“A commission or a concert is an opportunity to create a space that is not about value creation. It can be about imagining a different way of being together — and valuing that is really important.”
Reuben Esterhuizen
Reuben Esterhuizen is a composer and performer hailing from Guernsey, Channel Islands, currently based in London. Reuben’s work utilises minimal materials and intuitive systems, exploring both standard practices which focus on reiteration and sound, and the effects of layering and ambiguity; he also engages in cross-disciplinary practices involving movement and non-standard methods of score-making. Reuben’s work has been performed by ensembles such as Plus-Minus Ensemble, EXAUDI, Musarc Choir, Ensemble 7Bridges, Unfinished Collective, Frankland Quartet, and various individual instrumentalists; with work having been performed at Siobhan Davies Studios, IKLECTIK, Milton Court Concert Hall, Goodenough College, and The Place; he also enjoys working with choreographers and involving himself as a mover in collaborations. He is currently a Junior Fellow at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where he previously studied with Paul Newland, Laurence Crane, Richard Baker, and Amber Priestley, supported by the Guildhall School Trust.
In 2025, Reuben was appointed as one of Guildhall School’s Junior Fellows; at the start of his fellowship, Georgie West sat down with Reuben to discuss the process of shedding ideas, radical music-making, ceramic artists, movement, and togetherness…
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Georgie/PRXLUDES: Having just finished your Artist Masters in Composition at Guildhall, can you talk to me about your journey into composing and how you feel after completing the postgrad?
Reuben Esterhuizen: I’m not sure how my journey into composition compares to other peoples’ in whether it’s “standard” or not, but I suppose my first go at composition was in school. I started off writing songs when I was younger, and then as I got more into classical music at secondary school, I had a go at some composing things — sort of juvenilia. On my way to university, I was really interested in the academic side of music. I wanted to do everything, and I didn’t yet feel that composition was the only thing I wanted to pursue. I wanted to study musicology, ethnomusicology, and those sorts of things… I became really excited by composition and I quite quickly figured out that it was what I was most interested in out of all my “subjects”.
How has your practice evolved through your undergraduate and postgraduate education?
The difference between what I started off doing and what I’m doing now is so radical that I have had to continually find new reasons for why I’m even doing it. The reasons that I started composing are very different from the reasons that I continue to compose now. So that process of renewal and rediscovery has been a big part of my Masters course as well. The big transition was [away from] making music that was coming from ideas; when I was at university I kept a list of ideas for pieces that I wanted to write — a piece about plastic pollution in the ocean, or capitalism and body image. I think the big change for me came from asking: what can music do and why am I doing this?
These questions, coupled with the sense that music and art in general really don’t have that much political potential in terms of what they can achieve — a piece about body image is not likely to disrupt dominant perceptions of body image, and a piece about capitalism is not going to challenge capitalism — led me down a slightly more experimental path of shedding “the idea” when thinking about why I make music.
What did you discover about these practices during your postgrad?
Now, what interests me about composition is partly what has interested composers for quite a long time — which is the experience of sound, materiality, and form. Although in a weird way, my Masters has led me back around to thinking about what political potential music has; and [how] experimental music, more than most, can offer an alternative way of being together. I wouldn’t say it’s gone full circle, but maybe I have a more refined sense of what music can do. When you’re performing an experimental piece that’s open, or a piece that asks you to reconsider how you interact with each other as performers, I think that creates a kind of “imaginary” for how it’s possible to live your life with others that is radical. I think a part of my process has been also to find a place to imagine those potentials — or finding places in my music to host those imaginaries.
It has been a major process of shedding and taking out what I feel is unnecessary, and going back to basics when thinking about form and material and really listening to what I’m writing. The composer I am leaving my Masters as now is unrecognisable in every way from the person I came into it as. Something happened in my experiences, and in my coming into contact with people in these two years, that radically changed my perspective in a lot of ways.
What is it about “idea” led pieces that you felt yourself resisting, and how does that relate to the act of composition in the 21st century, or what it’s like to write as a composer now?
I think I’ve become quite cynical about those sorts of conceptual or political pieces which I used to make. A part of me also feels that they can almost be quite dangerous in some ways. There’s this great book which I’m reading at the moment called The Art Kettle by Sinead Murphy, which argues that political fervour, or ideas that are revolutionary or radical, become neutered when they are channeled into art. If I take my rage at the system for its role in the climate emergency (for example), and I decide to write a piece about it, the resulting artwork is not only easily co-opted by the regime as symbolic of its tolerance for dissent — but my resistance and protest get hidden away inside the concert hall where I would no doubt be preaching to the converted anyway. I of course feel strongly that we should be fiercely political and fight for these issues, but perhaps not through art. Where it becomes inevitable that Capital subsumes artistic protest, it becomes all the more important for us to actually go into the streets and protest for these things.
But I think with that being said, music can be a place for imagining a way of being together which is anti-capitalist and still radical. It’s more real, in a way, because we’re actually inhabiting those relationships through our performance. A commission or a concert is an opportunity to create a space that is not about value creation. It can be about imagining a different way of being together — and valuing that is really important.
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Where do you search for your influences — whether they be musical, literary, theatrical, philosophical — and how important is the contextualisation and exploration of these influences to your work?
I think it’s really important for artists to read widely. To understand our place as artists in society, critically and contextually. I’m glad that I’ve been able to make that a part of my practice, though I’m never as well-read as I’d like to be. My influences during my undergraduate degree were predominantly musical, and I think that in the past two years my influences have shifted away from music to other art forms. I get most of my inspiration now from painters, and increasingly ceramic artists; I often think these visual artists have more interesting things to say for composers than most composers do about working methods. It sounds quite obvious, but I’m fascinated by the way that methods of working manifest in the final outcome of a piece. The process is placed on more equal footing with the product. So in regard to that, looking at abstract painters in particular is fascinating — they talk about the process of making in such an interesting way, as their methods are often more intuitive and not necessarily pre-calculated.
But that isn’t necessarily natural for me. Composing is sometimes about negotiating with who I am as a person, with particular neuroses and desires to want to preplan everything in my music… I used to have a massive thing about wanting to know the outcome of the piece before I started writing it, but a big part of what I have been doing over the last two years is trying to push back against [that]. It is a negotiation between real life and what happens when you go and sit in front of your paper or at your desk to do anything. Being present with how you’re thinking about what you’re doing, and knowing when to push back against impulse, and knowing when to let it lead.
Our material is sound, and it’s not immediately obvious what our pieces are going to sound like until someone plays them; but ceramic artists and painters don’t experience that as much. I think ceramics are so much more interesting than 90% of the things in galleries nowadays, particularly in the way that the material and the process that happens for those objects to come into existence is put front and centre. Process and material are literally presented in the object, and that’s quite inspiring. I’m not an expert in ceramics, but I think the most beautiful works are the ones where you can see how changes in the process of making have led to a particular outcome. Ceramic artists are dealing with clay and earth and there’s a reverence for their material as they shape it into something; and that is an influential way to think about sound. It’s hard to channel this as a composer, as our work is not as immediate — whereas when working with clay it is literally under your hands and you can shape it.
That being said, I’ve had the experience multiple times when I haven’t had a real piano to try something out on. And so firstly I am writing on my electric Yamaha; and then when I hear it on a real piano for the first time, it just comes alive in such a transformative way. Obviously there “is” sound coming out of the Yamaha, but the experience of the real instrument is incredible.
Your process has evolved to include a plethora of working methods from utilising minimal materials, focusing on reiteration and sound, and looking at layering and ambiguity. Can you talk to me a little about what inspires you to play and explore these elements?
Repetition was a large preoccupation of my postgraduate work. At first, exact repetition, and then more recently reiteration, or similarity. I write to create an experience of sound, and in order to be immersed in that experience, there needs to be a continuity — a quietness and similarity so that the listener has time to walk around. Darius Paymai says that he doesn’t like to be pulled along by a piece of music, he prefers when he’s able to walk around himself. That was quite impactful as a metaphor for me, and I really agree with that. I don’t want to pull anyone along; I want to give a listener the opportunity to enter into the work themselves.
I think there’s something about repetition and minimalism that connects me strongly to experiences of nature. This is more of a recent discovery for me, which came out of asking myself why I’m really interested in repetition and similarity in the first place. If you’re standing on a beach and you’re hearing the waves crash over and over again, it’s repetitive and it’s hypnotising, and it’s beautiful. We see/hear this everywhere in nature. It’s something that the painter Agnes Martin talks a lot about as well. Her paintings are abstract — not literal depictions of nature — but many invoke the experience of nature, and of seeing something that’s repetitive.
Subsequently, the more I’ve realised this, the more exact repetition has ceased to be a feature of my music, because there is no such thing as exact repetition in nature — but there’s a lot of similarity. If you were to take all the leaves on a tree, they’re all sort of similar looking, but their colours are all slightly different or they have slightly different markings on them. I think that’s really beautiful. There’s an interest in naturalness that I think has led me to being much less rectangular or less precise in my work, embracing ambiguity and layering rather than precision and clean segmentation.
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Your recent work has expanded to more cross-disciplinary methods of working and score-making. After working primarily with standard notation, what does the world of open-score making and non-standard practice look like for you?
It’s a really broad world and I’m still finding my way around it. It was important for me to go through that process of excavation with my “pen-and-paper” practice to figure out what things that method offered for me. Then, once I understood what I was doing a bit more, it felt like it was the right time to open this up into different ways of working.
I’d been making text scores or text pieces that include musical material for quite a while; they’re some of my favourite pieces of mine because they tend to only do one “thing” — in a way that I really admire about the whole practice of instruction scores. Paul Newland, in his recent Another Timbre interview, said that their appeal lies in how strongly they foreground material, concept, and performativity. Nothing else is necessary. The ones that I enjoy making are text pieces which enact a process or they investigate relationships between people. The two sorts of text scores I’ve been working with involve either exploring different ways for performers to relate to each other through sound, or they’ve been exploring extremely basic materials while allowing performers the freedom to make certain choices that will create certain results that I think are beautiful or interesting. This year, as I’ve been making more interdisciplinary work, those interests have had time to come to the fore.
I tried my hand recently at making graphic scores for the first time. I’m not sure how successful they were — I found it quite difficult, because if you’re going to make a graphic score with no notation, you have to genuinely be okay with the performer interpreting it in whatever way they want to. It sounds kind of obvious and maybe that’s easy for some people — but I think if you’re very used to time signatures and decisions, then really letting go is quite a skill. I was lucky enough to be making some of these scores alongside Joanna Ward, who’s an extremely skilled graphic score practitioner. It was so instructive to see her total handing over of responsibility to the performer, and her complete openness to what might come from that.
I haven’t totally given myself over yet to “pure” graphic scores with no notation, so I clearly still have some work to do. I think my problem is that I tend to work in absolutes; and I recognise exactly why graphic score practice is so beautiful because it decenters the composer somewhat, and offers a form of notation that is much less authoritarian. The part of me that’s politically engaged is saying “yes, now all notation should be like that” — but then there’s the part of me that still enjoys writing something and seeing it come alive in someone else’s hands. There’s still space for both of those things I think, but there’s a part of me that always wants to go all the way.
In some ways, my text scores allow me to do that. They are some of my most austere work. When you write a text score, you’re not literally having to decide bar-by-bar whether there should be a change; you’re just writing an instruction that begins a process. So I think my text pieces, when they’re performed, [are] really very minimal; and they’re very austere in the sense that they are just doing one “thing” — and it might be the most basic thing. They’ve given me a freedom to be extreme.
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In June 2025, Musarc choir performed a durational performance installation, ‘Staring at the Sun’, that you made with Joanna Ward. This was a full and exciting work that included many different elements including movement, group singing, graphic scores, individual exploration and autonomy, multi-media, instrumental improvisation, and other tangible elements. Can you tell me more about the process of making this work and how all the individual elements weave together?
I think the installation came at a really good point for me as an artist this year, where I was interested in more experimental ways in presenting my work. A big appeal of the installation format is what it allows the audience to do, as they have more autonomy in the space. Allowing the audience to approach different stations in the landscape of the work — allowing them to have control over the faders of what they hear at any one time, by standing really close to one thing whilst being in earshot of something else — is the kind of layering and ambiguity that has aligned with my interests this year.
Joanna suggested the installation format as she’s worked on lots of performances that involve multiple pieces happening at once. We conceived it first by deciding that we would each write a larger piece for the choir to sing as a more “traditional” form of song; and then we would each write a couple of smaller things that could happen at the same time, or could be looping. The piece became about smaller pieces happening around larger pieces, but they would occur at different moments across the duration of the performance — and that difference in happenings is what informed the listeners experience.
The concept of hearing something multiple times in different contexts is really interesting. Working with Joanna and Musarc really made this sort of installed exploration possible; Musarc are so open to this way of creating and they really gave us free reign. When we said, “We want an hour and we want to do this performance installation”, they said yes — you couldn’t do that with a traditional choir. They aren’t a “normal” choir and they love and celebrate that.
Joanna and I then started painting graphic scores together — which were totally graphic, with no notation — and we gave them to subsections of the choir. We knew that they would engage with them in a totally sincere way with no self-consciousness and that is really unique. At conservatoire, you often have to work quite hard to get performers onside with more experimental work; but with Musarc, none of that was necessary because they are so used to it. That was really special.
We really didn’t want to tell anyone what to do with the graphic scores, but we divided people into groups — then this one group of dancers decided that they were going to choreograph one of the scores. We only looked over what they were doing, but on the day of performance, they went for it — and actually, seeing that was pretty important for me. It made me think more about how there’s a way of engaging with graphic scores that is still focused or that still makes sense, despite a lack of notation. I am often aware that sometimes there’s a danger with experimental work that it looks inward and doesn’t speak to anyone else. But I didn’t feel like that with this performance.
I’ve been really drawn to experimenting with field recordings, media installations, or just having sound in a space, and I think this piece was an opportunity to work through that. Architecture and space is something that has interested me a lot recently, and it felt really related to the making of the installation. These three architects wrote a book about houses which said that “a good house is a single thing, as well as a collection of many, and to make it requires a conceptual leap from the individual components to a vision of the whole”. We had to think about the multiplicity of encounters that it would be possible to have in such an environment.
In the same way, composing became a lot more than just writing notes and making scores: it became about placing the benches in the best positions in order to invite the audience to sit but also move around — how many of those benches do we need? To what extent will it become a seated thing? Where do we place the graphic scores and how do we declare the space as open? Because the concert format is so dominant, you have to declare the space is open; and then after you’ve done that, you can move to more concentrated areas of activity, such as moments when the whole choir is assembled. In this respect, it really was a broadening of what composition can be. It became about composing space: not only for the choir, but also the audience.
You documented this piece in an interesting way, using a multitude of camera angles and walking GoPros which captured the piece’s spirit really well. How intentional was this decision in regard to an online audience experiencing this piece?
I can get quite anxious about recordings, but I do think that exciting documentation is sometimes overlooked in new music. We should realise that documentation — not just of performance, but also of the making process — is so important. We live in a digital age and people are going to interact with your work online, and you can make that experience a genuine part of your work. It should somehow reflect something about the work itself. In light of these thoughts about documentation, I wanted to use you [Georgie] and Darius as walking cameras — with go-pros strapped to you — to give a sense of what it’s like to walk around, and (as much as possible) relay that experience of being far away from something, and then moving close to it to see how the sonic experience changes. A lot of pieces in the installation wouldn’t work on their own; they are all dependent on happening with each other, in the space, at the same time. Therefore, it was a very specific piece to document — and document well — to capture the essence of what we made.
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After working with and collaborating with dance artist and choreographer Lydia Swift for your piece ‘new work for movement and sound’, you have also been exploring movement yourself — how did this journey evolve, and what does it mean for you both within and potentially separate to your composition practice?
It’s quite a long journey! In early 2024, Lydia asked me if I wanted to dance in a piece which was part of her Masters show at The Place. It was a music and dance collaboration with her partner Theo Finkel called ‘Grey Area’. She asked me to be involved solely as a dancer/mover in her piece, and I said yes very quickly! I had done some work with Lydia in another context, so I knew she was interested in experimental movement practice and that what she would require of me movement-wise wouldn’t involve any particular virtuosity.
The devising process for that happened in October and November, and it was performed at the end of November, 2024. The experience of being a dancer in that devising process and not needing to be concerned with music — or even concerned with creating anything — was an opportunity to see how one could work in that kind of devised way, and ultimately come out of it with a piece of work at the end. It was profound to witness Lydia work, and how she moved us between devising the piece and choreographing it. She really took us into account in the making, and the piece that resulted was as much a creation of Lydia’s as it was a result of the people that were dancing in it, and our particular qualities.
I sort of fell in love — not only with the activities that she was setting us as warm-ups, to do with embodiment, attending to your sensations, moving in response to them, but also with that way of working. This kind of score-less composition when you’re working with performers very directly and devising together is something that happens relatively rarely in new music in comparison to contemporary dance. I was blown away by that process.
I felt it was a great pairing, so I asked Lydia if she would consider working with me again in a collaborative partnership for a piece in May 2025. The resulting piece was called ‘new work for movement and sound’. I asked you and four other friends of mine — James Graham, Darius Paymai, and Maxime Treschel — to be a part of it. We were all musicians apart from Lydia, who was the only person with dance training, so a lot of the work and rehearsal time was about getting all of us in a position where we could engage with movement on a similar level to sound. Neil Luck and Athina Vahla held a workshop called “New Memories for New Muscles: Rethinking the warmup as a site for radical ideas and aesthetics”, and it really felt like our piece was kind of an example of that. Our warm-ups became extremely important to our process: we were learning how to inhabit a space together, which involved being attentive to each other, our bodies and our movement.
Since then Lydia and I have started working more together as a duo, exploring movement and sound together. Obviously she’s trained as a dancer and choreographer and I’m trained as a musician and a composer, but we’re both dipping into each other’s disciplines. It’s been really refreshing to navigate the different questions our individual practices present. The questions you ask yourself when you’re moving in response to your own sensations are so different to the questions you ask yourself when you’re sitting down and composing — they are so much more immediate. It’s been incredible to be completely in the dark with a new discipline in a way that’s disconcerting but also really freeing. You suddenly have no reference point of what’s right and what’s wrong.
When you’re moving you don’t know if what you are doing is good or bad or whether those questions are even real or valid to ask. You have to have your intentions so clear in your own head, and you have to be so focused… It’s a magical practice, and I am really grateful to have met Lydia and to do work with her because it has really opened up another world of being for me.
What are you looking to explore and develop in the future?
A lot of what I’ve done this year has been really explosive — exploding my practice into different arenas, and seeing where interests can take me in unexplored territories. I’m quite excited to see how those experiences impact my writing, if I were to go back to writing music that is notated or that is for a performer.
I think, importantly, I don’t see the work that I’ve done this year as a progression — I see it as a development. Progression would imply that my work has changed and it’s going to go in this total non-scored, devised direction forever. It’s not going to do that, as much as I have loved it — and it has now become a core part of what I can do as a composer — but the act of sitting down, being focused with sound and material, and the practice of writing means that scored music will always be a part of what I do. Having gone through these projects, I wonder what it would be like to write a piece for string quartet or solo instrument now? That is something that I’ve not really explored. So much of my recent music is about layering, or the experience of things happening simultaneously that cause a kind of blurring or out of focus effect… So what do you do when you have a single monophonic instrument? These are the sorts of questions I’m interested in exploring going forward.
I want to keep developing my practice with Lydia and make work with the friends I’ve played with over the past two years. Coming out of an institution, it is really important to create and maintain a community for yourself and for others, that creates a space where experimental work can continue to be made in a supportive environment. That environment is something I want to focus on developing, finding a collective practice, something we started doing with ‘new work’. The act of being together every week, or every other week, throughout a process that lasts four months… You become not just closer as friends with the people you are working with, but you get the opportunity to live together in each other’s worlds for a time. It generates something really profound, and what comes out of that is really exciting for me.
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Learn more about Reuben and his practice:
- https://www.aisido.org/
- https://soundcloud.com/reuben-esterhuizen
- https://www.instagram.com/reuben_esterhuizen
References/Links:
- Sinead Murphy, The Art Kettle (Zer0 Books, 2012)
- Paul Newland, interview with Another Timbre (2023)
- Francis D.K. Ching, Architecture: Form, Space, & Order (John Wiley & Sons, 2007)
- Neil Luck and Athina Vahla – ‘New Memories for New Muscles: Rethinking the warmup as a site for radical ideas and aesthetics’, shared workshop (2022)
header photo by Charlie Stevens
