“That’s something which I am trying very hard to do with this piece; making sure the tools that you are using are fun. There’s no benefit to torturing yourself by working in a certain way.”
Hugo Bell
Hugo Bell is a composer, performer and artist based in London. Coming from a background in performance, his practice is heavily reliant on collaborative relationships from a wide variety of creative backgrounds including choreographers, early music practitioners, visual artists, electronic musicians and instrument builders. Hugo’s music has been presented across Europe and North America by groups including hand werk, Ensemble Proton Bern, Ensemble TaG, XTRO Percussion, Residentie Orkest, and New European Ensemble, among others. Hugo is a LSO Soundhub composer of 2024/25; he was a Britten Sinfonia Opus 1 composer in 2021, and has been awarded the Conlon Foundation Prize (2021), Philip Bates Prize (2017) and NCEM & BBC Young Composer Award (2014). Having studied as an organist and conductor at Newcastle University and Gothenburg Academy of Music, Hugo studied composition at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and Royal Conservatoire The Hague, where his studies were generously supported by the Leverhulme Trust.
On 16th May 2025, Hugo’s new work ‘Black Box Communion’ will be premiered at St. John’s Waterloo, as part of the LSO Soundhub Showcase. Ahead of the premiere, Patrick Ellis visited Hugo at his home studio in London to discuss his new work, heartbeats as time, DMX lighting, learning new skills, reworking pieces, and being “wired differently”…
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Patrick/PRXLUDES: Hi Hugo! You’ve been busy working on a new work that will be a part of this year’s LSO Soundhub showcase. Tell me about the piece and how the working process has been so far…
It’s a continuation of an idea that started out as part of a project with Ensemble Proton Bern, which was originally an audience participation concert. The challenge with that was getting the audience involved in the piece without the piece relying on them too much. The solution that I came up with was using photoplethysmography sensors — PPG [ed. a form of pulse sensor] — which measures the circulation of red blood cells in your bloodstream. Normally it is on your fingertip, and it sends an infrared light through; when a red blood cell goes through it blocks a signal, and when it passes, it releases it — and from that, you can determine your pulse rate. I used that to get the signal from people’s pulse in the audience, and then the players used that to play from.
Since then, I’ve done a few pieces which explore this idea of using heartbeats as a substitute for musical time. This project [with the LSO] is kind of an extension of that. For this project, I am going at it from a slightly more hi-tech angle; I am using sensors going directly into a MaxMSP patch, and that’s then triggering DMX [Digital Multiplex] lighting which is flashing in time and reacting to the pulse. It’s also going through some live electronics… So the idea is to create this weird feedback loop where the players are using their own pulses as a time keeping object — but at the same time, what they’re playing is then feeding back into the speed in which they have to play at. It’s examining the performer as a kind of object.
In terms of the tech side of the work, particularly with the pulse sensors, how have the performers taken to that?
It has thrown up different reactions from different performers. One of the musicians in Ensemble Proton had quite a strong reaction to it, because their son had some difficult health problems early in life; they said that seeing these things which measure your pulse took them back to that, which was quite emotionally challenging. Also with that project, one of the audience participants had circulation issues, so they had a naturally weak pulse. About a minute in, something went wrong because this audience member’s pulse was too weak to be detected, so the piece froze for about two minutes. But that was something we agreed on with the ensemble, we were going to take it as it comes — no tricks, no smoke and mirrors, just do it authentically. Which was exciting, but I wouldn’t do it like that again.
Musicians tend to react to the concept of heartbeats as pulse in a number of interesting ways. The first thing people do is think “wouldn’t it be funny if I ran on the spot and see how that affects it” — so everyone always tries that straight away. But it has very little impact, because it takes about five to ten minutes for your heartbeat to catch up with your circulation. There’s the really famous piece by Heinz Holliger for solo oboe called ‘Cardiophonie’ — I think he was the first composer to use heartbeats in music — where the oboist basically has to asphyxiate themselves by playing along to their own heartbeat. Because he is a crazy oboist, the piece gets harder and harder; so then breathing gets more difficult, and the heartbeat rises… so that’s a masochistic approach to it.
With my piece, I’m not going down that route. The interesting thing is how much variability there is; it makes you realise how different everyone is in terms of the biology of themselves. When I first [started] working on this idea in The Hague, I took it to one of my teachers — Richard Barrett — and he was telling me that he has one of the slowest pulses that has ever medically been observed… The cellist I’m working with on the LSO project, Colin Alexander, [has] got a significantly slower pulse than the other players, so that’s something that I am trying to incorporate into my thinking with the parts. My interest in the idea is the unpredictability, how variable the performance can be. However, you do need to have some semblance of control — otherwise you’ve got situations where you’ve got one player playing on their own for five minutes because everyone has finished performing the piece earlier. By and large, players are quite receptive to it. Everyone likes a new approach and a new challenge.
What systems have you put in place to maintain that control and prevent any overhang?
It all happens at the architectural stage of composing the piece. You have to have a vision of how the network of parts interacts with each other. One thing I’ve realised is that the most important element in musical performance is time — the second you take away regular, measurable time, everything else falls apart. So there has to be an element of ceding control; but at the same time, if you do your homework properly, you can work out what the boundaries of a likely performance will be. What would it be like if one person’s heartbeat is particularly slow, and another’s is particularly fast?
Are there any particular tricks you used in that architectural stage of composing the piece?
I’ve got a few tricks which I use. I do a lot of stuff based on circles of fifths. When you want something to evolve linearly and organically, I find it’s best to create relationships like that, because it makes sense harmonically. You’re not going to have notes that sound out of place, but you can work out how many steps you want to go — so that forms quite an important basis. It might not be obvious audibly, but that’s how a lot of the harmony is constructed, rather than thinking about vertical chords or pitch cells and stuff like that. If you don’t know when they are going to happen, it’s hard to judge if they’ll go with each other.
In terms of timbre, there are times where I’m approaching musique concrète. I have always liked unpitched sounds on instruments, particularly with strings — especially the percussive timbres that you can get from them, which I think has been largely a part of my musical language, so that naturally found its way into the piece.
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The work is being performed at St John’s Church in Waterloo. Has the venue been used to inform the work at all?
A little bit. It’s a cool space. I’ve performed there a couple of times including last night with my choir that I sing with [the New London Chamber Choir], but I’ve also seen many concerts there over the years. It’s a brilliant space, because it doesn’t sound like a church; you don’t have to worry too much about the acoustics.
One thing that is quite important — particularly when watching the concert last night — is the visual impact that it has. The second that you start using lighting in compositions as a parameter, rather than an element of staging, things get a lot more complicated. I noticed from the first workshops that we did, that the colour of the lighting you choose affects how you perceive the music. If you change it to a bright white, it feels very mechanical and soulless. There’s one bit where I was experimenting with RGB lighting — each player had a different colour — and it suddenly looked a bit kitsch and primary school-like. So thinking about how the lights will look in the space is very important.
The idea is that there will be strip lights behind each of the players that are mounted vertically — so the bodies will be casting a colourful shadow — and that will interact in various ways with the pulses that they are playing in. It’s exciting, because I’ve never had the chance to really work with those elements of performance. It is quite rare as a composer to get access to resources like a full tech team; the LSO tech team have been absolute superstars, despite the fact that they are “on the road” — because they are not at St Luke’s this year. They are a very knowledgeable bunch and incredibly helpful. It will be a feast for the eyes and ears, hopefully.
Have you experimented with lighting in any of your previous compositions? Or is this a first for you?
No, this is a total first. I always see composition as an excuse to learn how to do something new. This is the first piece where I am using MaxMSP; I’ve been learning it on and off for a couple of years, but I find that you always need a tangible goal or deadline to work towards to properly learn something. It’s like learning a language; you can only truly learn it when you are in the country, not on Duolingo whilst you are at home. Once you’ve got deadlines and pressure, you actually start to learn how it works. I’ve got a little DMX light which the LSO have lent me — I’ve been playing around with that. I have got a lot of friends that have done stuff with DMX lighting, so I have been warned off a lot of bits of hardware… It’s a real ballache working with lighting — it works very differently to sound. One big problem is the refresh rates; it is very easy to crash DMX lights if you send them too many messages at once. That’s what I’ve done a few times, but I think that I have ironed that out now.
Particularly in Central and Northern Europe, there are a lot of composers who incorporate lighting. There is Simon Løffler who did quite a well-known piece called ‘e’, which I saw NEKO3 perform in Graz a couple of years ago, which was very cool. There’s also Óscar Escudero, who does a lot of these audiovisual theatre pieces. So it’s definitely something which a certain type of more media-oriented composers are starting to dig into. But it’s baby steps for me, and it will be very interesting to see what comes out of it — I am sure something unexpected will arise from it.
Earlier you talked about using each composition as an opportunity to teach yourself a completely new skill. What are some other examples in the past where you have done this?
This was definitely the case with the Ensemble Proton piece. Originally the brief instructed there to be no digital electronics — so I took that quite literally and started learning circuitry. I was building arduino circuits, working with LEDs, all of this stuff; there were absolutely no computers involved. Circuitry is not like messing around with code; there is so much that you need to learn, and it’s not something where you can sort of fake it until it works — you have to know exactly what’s going on.
I did a collaborative piece with composer-harpist Liucilė Vilimaitė in 2023. We were both playing the harp using pulse sensors and solenoids to hit the strings. With the solenoids, as cool as they are, they were a nightmare to get functioning correctly, and they kept overheating to insane levels. During the performance, we wrapped them in cotton buds so that they wouldn’t burn our fingers. We could only have them on for around five or six minutes before stuff started to smell like burning; so we had to practice the piece in two minute intervals, then wait half an hour for the solenoids to cool down again.
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Much of your work is heavily reliant on collaboration. I remember years ago, there was a turning point for you when you attended a talk by Brian Ferneyhough at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. You asked a question about how to grasp all the techniques…
Go and get an instrument and fuck around on it, was his (paraphrased) advice. That was a watershed moment.
What was the main thing you paid attention to after that moment?
It was flipping the thinking on its head. The big struggle with any artist is ego, and how you relate to it. I started composition quite late, and I was coming from a very Anglican choral background; I was playing the organ, I was conducting, and all the pieces that I had written had been choral works. Whilst looking back on them, some of them I think are actually quite good; they are good because I understood choral music, not because I understood choral music and being an artist.
I always came from that top-down view of how notated composition worked. It was always this thing where you provide the score, then the choir rehearses and performs it. Obviously, if you are not involved with conservatoires and some universities, contemporary music is hard to find a way into; it’s something that we take for granted just because we know other composers, and we know what the names of the ensembles are. If you are coming at it like I was — aged 22/23 — I don’t know who the composers are. If you go on Google and search “contemporary classical music”, it’s not the stuff that we listen to that comes up, it’s like “relaxing classical piano hits” — not the Laurence Osborn piece. So it is very hard until you have those direct experiences to actually flip that thinking — which is maybe a good and a bad thing.
In terms of collaboration for me, I was working that way for quite a long time. It was only once I started studying at a conservatoire — when I first got into Birmingham aged 26/27 — and I remember I was doing a cello piece with Tom Pickles, a phenomenal cellist. In the first workshop session, we got into a room and I heard him play; there, your musical intuition takes over and you think, “okay, they do this really well, that is really natural to them — why don’t I just write a piece that suits them, rather than me sitting in my room on my own for days on end trying to come up with something really clever?”. If you go there, you get inspiration from the performer. In the end, it was actually a very successful piece; I’d say stylistically it’s not in line with what I do now, but as a cello piece it was incredibly successful. That was the turning point for me in terms of realising that the best ideas are out there — not stuck in your head.
I suppose the next one which really changed things for me was the Hyperorgan project, which was organised by Trevor Grahl at Orgelpark. What was great about that project was that it was led by a composer, who knows what composers need: not too much time to think, lots of hands-on interaction. The idea was to create a ten minute piece in a week on this amazing instrument, which was like a synthesizer mixed with an organ; if you’ve got any sort of understanding how synthesizers work — in terms of layering additive sounds and using LFOs and modulators — you can kind of play it yourself. So you come up with these ideas and then you have a session with the players — you interact with them and they say “ah, this is interesting, but what about this; I like this idea, maybe lean into this” — then it happens very organically.
You mentioned that the Hyperorgan project was led by a composer. What insights have you gained from the collaborative process when working with other composers?
If you have got other people who are happy to make a decision, you put your ego to the side. It’s just more fun, you know? Like, what’s the point in doing composition if you are not going to have fun? Because you’re not going to make money… So if you are not doing it to have fun, what’s the point? That’s another thing that might be fun to talk about — making composing fun again. That’s something which I am trying very hard to do with this piece; making sure the tools that you are using are fun. There’s no benefit to torturing yourself by working in a certain way.
Going back to the Ferneyhough moment: that was a big change. It was just before I wrote my first orchestral piece when I thought “okay, maybe I will try that”. I was working on this piece with Gloria Yehilevsky for snare [drum] and viola — ‘Between the Smallest of Spaces’. I’ve reworked it about four times now, I’m still not happy with it, and I want to do it a fifth time now. But to make that piece, I went out and bought a snare drum from a strange bloke in Hackney for £20 — I’ve still got it in the cupboard — and I just messed around on the snare drum getting fun sounds. I got an old violin from a family member that had passed it down to me, and I started hitting it, [making] all sorts of strange noises, and approaching it very tangibly and very hands on — rather than sitting down with manuscript and going “okay, what notes?”
It’s really, really fun — and then funnily enough, you also understand how the instrument works, so if you are then going back to something that’s very note-y, you have a better understanding. I’ve got that cello over there for £40 during the lockdown; it’s awful, it won’t stay in tune, but if I am writing a cello part, I can immediately sit down and fumble my way through. You start getting an idea of what’s idiomatic with the instruments and the second you start doing that, your music just transforms. It’s the difference between Ferneyhough writing difficult but idiomatic music and stupid, undergrad-composer-you (not you) writing something which is badly written and difficult because it is badly written — not because it is technically challenging.
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Would you say that it’s the process of learning these new things which makes it fun? If each piece has the same process, it becomes a chore…
Yeah, I get that feeling. An unnamed (but very successful) British composer came and gave a talk in The Hague. And this composer was moaning about how he hates his life because he has too many commissions, and he is on this treadmill of churning out pieces that he hates and has to do it to pay his mortgage. I just thought “fuck me, what a situation to get yourself into!”. Not only that, but you are taking opportunities away from other composers who — in this country, let’s be honest — have got fuck all opportunity. And he wasn’t doing anything with it; you don’t even enjoy it!
If you are not learning new things and are essentially using the same process over and over again, then you are just churning as you said…
I also just think it’s about the way you are wired. So much about composition is understanding yourself. When I first started out trying to be a composer, I was writing a lot of Tom Johnson pastiches; when you are starting out, it’s quite an appealing route to go down, because he maps out these very rational processes. As I am a very logical and rational thinker, what appealed to me at the time was “if I follow these principles, then I will write good music”. The piece is good if I make sure that it has all of these mathematical equations that determine exactly what pitch I’m using and then my input as a composer is reduced — but it’s okay, because I did the right formula and the piece is fun… But that’s absolute nonsense.
When you realise that, you can work with yourself or you can work against yourself. Something my dad taught me from the field of architecture — he said “just because something comes easy and naturally to you, doesn’t mean it comes easy and naturally to everyone else, so don’t be afraid to do what you think is obvious” — was some of the best compositional advice I’ve ever got. There’s lots of stuff where I’m sitting in my room, working on a piece, and I think “oh, that’s too obvious, that’s kitsch, that’s cliché” — but then actually you stop and think “well, it’s obvious to me”. The number of times you hear something and think “oh my god that’s amazing, I would have never had thought to do that”… As I said, we are all wired differently. That’s what makes it interesting.
Generally for you, each piece is an in depth exploration or an investigation into something; after finishing the work, you’ve dived so far in that you have exhausted the topic, and wish to do something else in another piece.
When I first started studying with James Weeks privately, I remember talking to him about this. He said one of the things he loves most about writing a piece is finishing it, because he’s got all of the leftover material that he uses for other pieces — which is quite an interesting way of thinking about it. Once you start pulling at one thread, other threads emerge. Since I’ve been getting back into composing with this piece (I had a bit of a hiatus last year, focusing on getting back to reality and earning money), one thing I’ve found is suddenly I’ve got floods of ideas coming back, after a year of not wanting anything to do with music, not going to concerts. I just felt so burnt out after my Masters.
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Earlier you were talking about the several reworkings of your collaboration with Gloria Yehilevsky, ‘Between the Smallest of Spaces’. What were the reasons for you to redo it? Were you unhappy with the overall idea or the performances?
It was such a stylistic departure. That was the first unpitched piece that I did — very Lachenmann-esque. In hindsight, I think the reason that I reworked it so many times is to do with a lack of a logistics and economics of it; I’ve got a cheap violin and a snare drum here, [so] I’ve always got access to the things that make the sound for the piece. It’s not like with an orchestra, where you spend ages writing it and then you hear the recording and think “ah, it would have been great if I had done that” — you are not going to sit down (unless you are a real psycho) and go through all of those tweaks without the knowledge that you’ve got a future performance coming up.
But that piece threw up a lot of challenges. There’s something which I’ve since learnt, which is this idea of parametric coupling — where certain sounds are intrinsically linked to the way that you play them, in terms of things like dynamics and balance. That was the big one really, because the first challenge of the piece was: how do you get a viola and a snare drum to balance? When you play them both traditionally, they don’t balance at all — but if you play them non-traditionally, [such as] rubbing your fingers on the drum skin, that’s then incredibly quiet. You see it a lot with Simon Steen-Andersen’s music — he does all sorts of non-standard playing on all manner of instruments and homemade bits and bobs. But the way that works is that the actions are always very mechanical and deliberate. So it’s that psychology of hearing a sound and understanding whether it was intentional or by accident. If you are working with detritus sounds — in a way that someone like Lachenmann would — they need to be overemphasised, made to be clearly deliberate. Otherwise it sounds like it’s unintentional and then your brain perceives it differently.
So with this piece [‘Between the Smallest of Spaces’], I was just listening back to each of the various iterations and thinking “that doesn’t sound like I meant it”. The players are playing exactly what I’ve written — I’ve worked with them — it’s just not quite hanging together. A lot of it was also to do with the way that I composed the piece. I had all of [the] various sounds recorded onto Cubase and l laid them all out — like sampling — and then I was arranging the samples across a timeline. The issue is, because you’re converting it from one medium to another, you lose information; with the transcription, their interpretation becomes a cheap imitation of the recording.
The latest iteration of that piece was performed in Switzerland over a year ago. I don’t have a recording of it and I didn’t go either, so I have no idea how it went. But it was performed by Ensemble TaG, who reached out to me needing a piece for viola and snare drum. It’s quite good writing for weird combinations of instruments, because you get these nice unsolicited opportunities — which I have never had before. There is a part of me that wants to do a proper studio recording of it, just to see if it is actually good now… But you could end up like Boulez and be rewriting your pieces forever, and that’s an even worse way to go. That’s why deadlines are good — if you’ve got a deadline, you’ve got external accountability. You’ve got to have the piece done, you’ve got to move on with your life, because you can go back and rewrite endlessly.
Generally for me, once it is done, it is done. Even if the piece was awful, when you create something you’re not satisfied with, it sheds off some of those old aspects to your work.
Michael Finnissy once told me, ad verbatim: “Hugo, sometimes you just need to take a shit”. You’ve just got to do your piece — if it’s shit, get it done, the constipation is out of the way. That’s actually the same as redoing the same idea; I suppose that the rewriting [of] a piece is going back to the same idea and saying “actually, I can do this better now”. I’m quite a critical person in general; through every single one of these pieces, there is not one which I would hang my hat on and say “that’s exactly how I want it to be”. Obviously as an artist, you have to put on a facade that that’s exactly what you meant — you’ve got to be confident, you’ve got to speak about it. So it’s a funny balance between self-criticism and the appearance that you know what you are doing, because people rarely realise what’s gone wrong. Like last night when we messed up all of the entries of the choir — no one seemed to notice.
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Hugo Bell’s new work ‘Black Box Communion’ premieres 16th May 2025 at the LSO Soundhub Showcase at St. John’s Waterloo – you can buy tickets at:
Learn more about Hugo and his practice:
References/Links:
- Susha Cheriyedath, ‘Photoplethysmography (PPG)’ (2019), News-Medical
- Sweetwater, ‘Understanding DMX’ (2024), Sweetwater
- Heinz Holliger – ‘Cardiophonie’ (1971)
- ‘Future Ready’, London Symphony Orchestra
- Simon Løffler – ‘e’ (2014)
- ‘Solenoid 101: What is a Solenoid?’ (2025), TLX Technologies
- Laurence Osborn – ‘Essential Relaxing Classical Hits’ (2021)
