, because you’re never bored. For example, Nancy Litten has written this fun, bouncy [piece] called ‘Fred and Bertie’s Night-Time Stroll’, based on the F minor Nocturne; and having played the F minor Nocturne, and then learning this, it’s very fun to do. It’s really interesting to compare them.
Zyggy: As an anthology, and performing these pieces at London Piano Festival — how are you curating the programme? Do you see these pieces as a set?
Rose: They can really work either as a set, or by themselves. Last month, I played three of them by themselves — and I think they all stand alone really well. [You] don’t have to learn all of them to play them, at all. The book goes from easiest to hardest, in terms of difficulty; it’s intermediate to advanced [in difficulty]. This is the first time I will play them all as a set; and at the moment, I’m trying to figure out an order. It would be nice to mix and match. I’m excited to play them all and see what happens.
Zyggy: Something you touched on is the kind of accessibility of these pieces — with the book going from easiest to hardest. For all three of you — how important is accessibility, consciously, in each of your practices? In terms of expanding audiences and reach.
Lucy: For me, it’s exciting to bring something different to an audience. Obviously, the classical music canon contains some amazing music and it’s great to still be able to access it and hear it performed. But to me, it’s much more exciting to hear music by new composers. There’s a freshness to it, the music has a feeling of relevance, you can hear a broader range of musical influences and you get a much more diverse range of composers.
Charlotte: It’s relevant to the times we live in today. Not saying that the other one’s irrelevant — but it’s a different sort of relevance.
Lucy: We have our own lived experience, don’t we? Musically yes, but in life as well. I expect my lived experience is completely different to Chopin’s… and I would think my music reflects that. And I think it’s exciting to hear music from new composers, because you can get a sense of that.
Charlotte: I think it’s quite interesting to think about audience accessibility. For all of us in [the] music world, I think most of us are quite happy — or open-minded — to go to a contemporary music concert which is a bit more “experimental” than you would hear in your world, day-to-day. But for the typical non-concertgoer, if they went straight into one of those, they’re often kind of put off — they’re a bit like “what is this? I don’t understand what is going on, there’s too much strange sound.” So I’ve been thinking about this recently: as a composer, how much responsibility do we have to try and make it accessible to a wider audience? Not just our niche of people who already enjoy going to experimental contemporary concerts. It’s needed to sustain the genre, if you like — all the discussions we’ve been having recently about sustaining the future of classical music. Do you compromise a little on what you want to do as a composer? Do you have more “accessible” [pieces] so that people who don’t go to concerts can enjoy it, take something from it without being put off? That’s an interesting internal discussion I’ve been having recently.
Rose: It’s interesting. At conservatoires around the UK, in recent years, it’s become more common in exams and competitions to ask you to include a woman composer, or a global majority composer. I think this is really great, because especially pianists… Even though we have such a large repertoire, we all end up playing the same things. -laughs-
We should try and change our thought process on choosing repertoire. I think it’s great that people are playing more Clara Schumann, more [Amy] Beach — making them more in the spotlight now. But I try to think about what the music world will look like in 50 years — and if we don’t focus on female composers and global majority composers who are alive now, will the same thing happen to them, and they’ll only get acknowledged once they’re dead? I think anybody would live a fulfilled life playing Bach, Brahms, these amazing composers… But you learn so much by meeting these amazing composers from around the world, that I would never have met if this project didn’t happen — and we have this book we can play forever.
Zyggy: That really taps into the extreme gender disparities in programming in classical music — particularly the lack of representation for women composers across the board. In what ways would you like to see these disparities addressed in the classical music world, and how has the experience of 22 Nocturnes helped to address these issues for you?
Rose: This might just be my opinion — but perhaps people are playing women composers in concerts because they feel like they have to, to be politically correct. “Oh, we have to put a woman composer [here] so we’ve met that requirement.” I just hope there’ll be a shift, so that people don’t see women composers — and contemporary composers — as just supplementary. That they do stand by themselves. We have a responsibility, as performers, to explore and discover these composers for ourselves. They do have so much value, and just because they’re “not played”, we assume they’re “not as good” — but if that was true, we wouldn’t have these amazing composers from the past that weren’t acknowledged in their day.
Lucy: It’s such a huge topic isn’t it — and there isn’t an easy solution. Visibility is important: but like Rose says, it can feel a bit like tokenism making sure there’s at least one piece by a woman performed… it’s a starting point, I suppose, but it isn’t enough. In the film scoring world — particularly in contemporary film scoring — we have composers like Hildur Guðnadóttir, Anna Meredith… and they are really the ones making strides creatively. There does seem to be a shift towards women and minority composers in this area — I don’t know why or how this is happening, but it is happening and the music they are creating is extraordinary. But really the statistics about women in the music industry are still so shocking; there’s so much that needs to be done.
Rose: Maybe it can start from when you first learn music. I know that ABRSM [are] including a lot more women composers now, and this will really help in the future — [that] you don’t discover women composers when you’re 18, you realise they’re around when you’re really young and you’re brought up thinking about that. For example, I played a piece by Lili Boulanger; it was on the Grade 8 list, she was the only woman on there. At the time, I didn’t think about it — “oh, this is a really nice piece” — so that would be a way to think about it. That’s not the first thing you think: it’s a wonderful piece of music — and it’s written by a woman.
Charlotte: I think that’s the end goal, isn’t it? We want people to be thinking “what a lovely piece of music”, and not “this is a woman’s piece of music”. I agree with what you were saying, Rose: it feels tokenistic that you have your one female composer, one contemporary composer, in programming. It feels like a box that has to be ticked. You’d want to get to the point where it’s a 50/50 kind of thing. It begins with education; I teach the piano, as well, [and] I will try and give my students as much repertoire by different composers as possible — including female composers. I won’t necessarily put it in front of them and say “this piece is by a woman composer” — at the age of 9, it goes over their heads — but they subtly hear that this one has a woman’s name, this one has a man’s name. It’s a normal thing for them.
Growing up learning the piano, I don’t think I had that male-female composer divide in the same way. For me, it was more like: “Concert works are by men, and educational work is by women.” I grew up on a diet of Pam Wedgwood. -laughs- It felt like there [were] a lot of female composers, but all doing the educational stuff. The idea of “you’re a woman, so you’re nurturing, and all the big strong concert repertoire is by men”. So having concert repertoire — serious concert repertoire — by women in the exam boards is going to address that.
Thinking about barrier[s] to emerging composers… I read something recently which was saying that a lot of the commissioning guidelines, funding opportunities, composer opportunities, have an age restriction of 30. Having an age restriction of 30 affects women more than it does for men; a lot of us have been brought up to not put ourselves first, not put our career goals first. Whatever other people in your life want — whether it’s your relationship, your family things, whatever you think you should be doing. So maybe you delay going into that career as a composer until you’re a bit more sure of yourself — which is often in your late twenties, or early thirties. Having that age restriction of 30 is very frustrating. That’s one boundary from a commissioning point of view that could be looked at, and addressed.
Lucy: I’d be interested to hear your experiences about this project and other initiatives like this one — that are exclusively for women. I experienced one or two interesting comments about the idea of a project being exclusively for women — about it being discriminatory — and I found it really frustrating to hear that sort of feedback, and hard to articulate how essential it is that we have projects like this. It’s so needed. We wish it wasn’t needed, but it is essential. Did either of you [Rose and Charlotte] have any negative feedback or comments about the idea?
Rose: I did have some negative feedback — mainly from men who felt it was unfair that they couldn’t be included. I don’t want it to feel like now, only women are going to get opportunities — but I don’t think it will ever get to that point. Maybe that’s me being naive, but I really doubt that. In an ideal world, everybody should have the opportunity, but it hasn’t been like that in the past. We shouldn’t be made to feel guilty for creating this anthology.
Charlotte: If you ask them how many anthologies for piano music by only male composers there are… you can’t count them all, right? There’s literally so many. And then you say, how many anthologies of piano music are there by only female composers? Outside of this project, I can think of two others — which are historical ones by Piano Music She Wrote, who document piano music by female composers on IMSLP. But how many big, important female composer anthologies are there — besides ours?
Lucy: Initiatives like this are essential to readdress the balance. It’s not about tipping the balance, it’s about wanting equality. So thank you, Rose — you’re doing good work!
Zyggy: Following on from your performance at London Piano Festival — what are the next steps for you, Rose?
Rose: After the concert, I still want to keep playing these pieces. Not necessarily as a full set, but to programme them how I would any other piece. I think some concert organisers have strict requirements on what you can play — in a concert last year, I proposed music by Debussy and Ravel, and they said “no, that’s too modern”. -laughs- I was like, hmm? So there can be barriers, definitely. My goal is to record them soon, as well; and to keep researching, and finding new compositions.
I play with Esther Abrami, the violinist. It’s always interesting to play with her, because she is so passionate about female composers. She told me that she never played a piece by a woman composer until she was 18, or 19. We played a piece by Angela Morley; I’d never heard of her before. She’s written amazing music. So exploring women composers not just as a solo pianist, but in chamber and ensemble work is something I would like to explore more.
Zyggy: Lucy, Charlotte — what’s next on the horizons for you?
Lucy: This year I was selected for the Sound and Music Seed Award, so I am currently developing a project with them, exploring the connection between music, narrative and animated visuals — more specifically using non-verbal animated characters. I will be developing a collection of original compositions that engage with the visuals, which challenge an audience’s perception of the character and it’s development, as well as the story and the space in which they exist.
Charlotte: I’m just coming to the end of Adopt a Music Creator. I’m going into rehearsals with that; so composition-wise, I’m going to have a bit more time to look at some of my other personal projects. When I went travelling in South America a couple of years ago, I took a lot of little sound recordings from different places. I want to integrate some of those into composition somewhere; doing musical memories, or “musical souvenirs”. When you go on holiday, you take photos and buy souvenirs — but we don’t have sound souvenirs in the same way. I guess I brought home sound souvenirs, and I want to create them into something.
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Rose McLachlan’s performance of 22 Nocturnes, featuring pieces by Lucy Hackett and Charlotte Botterill, takes place on 5th October at King’s Place, London, as part of London Piano Festival – learn more and get tickets at:
The 22 Nocturnes anthology is available to buy on EVC Music:
Learn more about Rose, Lucy, and Charlotte at:
This article was last updated on 20th September 2024.
