“We don’t know what the end goal is going to look like, but we all have faith in the process. We are all making the momentum, and it will go where it will go.”
Timothy Cape, Bastard Assignments
Bastard Assignments are Timothy Cape, Edward Henderson, Caitlin Rowley and Josh Spear — four composer-performers making experimental music. They work collaboratively and have developed a shared practice encompassing concert music, movement work, online pieces, text, video and improvisation. The members met while studying composition at Trinity Laban, and in 2013 started organising performances of their own work and providing a platform for other artists in London.
Bastard Assignments has performed around England, Ireland, Germany, the USA and Scandinavia, and have both performed live and created recordings for various programmes on BBC Radio, as well being profiled on Deutschlandfunk. In 2025 and 2026, they are touring PIGSPIGSPIGS — a music theatre piece commissioned by Borealis – a festival for experimental music (NO), Spor Festival (DK) and Wigmore Hall (UK) — as well as presenting music installation HOUSE, commissioned by Musik Installationen Nürnberg (DE).
During their lunch break for one of their rehearsals in London on an early February afternoon, Patrick Ellis sat down with the group after a morning rehearsal to discuss their upcoming commissions HOUSE and PIGSPIGSPIGS, Dorset farmers, collaborative narratives, working with a theatre director, and more…
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Patrick/PRXLUDES: Thank you for taking the time out of your rehearsal to have a chat with me. It was great to see the work in progress for HOUSE, one of the two new productions you’re doing. Do you have any set warm ups or rituals when you begin your rehearsals?
Edward Hederson: Well today we didn’t do anything…
Timothy Cape: We usually do a warm up, yeah.
Caitlin Rowley: Especially if we do more physical work.
Edward: Usually we do vocal warm ups, but today we did not for some reason — I don’t know why.
Tim: Often we start sessions by doing a stretch, warming up our voices…
Edward: And then walk around a bit. The material for HOUSE that we did in November, we were warming up and then just playing around, which then became the start of making the material for the piece.
Josh Spear: I can’t remember the order that it all happened in to be honest.
Edward: We were messing around with furniture by climbing over it, and coming up with these loops of moving action. At the time, we were not thinking that hard about it; it was just something that came out of just being together somehow.
Tim: So that’s for HOUSE. What we knew about that commission was that there was going to be this installation about a house, which was our idea in the first place — but that was fixed early on in the process. So then we had a concept that was fairly fixed, and we knew that we had to create material within that framework, which was the set. And then we had a few tables and chairs in the room and started working with those.
Josh: I think we were all pulling things from other stuff that we do. Ed has got a very good vocal warm up, and we’ve all done other bits and pieces. I have done some hours of butoh, so I thought “well, I can probably tell people where to move really slowly”. We started doing things like getting up over [a] period of 20 minutes from lying down, which was a nice thing to explore.
Patrick: When you have a commission or project, do you try and tie in some of these warmups which then become devised material?
Tim: No. The warmups are not really a big part of the later material typically — it just starts.
Edward: It does depend on the project though, because if we know that we are going to be singing, then we will warm up our voices and try to move around a bit. If we are coming up with something completely from scratch, it’s different. I remember in November, we were like “oh, let’s all just do some improvisation” — we were in a vehicle, and we were moving around and we had a bit [of] choreography, instructing each other “what if you did that, and you did that” — trying to get into a kind of flow state as quickly as possible, and then stuff rolls out of that. That was the first time actually that we had been…
Josh: Quite disciplined?
Edward: Yeah, but in a way not worried about a metastructure. We were just focused on making material.
Tim: But the metastructure had been fixed [beforehand] —
Caitlin: It hadn’t been fixed [at that point], but it had been discussed.
Tim: We knew that it was going to be a set with a house and the concept that we had at the time was fairly fixed.
Josh: I was definitely thinking about rooms and furniture, and we had to do something that uses that.
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Patrick: Concurrently to HOUSE, you are also working on PIGSPIGSPIGS — how did that piece start?
Tim: We decided that we were done with this mode of doing Bastard Assignments — which was a mixed bill on a night that featured pieces by all of us individually. We had done that for a few years, and we thought that we had gotten to the end of that; we now wanted to have this idea, from then on, of making fully collaborative work. A full night of that — one piece for a full show basically.
And then, we thought “okay, we are working on a much larger scale, how will we work with that?” — one of the ideas was using a narrative (which was a first for us). And that is how we then got into doing PIGS…
Edward: We had an idea of being a family, which was the first set of pitches that I sent out [to festivals]…
Caitlin: That was based around us.
Patrick: You mentioned that in the rehearsal that you each embodied these roles.
Tim: We have these dynamics in the group that are quite archetypal.
Edward: We had this idea of doing a work centred around family — creating something about England and an English family. And the initial idea was “okay, what if we did Hamlet” — which was purely an exercise to see if we could do it — we were not thinking we would do Hamlet, but we just needed a story.
Josh: It was quite freeing. We knew that we were going to chuck that away almost straight away, but it was great to work with that.
Edward: We started working with Hamlet, and then did the play, but it is all around an apple orchard in Kent. And so [there] was this father and son synopsis, with inheritance of the farm from the family — that was the start. After that, we carried on working with the material over a long period of time. We also drew inspiration from Josh’s family who are from Dorset, who were farmers and alcoholics.
Tim: The idea that they were pig farmers came up. It was originally an apple orchard family, but we thought that was boring, so we made them pig farmers — and then an idea came of one of the characters turning into a pig.
Caitlin: We were interested in incorporating magic.
Tim: So we thought about integrating that and then also then put the transformation into the piece.
Edward: For context: the dad transforms into a pig halfway through the story.
Timothy: And then afterwards, we realised that there are lots of [Ancient] Greek myths about alcoholic men being turned into pigs by a magical woman.
Josh: It also happens in Spirited Away, where the parents get turned into pigs.
Tim: But the myths are specifically to do with alcoholism, which is a funny irony. It was fun that we were inventing these little narratives that were actually really old. After we worked through this process, we then worked on the script over Zoom.
Early on, I was pushing back quite a lot against the idea of there being a script, and there being any sort of naturalised acting. I thought that we could do narrative in other ways. But in the end, I think that we’ve made a happy medium; there is a certain type of naturalised acting, but it’s also pretty Epic [in a Brechtian sense] as well.
Josh: I don’t really know if it’s epic…
Edward: But the piece is big, you know? You are quite like a chicken [Josh], it’s not that naturalistic… -laughs- We’ve had to refine the characters. The director, Kim Pearce, got our script and went through it in a natural type of way — and then was really able to help us try to find animal versions of these characters.
Josh: And that really appealed to her sensibilities [as a director]. She found a way in which we could perform it…
Edward: In a way that would make sense for us to do it. Together, we worked with the material which is a bit like The Archers, and a bit like this other hysterical, magical theme. She helped find us a register that we could inhabit, and would make sense for this music-charter world that also we really struggled with grappling with the form [of] initially.
It seemed to me during this whole process of making PIGS that it has been a process of being like: “We want to do a show, and it’s going to be a whole evening, and we are going to make it collaboratively — okay, what do we have to have in place during an hour and fifteen minute show?” We realised that the only way to frame this all together was to have some kind of story. And then we realised that if it has a story, then we were going to have to write some kind of narrative — which then led us to working out that we had to act the story. None of the process was like “oh, we are desperate to do a play”…
Josh: About Dorset!
-collective laughter-
Edward: But because of that series of realisations, it became the only thing that we could do that made sense for us to fill this idea.
Josh: Before that collaboration time, we spent a few hours with a whiteboard thinking about what we can do — as well as what we hate in other work that we see — and how we avoid doing that. I remember those constructive conversations with a lot of whiteboard action.
Edward: The first few months were in the autumn of 2022, and the whole process has been such an imaginative gear change. It’s taken all of that time in order to get our heads around it.
Tim: And not all of that time was making the piece. It was figuring out this new way of working and it sort of spilled into the piece.
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Patrick: How did working from a script influence the choreography?
Josh: There is a bit of a paradox, where if you have something very concrete in your mind — something that you can follow — you can actually hang quite weird things off of it. If you’ve got a clothes rail, you can hang all sorts of weird and wonderful clothes off it and it all holds together.
Edward: Using the idea of a narrative gives us and the audience something to follow; and if it works, it will allow us to be very weird and take some big risks and do the most extreme version of us. But it’s held within this story that will pull it all together, rather than the opposite. You see people making this contemporary theatrical-type work in this experimental way — where they are desperately trying to create meaning at every minute from scratch — but that is a super exhausting way of working for them and the audience. “Oh and now we are doing this completely different thing” — with completely different material that doesn’t mean anything. We just thought that for us, that method had become a very tired way of working.
Josh: It is really quite disappointing for everyone involved.
Edward: Or we would make these pieces that were 15 minutes long, that were fragmentary and repetitive — tornadic, basically. If you were going to create a performance that was an hour and a half long, you couldn’t do that… -laughs- Well, we felt that anyway.
Josh: It wasn’t a very easy decision to make, to be very pure with our approach and be very disciplined; we weren’t all agreed for some time. I think it was around six months…
Edward: Years at a time!
-collective laughter-
Patrick: When you were crafting this narrative, did you keep each other in check from deviating away from this new approach?
Edward: We had a few internal chats where we said “I don’t think this is going to work” — even when Kim was rehearsing with us. But I remember saying, “imagine that it’s going to work, and we’ll go from there…” -laughs-
Josh: But by that same time, we hadn’t arrived at an ending for the story and we hadn’t actually blocked anything.
Edward: It’s hugely challenging to have this long process where it develops very slowly over a long period of time, and you don’t know where you are going for years at a time. I remember saying for years, “well, it’s about a family and there’s some magic and you know, we’re not quite sure, maybe this, maybe that” — but gradually, it started to cement. Having Kim come in to direct was a really great experience for all of us; as she became in charge, she took over some kind of ownership of the piece. We didn’t have to argue over every point; she would intervene and say “hmm, I think that it should be like this”.
Patrick: Has this been the first time that you’ve had someone external come in?
Tim: Well, we’ve worked with a lot of people like Marcela Lucatelli and Neil Luck…
Edward: But not for a piece of ours.
Josh: It has been the first time where someone is really telling us what to do within our own work.
Tim: Her direction is going through a framework that we set up ourselves.
Josh: And we made all of the material too, really.
Tim: So Kim has helped us with facilitating the making of our own material.
Caitlin: Also somehow with her outside eye, it all started to gel a bit more. And it became suddenly very much more Bastard Assignments than it had been before that. It was very, very strange. -laughs-
Edward: But it’s difficult if you are in the middle of the process. Before [in previous works] we would film it and then look back at it, but that really breaks the flow of a rehearsal. It’s so much better when there is someone there who can say “do that movement over there” — you don’t have to pause.
Josh: I think we also had a sigh of relief after Kim had come, because she just gave us assurance really. She was also taking it seriously, that was the other thing.
Edward: It doesn’t feel like we were way out on a ledge on our own.
Tim: I am looking forward to working on it over the next two weeks. We will be putting these elements of script alongside some musical ideas that we composed; it will be interesting to see how we move between those worlds of character, as well [as] narrative, and then into the more abstract world of music.
[With] a lot of what we have done so far, we realised that we are working with quite traditional ways of using music. Often [with] how montages work in films, the music comes in and you see a little montage of images — you understand the time is passing, you understand you’re experiencing a character’s emotional turmoil, and the music is helping you with that. All of those ways that the music works in narrative is something that we all understand from watching movies. In many ways, we actually end up using those sorts of relationships using text.
Josh: There are very specific sections, but there are also very ambiguous parts too, I think. -laughs- We’ve charged up our performing personas with characters, and then we have started playing music — and that’s quite interesting.
Edward: That’s such a weird aspect about the form as it exists. I actually don’t know the answer to this yet, that is something that we will have to discover over the next few weeks.
Tim: We did have a bit of a discovery — because we created the text and the characters, we are wearing these costumes, and then sit down play our instruments. So the big question is “Are we still our characters when we play our instruments?” We thought that we were thinking “yes and no”, but then Edward does a big monologue — he sits down and sings whilst the rest of us were all playing instruments — [and] we thought “oh, he is still the character — he is still George”.
Josh: You can read it that way.
Tim: Kim thought that it was definitely George.
Edward: I pushed against the idea, but then I wrote a song for George, so then I thought “yeah, okay”. -laughs-
Tim: And then we just accepted it. But there are still little unknowns about it — what is the relationship when we switch roles between the acting and the performing?
Edward: What’s interesting is that Kim comes from more of a theatre background rather than music. So for us, [it’s] quite important to transition from “oh, I am a character” and then “I am me playing the role” — but I think if you are watching it from a theatre point of view, you don’t care about the distinctions between a composer and performer. You are just going to think “George is playing the piano now”.
Tim: That’s up for grabs in the next few weeks. That’s going to be quite an interesting thing to see unravel.
Josh: And I am quite open to that being evocative, rather than nailed down or abstract. I think that we have earnt it by being very specific with the narrative.
Patrick: Has the music that you have written been informed by embodying these characters?
Caitilin: There are some nice coincidences. With Edward and Josh, they are playing conventional instruments, whilst Tim and I [are] performing on electronic instruments. There are these relationships between old and new — which is a theme that has accidentally happened, and functions very well with the way that the characters relate to one another.
Josh: We had this residency in Ghent in 2023 [Bijloke Summer Academy], and we brought along a saxophone, a bass guitar and a [ROLI] Seaboard. But for me, the instruments didn’t bear enough relation to the story. So then I was pushing quite hard for us to take farmyard tools and use those as instruments — that’s where we are at now.
Tim: And Caitlin made an instrument…
Caitlin: Tim found this Instagram video of a sound artist named Michael Ridge who has what he calls an “Earth Block Instrument” — where you can attach twigs to a box and then bow them, which then gets picked up by a contact mic. I got in touch with Ridge and asked if I could have permission to expand on that; so I integrated a tiny Bela nano-computer1 into the box. It is like its own effects unit…
Tim: It produces a strange, droney, weird overtone sound using these twigs that have been processed with lots of reverb. With that, you then start thinking “it’s twigs, that’s to do with nature — and India is [the name of] the daughter and she’s communing with nature”. So you immediately start picking up these relationships between the narrative and the text — but the nice thing is that they are there already. The music is there to be what it wants to be; we have faith that we have provided this sort of set of meanings for the audience, and they can make the connections between it all.
Edward: Well, we’ll have to see, we won’t really know. -laughs- There is a big chunk of music in the piece — there’s fifteen minutes of music where we are playing quite hard, and that’s the first time where I will have a bit of sheet music [in this piece]. We will have to see over the next few weeks what the vibe is for that. The feeling that I get at the moment is that it will be a moment of discovery for us. We will take it to different audiences and places — really, we will be performing this to more of a theatre crowd rather than music-y places.
Patrick: Speaking of music venues, you will be performing this next year at Wigmore Hall. Is there scope for the work to be adapted after a few performances?
Edward: The idea of it is that we shove it in some suitcases and take it away, really. That’s the idea. Partly, that was informed by having to perform it for Wigmore Hall. They made it clear to us about the requirements: it has to be quite light with equipment, props, costumes, amps on the stage (no complicated tech) — so we use things that we can carry with us. There’s no full lighting rig or anything like that. We’d like to perform it more — I keep joking about doing a twenty year West End run, so we’ll see about that. Broadway maybe…
-collective laughter-
Josh: It’s not totally ridiculous..
Cailtin: Stranger things have happened.
Josh: Like Back to the Future: The Musical, that was pretty strange…
-collective laughter-
Edward: I don’t know really, we are open to it [more performances]. It’s very much within the music world, but we are reaching out a bit. Seeing whether it makes sense to people in other contexts would be exciting. I hope that you don’t have to be a new music nerd to enjoy it.
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Patrick: You were working on HOUSE earlier today. Obviously from seeing a very small, surreal and rather suggestive scene from that…
Caitlin: -laughs-
Patrick: You start with these household objects as the impetus of the piece — it is still early days, but where are you going to take this?
Josh: Well, the first performance is racing towards us…
Caitlin: We are about halfway through it.
Edward: We are performing it in May.
Josh: But this is a really totally different and new approach for us again, and we have even more of a creative team.
Tim: This was an approach that was offered to us rather than something that we came up with ourselves.
Edward: It’s for this festival in Nuremberg — Musik Installationen — which is based around installations. When they approached us, I immediately thought “oh, it’s going to be all day obviously”; it turns out that it does not have to be all day, as other acts are doing two or three hour pieces…
Tim: A three hour piece is not an installation.
-collective laughter-
Edward: Exactly. So we are doing it all day. We have a set and live in it all day, and the piece went on from that…
Caitlin: It’s sort of become vaguely about my house, which has had a rather curious history of decay and neglect… -laughs- I did some research into it a number of years ago, so that’s formed a loose sort of framework.
Tim: Your house is a really old Georgian house. Then we sort of thought “well, do we really want to go back into the 1800s?”
Edward: With the current idea, there are two timelines that are happening simultaneously. One is just the day, as it happens — we start with breakfast and then end with dinner, essentially time as it exists — and simultaneously, we are moving forwards through “date time” from 1950 to the present day. And so all of the objects, costumes and music are changing as we move through each era. There are going to be these recurring little vignettes of ideas, featuring different people from different time zones, doing the same thing. I think it’s got similar themes [as PIGSPIGSPIGS] in terms of relationships, families, love, death, breaking up. These essential relationship situations.
The organisers [Musik Installationen] are going to put our performance space in an abandoned shopping centre in Nuremberg. And Rudy — our designer — is going to build a house set of some kind. During the performance we are going to “live” there and do ordinary things like cleaning, eating and lazing around; but on top of that, we are also rehearsing these tightly choreographed interludes, which you saw us working on earlier.
Tim: The installation will have moments where sometimes it will be quite bare — just the four of us living in the house doing pretty mundane things — and then there will be these very performative moments, [which] will come back in different guises with different music in different eras. So these quite camp and jolly high performative moments are juxtaposed with these much more mundane, everyday stuff.
Josh: The flame that is under my butt is creating dynamics through the time — that’s what I always think about [when working on a new project]. So there’s lots of activity where it is very fast and then very slow.
Edward: We’ve tried very slow material, as well as faster ideas. So this register has emerged where there is this hysterical, camp vibe — who the hell knew that was going to come up? It just emerged. I think of Benny Hill; this sort of old fashioned, 70s, end of the pier, sex comedy, Carry On stuff. -laughs- Who knows where that came from?
Patrick: So there’s this juxtaposition between these very natural, mundane activities and the short choreographed, rehearsed scenes…
Josh: It’s quite pragmatic versus totally instructed.
Caitlin: When we are making and eating lunch, that will be the sound.
Edward: I think what is emerging [from our rehearsals] is that there is a counterpoint between different elements; there will be three of us doing normal activities whilst the other is moving in super slow motion, and then two other people start doing a different choreography, so it produces these different layers of activity.
Tim: When we were looking at the history of Caitlin’s house, what was interesting is when you look at the wallpaper, you see the layers of the other wallpaper and then [further on] the bricks behind it. And then you see all the maintenance of the building through the eras. And also (like in a lot of houses) you have a modern piece of furniture in the room, and then an older chair beside it. Houses are these things that are already haunted. They are these multiple timelines existing at once; the past is there with you in the walls. Then with our performance, there will be these juxtapositions of very different performance modes — us in the present day doing stuff — but there is also this shadow of the past existing.
Edward: Which I also think is apparent in PIGS as well. There is this veneer of middle-class Englishness, and underneath, there is something totally dysfunctional within the family. But also underneath that there is this prehistoric aura that is still affecting the characters which is causing major problems.
Tim: My character in PIGS is pregnant, and she is connected with the land. To me, the whole piece is about selling the land, because the alcoholic father has fucked up the farm and wants to sell it to save money,. But this little marshy, little paddock that he wants to sell (in my mind at least) has a prehistoric tomb there — and there is some form of ancient magic. There’s this old pagan weirdness under it.
Edward: But there’s also the theme of what it is to just live. How do you make a life? How do you build a house for yourself?
Josh: We drew up a plan for the half a million pound version of HOUSE — which is a sort of Alexander Schubert virtual garden, with LCD screens and smoke. The audience go in and we would have all of these projections of Caitlin’s wallpaper…
Edward: Next year!
-collective laughter-
Patrick: Have any of these elements ever appeared in previous works of yours? Or is it with these two larger productions that it is entirely new subject matter?
Tim: We did Josh’s werewolf piece, FEED, which had ghosts and haunting themes included.
Caitlin: My work has often used quite mundane things.
Edward: Ordinary life — there’s quite a lot of that. The comedy/horror line is often there. It’s fun, but not funny; which I think gets to quite a hysterical tone, but in a light register, which I really enjoy.
I feel like now we are a bit older, we had a break from the last set of big works, because of the pandemic and us reconfiguring. In that time, I had a kid, you guys [Josh and Tim] moved out of London, and the UK, so these two new works are about [that] time of our life. Caitlin less so…
-collective laughter-
But definitely for the three of us [Edward, Josh and Tim]. We are a similar age, mid-30s. I mean, PIGS is about having a child. I was having a child in 2022, so there is all of this fear around having a kid, pregnancy and what that is. I think some of the activating energy of the PIGS story is the fear of changelings — which is another kind of old trope. If you gave birth to something that was not you, not of you. That’s a typical fear of birth — and that is ultimately how the show ends. -laughs-
Tim: Spoiler!
Edward: So that’s why it makes sense to me. The three of us [Edward, Josh and Tim] are in a phase of life where we are making houses, which has become this central part of our lives. We have a larger canvas with these two pieces to work on; there is now this confidence where we are like, “we can tell you a story”, whereas before it was just like “we are going to work on this material and just think about the material”. Material doesn’t mean anything — it’s just material!
Caitlin: But the material always meant something. -laughs- It wasn’t necessarily sensible though.
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Patrick: You’ve now been working together for twelve years. If you were to talk about each other in a positive way…
-collective laughter-
Patrick: …What qualities do you each bring, especially with these two larger commissions?
Tim: With PIGS it’s quite easy to talk about. In my mind, the narrative idea was driven by Josh, who has a taste for theatre…
Josh: My interests are from musical theatre, really. I’ve done a lot of work with plays, so I am used to being sat in a room with actors and a director.
Tim: Edward came up with quite a lot of instrumental music when we were in Bijloke — which shaped the musical energy.
Edward: I sort of got the ball rolling with the whole thing. I tried to be like “okay, this is what we are going to do now”… -laughs- I was just telling them all to go and do stuff — “This is going to be the next three years of your life, guys!”
Josh: Well, I had been saying “let’s do a big piece” when we were at Snape Maltings [in 2018].
Tim: And with Caitlin building the twig instrument, but also the objects and fitting them with the narrative quite nicely. Then I wrote these songs that frame the piece somehow…
Josh: Edward is good at dropping us in a rainforest and saying “how the hell are we going to get out of here?” with material. You are just happy to drop in — whilst I need more of an overview. Do you know what I mean?
Edward: Not really. -laughs-
Patrick: You need a fixed map from point A to point B, whereas Ed can start anywhere and say “let’s just start doing this”.
Josh: You [Edward] have a trust that something will emerge from the activity, but I want to know what it is so I can do the activity.
Edward: With my dad… When he’s cooking, he will be chopping stuff up, and I will be like “Dad, what are you making for dinner?” — and he would reply “I don’t know yet”. That is a little bit how I like to work: you just start, and then what it is just emerges. You don’t even need to worry about what it is. I think that this is the sort of thing where we ended up working on these pieces quite back and forth.
Josh: But we sort of meet in the middle. I suppose that’s the strength.
Patrick: Which must have created a lot of great results. You were talking earlier about how there is this narrative line, which then accommodates this freedom.
Edward: It’s coming up with structures that hold us all somehow. It got to a point also between 2020 and 2022 where our individual personal careers were taking off in various different ways, and it was seeming less possible to feed the personal artistic interests through the group — which was what we were doing before. It got to a point where it just made much more sense, where we were [all like] “okay, let’s just do our own thing” — and then we would come together with collective projects. And there is not the same tension with individual artistic voices and the group voice. So we each have our individual voices quite established — everyone has projects all of the time — and then we come together with this special thing. That was what made a really big difference, particularly for me; I realised that I could just have fun in Bastard Assignments!
Josh: Don’t you think your individual voice still comes through anyway?
Edward: Somehow, I think that it still comes through strongly, because you’re not so worried about it. This is the strength from working on these two pieces — it’s just a group dynamic. We’re not thinking, “What’s my thing? What’s not my thing?” The idea of writing this piano ballad as part of my own practice is so unthinkable to me, but I’ve done it in Bastard Assignments… Well, I wrote it as George, but it opens up something when I am feeding ideas into the group — “What if George sang a song? What if I wrote some lyrics and sang a tune?” It’s crazy, this heavy pressure that we put on ourselves in the past — “Oh, what’s my idea?”
Josh: “How do I hold onto that?”
Edward: “What’s my work?” — it just kills the piece.
Tim: It was a big decision to just decide that it was just a collective piece. It was very freeing.
Edward: But again, that was [when] I think I said “this will all be by Bastard Assignments… okay, now how does that work?” -laughs- We’re making a big piece and we are writing it together.
Tim: I thought that would make things more difficult, but it actually made things easy.
Josh: Admittedly, it was hard at the beginning though.
Caitlin: I actually still struggle with this new process.
Patrick: When I was observing the rehearsal earlier, you would collectively throw ideas into the hat in real time…
Caitlin: I think that we’ve always been like that during rehearsals since the beginning. Back in the day, Tim would bring a piece — we would be working on Tim’s piece, and then he would make the final decision about what went into it. Whereas now, we are all making those decisions.
Edward: I used to feel like I needed to argue every little point, but now, because of the scale of these pieces, I think it will all wash out and come together in the end. The momentum is driving in a particular direction, so whichever small decision we make, it doesn’t matter too much, because we are all going in the same direction anyway. I trust them all, we are all right, we’ve just got different versions of that.
Josh: We each have a shared vision of the end goal, especially towards the latter stages of the creation of these works, because we can now hurtle towards that goal in the same direction.
Tim: We don’t know what the end goal is going to look like, but we all have faith in the process. We are all making the momentum, and it will go where it will go.
Edward: But that’s what making serious work is like! Imagine if you started and you knew what it was all going to be like; it doesn’t really work like that, it is difficult to keep that alive. I think what kept it going is that we trust each other more.
Tim: I think within the classical music world, there is such a defined idea of a composer and performer — and the performer’s job is to say “well, what are you looking for here?” -laughs-
Edward: With anything, when you’re the composer, and other people are not the composer, you’re in charge. Whilst it’s nice to be a bit in charge, it’s also not that interesting to us.
–
HOUSE receives its premiere at Musik Installationen, Nuremberg, on 30 May and 1 June – learn more and get tickets:
Learn more about Bastard Assignments and their members:
- https://bastardassignments.com/
- https://timothycape.net/
- https://edward-henderson.com/
- https://caitlinrowley.com/
- https://thejoshspear.com/
Footnotes:
- The use of the Bela Mini has been supported by Cyborg Soloists, a research project led by Zubin Kanga, supported by a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship and Royal Holloway, University of London. ↩︎
