“That is my favourite thing about composing: just keeping my eyes on the path, focusing on making the next thing, and ending up in places I never thought I would reach. It’s as though you are being led by the work somehow, rather than the other way around.”
Eden Lonsdale
Eden Lonsdale is a British/German composer. His music focuses on exploring the various ways that movement and stasis can co-exist, as well as the inter-connectedness of harmony, timbre and line; often using very limited materials, his dense and immersive sound-worlds attempt to draw the ear into the smallest details and hope to inspire the listener’s self-guided exploration into the music’s manifold layers. Eden has written music for players such as Satoko Inoue, Anton Lukoszevieze, and Heather Roche as well as ensembles EXAUDI, Apartment House, Riot Ensemble, Oerknal, and Ensemble Intercontemporain, among others; he was a London Symphony Orchestra Panufnik composer 2023-24, and a Britten Sinfonia Magnum Opus composer in 2024. Eden studied Composition at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama with Malcolm Singer, Cassandra Miller, and Julian Anderson, as well as at the Kunstuniversität Graz with Klaus Lang.
Eden has released two albums on experimental label Another Timbre, Clear and Hazy Moons and Dawnings; and he forms part of composer-performer collective Red Panel, whose album with Eden ricercari for rainy days was released on Sawyer Editions. Patrick Ellis sat down with Eden to discuss these albums, his recent projects, working with limitations, subtlety, James Tenney, Alvin Lucier, and “forms within forms”…
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Patrick/PRXLUDES: Hello Eden! To start with what you’re currently writing — you’ve got two exciting projects coming up, for orchestra and for solo steel string guitar. What ideas have you had with those so far?
Eden Lonsdale: It always happens to me that I start the year with no commissions and think “great, I can finally get round to doing this thing I have been procrastinating forever” — or “great, I can use this time to something a little weird and experimental just for myself”. These two pieces are those kinds of projects. The orchestral one is actually a piece I wrote during my undergrad back in 2020 and I have been meaning to revise ever since. It’s going to be reorchestrated and become a bit longer, but it shouldn’t be a huge task. I’ve just been postponing it for about 5 years because, invariably, other projects seem to come up that take priority — so we’ll see if I finally get round to it this time… -laughs-
The other piece started out as an exercise for myself, really. The room that I am currently subletting has several steel string guitars in it from the previous tenant, so I just sort of accidentally started writing it; but meanwhile, I have found a guitarist who wants to work on it together, so it has become a real project. It’s going to be a very strange piece, because it’s in the form of a dance suite. It has six movements, each of which reference their classic baroque counterparts — prelude, courante, two minuets, sarabande and gigue — and the sound world it inhabits lies somewhere between Albeniz, Flamenco, and Radiohead…
You’ve previously said you prefer working with longer durations because you are not “clipping and pruning” to fit the material into a small time frame; you are letting the material breathe. How does that relate to the orchestral medium — when you’ve got so many instruments and so many possibilities, how do you control that?
My starting point is never this thought of “I have an orchestra, so I have a million possibilities”. I always begin from something very small, such as a harmonic idea or process, and then I spin outwards from there. I do a lot of abstract work at first, and try to get to the bottom of my material in all its potential by finding ways of developing it that are very simple and subtle — mostly classical techniques like inversions, retrogrades, diminutions and augmentations. Then I apply variations upon variations; so my available material branches out from a central starting point. That way it can end up in pretty remote places whilst still being of the same fundamental substance. This generates a potentially endless tree of variations… And then it’s a question of judging how much material is enough for whatever duration I am working with. This method works just as well for short pieces as it does for long pieces; it’s always the same approach — smaller frameworks just require the “tree” to be pruned a lot more.
In an orchestral context, I only start thinking about the instrumental colours properly when I have my material and form figured out. To me, the orchestration is a separate layer of the compositional process whose function is to serve the material. So you could say that I have a pretty classical approach in this regard. I think of my orchestration as good when it helps the material shine as brightly as it possibly can. In the end of course the sound is still the most important thing, it’s just that I arrive there by a different route.
When you get to the end of the process, or the actual end of a piece, do you know — “yeah, that’s it, that’s the end point”?
It’s very much a back and forth. From the very beginning, I start visualising the piece in its entirety — and the form emerges in parallel to the abstract development of my material. So at the end of the material phase, I always have a solid architectural form in place; and then I start filling it in. I always know where the piece is going to end, even when working on the beginning. I have the whole thing in mind as I am figuring out the details. But of course, that doesn’t always work out the way you hope it would. So I continue making small changes to the form at every stage of the process — but after years of working this way, the piece now usually ends up quite close to my initial vision.
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What other approaches do you tend to use to extend the initial material out?
As I said before, I usually stick to simple classical techniques, but I have other approaches as well. What I have often explored in the past few years is limiting my material from the onset, by taking the physicality and layout of the instrument itself as the starting point. For instance, I wrote an electric guitar piece two years ago where I only used the second fret and the open string — which made it easy for me to intuitively understand an instrument that I had never written for, and get into the mind of the performer. But [it] also gave me a strong material limitation — and that, for me, is essential.
In another piece I am working on right now — which is for two Baroque cellos — I have limited the physical material even more extremely. I’m only using the fingering on the fourth position and the fingering in the fifth position, on only the two middle strings. That gives me four fingered notes in total on each cello, but then there’s a scordatura, so the middle strings of the second cello are tuned a minor third lower.
Each of the four “nodes” on each cello can be played as either a stopped note or harmonic. And then all the possible combinations of those — also incorporating the two open strings — result in a surprisingly large amount of different chords. So in this case, the extreme physical limitation already generates an expansive tree of material, which could easily be enough to fill a 20-30 minute piece. That gives me great freedom in curating my form — especially as this piece has a duration of only 10 minutes — but also requires a lot of “pruning” and compositional incisions.
You’ve also previously talked about the balancing of the predetermined systems and embracing your more intuitive, spontaneous side…
I don’t think that’s quite what I meant. Spontaneous musicality, in the sense of improvisation, plays no role at all for me. All my material is generated strictly systematically; but what I meant was that the use of those systems over time has become very intuitive for me. I don’t think of processes and systems as setting up mathematical situations that are observed, no matter how the outcome sounds. Rather, they are a way of assuring homogeneity and coherence — and to my aesthetic sensibilities, that’s crucial.
In music, I like to feel like I am being drawn into a self-sustaining parallel sonic universe which functions according to its own internal principles and laws; so I absolutely avoid spontaneous musical decisions that break with those. Nonetheless, intuitive musicality plays a huge role — and that isn’t a contradiction. If I made a sequence of 25 chords, I would never think “oh, I like this except I will change one note in the third chord”. But what I will do is to just start the piece on the fourth chord instead. -laughs- That’s a purely intuitive musical decision that still preserves the integrity of the system.
Essentially, you aren’t breaking the rules of the system, but you are cutting the tape…
Exactly. To many people that may seem like I have “nothing to say”, or am unclear about what I want my music to “express” — but I don’t think of music in those kinds of rhetoric, or specific emotional terms. It’s more that I want my sounds to behave in a certain way within a certain kind of space, and using processes and systems to that end results in music that is so much closer to what I feel have to “say” or “express” than I could ever come up with freely. I realise that seems like a paradox.
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When you begin a new piece, do you try to use a new process each time — or a different variation of a system each time? Do you research new methods for generating material in order to keep the composition process fresh?
I reuse ideas and specific techniques many, many times — but never in quite the same way. I often find the amount of possibilities within the smallest idea totally fascinating; so I always need to explore that in depth before I feel I can move on. With the Baroque cello piece, if I kept all the processes and just detuned the second cello by a major instead of a minor third, I would have an entirely different harmonic world… I am too intrigued by the possibility of peering into those worlds to just let an idea go.
Every time I start a new composition, I feel as though I am writing the last piece again. But at the same time, when I look back at what I was writing two years ago, that music seems very different. That is my favourite thing about composing: just keeping my eyes on the path, focusing on making the next thing, and ending up in places I never thought I would reach. It’s as though you are being led by the work somehow, rather than the other way around.
Like, in the steel string guitar piece I am working on: the idea is very similar to that in the electric guitar piece I mentioned before. The material is always limited to open strings and specific frets. Each movement has a combination of one fret with open strings — i.e. open strings plus fret 1, or open strings plus fret 2 — which gives a different harmonic world to distinguish the movements of the suite from each other. It’s the same technique that I used two years ago, but the resultant piece is wildly different. That one inhabited an immersive, almost ambient kind of sound world, whereas this piece has basically just reverted to being “classical music” again… -laughs-
So your processes aren’t evolving in an intentional way, but there are these small unconscious changes that are pushing your practice along?
Yes, that’s how it feels to me. I continue working with the same processes and techniques for long periods of time; and every now and again, I have some new idea and then that becomes a thing that I do, or it is integrated with old ideas. My music is very different now than it was five years ago, but there is clear continuity. I can see exactly how it has come to be what it is — even though I am doing things now that I didn’t think I would ever do.
Did you always use these systematic placeholders, or did they slowly enter your work over time?
I definitely have not always used them. When I was younger, I was just writing pastiche compositions by ear; I think that’s how many people start. When I started studying I was still writing in that way — not pastiche specifically, but completely off the top of my head. I had a rhetorical and gestural way of thinking about music, which didn’t actually match up to what I wanted music to sound like.
In my second year, I encountered the music of James Tenney and Alvin Lucier and their pure system-based works — which had a huge impact on me. So for a while, I was writing pieces that just enact a process from start to finish — that just do one thing and that is the piece. It was such a revelation to me that this worked. But at some point I realised that while this creates the kind of functional systems that I like, I find the forms too explicit and a little boring as a listener. I kept the principle, but decided that maybe you don’t actually have to hear every bit of the process… -laughs- I much prefer mystery, and subtle implication.
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Your work ‘Voicings’ was premiered last year by Britten Sinfonia. The piece started out as something that was intended to be more of a “concerto”, but instead it ended up being more of a blended work between ensemble and solo voice. What kind of process did you implement to make that piece?
‘Voicings’, in the version you heard, started with a canon… -laughs- I remember I came to the preliminary workshop and had written almost an entire piece for voice and ensemble — but it didn’t work the way I had imagined. The players said it felt impossible to play it without vibrato, so that’s when I knew I had to throw it away — it just wasn’t sitting right. The night before the workshop I had written this little canon in just intonation and thought “hmm, maybe I should get Britten Sinfonia to play this as well tomorrow”… And it sounded so much better than the rest of the piece, so I ended up starting from scratch with that.
The material in the end became a double canon over a fixed ostinato. There is a harmonic canon and a melodic canon at the same time which constantly retune according to the current fundamental in the ground bass. The piece has four attacca “movements”, or distinct sections, which each evolve from that point in a different way. The first movement just explores the canons in their original form and in inversion. The second uses the retrograde and retrograde inversion in diminution. In the third movement the canons fall away and the ostinato becomes the main material, which is harmonised in alternating major and minor chords (which is derived from the effect that the inversion had on the material in part one) — and the fourth movement continues the purely harmonic landscape from there, but returns to the justly tuned tonal palette of the beginning.
When you write a piece that has multiple movements, do you always ensure that there is a linkage in the material?
Yes, that’s exactly what interests me about multi-movement forms. As I said before, I want my pieces to function like kind of miniature sound universes that have a strict and coherent logic within them; but at the same time I am really interested in exploring really simple material to its depths. Multi-movement forms, or suites of pieces, are my way of doing both of those things at once — they give me a reason to reflect on my material from different angles while not breaking the continuity.
I understand you’re part of “fluid composer-performer collective” red panel, with Cara Dawson and Patrick Hegarty. What was the dynamic like between the three of you? Did you use that group as the basis to inform ideas for your pieces in a more improvisatory and collaborative way?
It was four of us from the beginning — including Kieran Timbrell as well on the keyboards. I wouldn’t say that the work with red panel made my pieces more improvisatory, my compositional approach was still the same. But what I loved about writing those pieces was that I had to do a lot less of the “work” you normally have to do when writing for musicians in a more removed sort of way. I could just bring pretty raw material, without any real rhythms or dynamics and have absolute faith that the resultant sound would be as I wanted it. I really hate micromanaging performers in my scores, but often it’s unavoidable to an extent if you want the idea to come across in rehearsal. Being able to work in this way is just a luxury.
Was it a case of “I know Cara will typically play in this kind of way on the harp, and Patrick will do this with the guitar and the objects”…
Not really, I always gave them specific material and a rough order of events. I can’t really do fully open scores and be satisfied with the result, because my focus is on harmony and form and I think about those aspects painstakingly. It was more about a shared mode of listening that we had, or an unspoken agreement about how we wanted sounds to fit together in time. I didn’t need to provide a fully synchronised score because I knew that we would always do a more natural job at pacing it intuitively.
Did either of the other two chip in with any suggestions or ideas openly? Or was it just that you knew keeping it open would result in a certain outcome?
Well, I was living with Cara… -laughs- So first of all, I could try anything with her at any time. And then we’d regularly meet up as a group, play through our stuff and if it didn’t work we just changed it. There were definitely instances where we made small suggestions about each others’ pieces — and often those were incorporated — but the compositional process was never collaborative, per se.
You wrote three pieces for red panel — which were released last year on Kory Reeder’s label Sawyer Editions…
Yes, that was a passion project for me. I had been listening to the Sawyer Editions releases and really liked the vibe; also I had two friends that had albums there already. So I approached Kory and asked if he would be interested in putting out these pieces; then Cara, Patrick, Forrest Moody and I met up in Berlin and just recorded them all. I mixed them with my friend Aaron Braun, who also did the recording, and Kory did quite a lot of mastering for me after that. It was a lot of fun.
You’ve had three albums of your music released to date. Your first album, Clear and Hazy Moons, was released on Another Timbre in 2023; tell me a bit about the process of working on the album?
Another Timbre has been my favourite label ever since I discovered it in 2015 — so it was truly a dream come true when Simon Reynell reached out about releasing some of my music. The process was a back and forth; he listened to my pieces on soundcloud and sent me a list of the ones he liked the most. We narrowed it down to the four pieces that were viable — a mixture of pieces that I already had good live recordings for and others to re-record in the studio. I also wrote a new piece, ‘Anatomy of Joy’, which uses the exact same instrumental forces as ‘Billowing’ so that we could record them back to back and maximise the efficiency of the recording process.
And your most recent record, Dawnings, was released on Another Timbre last year. Was that a similar case with how it came about?
For Dawnings it was me who approached Simon with an idea. To be honest, I really just wanted to release another CD. -laughs- I had a piece for solo cello, another one for two violins and one for seven violas and I wanted these to be on an album together, like a sort of deconstructed string quartet. We tried the idea but it didn’t really work, because — unsurprisingly in retrospect — there was a lack of low frequencies across the disc. So we decided to mix it up a bit and throw in some pieces for mixed ensembles, a long piece for organ and ensemble — which I wrote for Gaudeamus Muziekweek — as well as a work for clarinet and piano which we re-recorded. In the end we also scrapped the two violins piece and I wrote a new one I wrote for four violins instead.
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It’s a funny one with albums in the classical world — especially in contemporary music. A lot of it is more of a compilation rather than an “album”… Do you see your discs as being an album as an artistic statement, or do you see it as a sample of some of your works?
They can’t be called albums in the sense that I intended the pieces to go together when I was writing them. But at the same time, all of the discs are all carefully curated, and I do think that each of them has an identity as a piece of work in and of itself. There are always common threads and themes between the tracks on a release, and of course I thought very carefully about the order. I kind of feel the same way about curating an album, or a release, as I do about composing… -laughs- In a way it’s just about trying to find the right order for things; and ideally, the chosen constellation enhances the listening experience of each of its constituent parts. Writing new pieces for the releases also helped tie everything together.
For those album-specific works, did you use any processes that were different from your other pieces?
Sort of, I suppose. Both ‘Anatomy of Joy’ (on Clear and Hazy Moons) and ‘Cloud Symmetries’ (on Dawnings) have some moments that would cause issues if they were to be performed live. In the latter piece, there are some instances where the mute is added or removed without any time to do so at all… -laughs- Which of course works in the studio — but I’d have to find some different solutions if these pieces were ever performed live.
It seems that you have built up a strong working relationship with Simon Reynell. Aside from your colleagues in red panel, are there any other ensembles where you have had multiple collaborations?
A few. I have worked with Apartment House quite a lot now. I guess they have played six or seven of my pieces. The first one was for the [BBC Radio 3] New Music Show; they rehearsed and recorded it without my being there, and the first time I ever heard it was on the radio — which was a cool experience. Aside from that, I have mainly worked with them in the studio; but they performed a new string quartet of mine in Sheffield in March, and there will be a new piano quintet at the Wigmore Hall in October.
The only other ensemble I have worked on more than one piece with is Rothko Collective, whom I have collaborated with since my study days. They have done two of my works so far; another new one is coming up in Scotland at the Arran International Festival of Chamber Music and Song. Otherwise, I have worked quite a lot with violinist Marie Schreer.
For your work with Apartment House, do you think that the working relationship has gotten to a point where they know in rehearsal what you want from a performance?
I don’t know — but it doesn’t matter, because I trust them 100%. To be honest, I’m never that wedded to a specific execution of my pieces, apart from certain things which are just non-negotiable for me — such as playing with no vibrato… -laughs- But that is actually one of the aspects of using systems to create pieces which have a strong sense of internal integrity. The performers can interpret quite a lot and the piece remains very much your own.
I love that: giving my pieces over to performers I trust, and seeing what happens to them. I adore the way Apartment House play — and even if their interpretations were far removed from what I intended (which they are not), I’d still be thrilled with them. I think every time they have played or recorded a piece of mine it has been a little different to how I imagined it, but I have always ended up liking their version more. They bring something out in my pieces that I didn’t even know was there.
With red panel, everything came out sounding exactly the way it did in my head; everything was very round and soft. Apartment House maybe have a slightly “edgier” way of playing, for lack of a better word. There is a different plasticity to their sound, a different sense of dimension. I don’t know how else to say it.
Earlier on, you mentioned that you can trace your current working practices back several years. What are some traits that remain from back then?
The first pieces that I still feel I identify with are from 2018 and since 2021, every piece I’ve written seems somehow authentically “my” own. So when I talk about these developments, I am referring to the period since then.
My work has changed a lot on the surface in that time — but fundamentally, I’m still writing the same music. Above all, I am interested in harmony and pitch-based materials; and the other thing that is essential to me is clarity of form. On a more abstract and unconscious level, my pieces always seem to be about the relationship between movement and stasis, in one way or another. I’d say those are the key features.
These preoccupations and aesthetic preferences are the same as they were five years ago, but I feel that they are constantly evolving. A good example is how the forms of my pieces have changed. All the early pieces in my catalogue (from 2018-2021) are either diptychs or triptychs — in binary or ternary form. To this day, that is still the basic framework of every piece I write; but at some point the forms began to become fractally splintered. Every part of, say, an overarching ABA form started to have its own internal microform that mirrored the macro — and I kept going with that on smaller and smaller levels, until the pieces started to feel like mosaics. So the forms have become more and more refined, I think; but at the root of it still lies the same classical architectural thinking.
Another big development has been the reintegration of line — in the sense of melody and counterpoint. As I said earlier, I’m basically just writing classical music at this point. -laughs- My approach seems to have become more and more traditional in many ways, without me making any active decision to go down that route.
I quite often have this experience when writing pieces, where I suddenly feel able to embrace something into my practice that seemed remote or inaccessible to me before — simply because I have found a way to do it that comes from within what I am already doing. Those moments are cathartic for me… Like when I was writing my early dronier pieces, I realised at some point that there were imaginary lines emerging between different overlapping parts — so I started using additional instruments to double those emerging lines. And then in the next piece, I started removing the source — so that was the moment when melody entered into my work. Every change is like that somehow. It always just feels like a natural progression to me.
The structures got more elaborate and subtle, similarly to how the systems that you used evolved…
I have this model that there are only “A” and “B” forms in music. Those Tenney and Lucier pieces are just “A”, and then if you add something else, that is “B”. And if you add a third section, which is the same as the first, it’s ABA — and if the third section is completely new, we could express that as two separate AB forms pivoting in the middle section. Basically, what I mean is just what Schoenberg said: composition is just repetition and variation. There is only “same” and “different”. Of course, there are degrees of difference — and arguably “same” doesn’t actually exist at all — but essentially I find that an extremely helpful way of looking at things. That’s why I stuck to those simple classical forms; I am always doing grassroots explorations of what composition actually is to me, and I like keeping things as simple for myself as possible. Through that I became very intimate with how these archetypes worked, and was therefore finally able to progress from there in a fully integrated way.
I think fundamentally there are two sorts of composers. There’s one who digs and really builds a world in one “piece”, then tries to do something different in the next project. Whereas the other type operates more like a painter, working within a similar set of parameters that then gradually evolve over time.
I think you’re right. Who knows how things will turn out — but I feel like I definitely belong in the latter category for now. I approach each piece with the same mindset as the last, the only differences being in the instrumentation, the duration, and the setting. New instrumentations always pose specific problems and challenges that give rise to new perspectives, and those new perspectives then inform how I approach the next task. The two cello piece I am writing now, for instance, takes material I used in a solo cello piece last year; that same material mixes differently with my current formal ideas — as they have evolved since then — and that relationship results in a new piece.
Taking an idea and then pushing it further?
Sort of. I don’t like the word “pushing” in this context. If I have a potted plant, I am not “pushing” it to grow — I am just making sure I water it and that it gets enough sunlight.
Are there any of your pieces where you have had a sudden contrast? Or has it always been a subtle shift from “A” to “B” for you…
It depends what you define a contrast as being. As I said before, I don’t like breaking with sound worlds at a whim. I’m not interested in shocking at all. If you really want that, there are so many ways in which that can be achieved. You can change the genre in the middle of the piece… -laughs- I would never do that, I suppose; I am interested in allowing the listener to get into the depths of things as they are. My favourite musical experiences are when I feel like I am in a parallel sonic dimension, and things just inevitably fall into their predestined places in accordance with mysterious laws. It sounds esoteric — but that’s what music is to me.
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Stream and download Eden Lonsdale’s albums on Another Timbre and Sawyer Editions:
- https://anothertimbre.bandcamp.com/album/clear-and-hazy-moons
- https://anothertimbre.bandcamp.com/album/dawnings
- https://sawyereditions.bandcamp.com/album/eden-lonsdale-red-panel-ricercari-for-rainy-days
Learn more about Eden and his practice at:
- https://www.eden-lonsdale-sound.com/
- https://soundcloud.com/eden-lonsdale
- https://www.instagram.com/edenlonsdale.sound/
References/Links:
- Marat Ingeldeev, ‘Interview with Eden Lonsdale by Marat Ingeldeev’ (2024), Another Timbre
- Another Timbre, ‘Interview with Eden Lonsdale’ (2023), Another Timbre
- ‘Art or Sound | The Life and Work of Alvin Lucier’ (2022), Sound of Life
- Ethan Haimo, ‘Developing Variation and Schoenberg’s Serial Music’ (1997), Music Analysis, 16(3)
