“I think composing gives you the luxury of not having to make a decision within a five second timeframe; but inherently, it is the same type of decision making. I think something that appeals to me is bringing composing slightly closer to performance.”
Omri Kochavi
Omri Kochavi is a composer and guitarist based in London. His work draws its language from a broad range of influences, focusing on the reality of sounds, plants, people, and the interactions between them. Recent highlights include the premiere of ‘Ladies in Bloomers’ as part of London Sinfonietta’s Writing the Future scheme 2024-25, and ‘gilufim | גִּלּוּפִים’, commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra following Omri’s participation in the LSO Helen Hamlyn Panufnik scheme 2023-24. Other recent and upcoming highlights include performances by ensembles such as the BBC Singers, EXAUDI, the Orchestra of Opera North, Slide Action, and Plus Minus. He was a Britten Pears Young Artist in 2021-22, culminating in the premiere of ‘Kishtatos’ by the BBC Singers at the Aldeburgh Festival; the work was later nominated for an Ivors Classical Award in 2023, and was awarded the Grand Prize at the 2025 SOCAN Foundation Young Canadian Composers Awards. Omri is currently undertaking a PhD in Composition at Durham University, supervised by James Weeks, and was a 2022–23 Junior Fellow at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, studying with Julian Anderson and Laurence Crane.
Recently, Omri’s work ‘Ladies in Bloomers’ — inspired by Fiona Davison’s book An Almost Impossible Thing — was premiered by the London Sinfonietta, EXAUDI, and gardeners from Story Garden, conducted by Ellie Slorach. Following the premiere, Patrick Ellis caught up with Omri at Café OTO in London to chat about community gardens, jazz guitar, intuitive decision-making, working with ancient text, and more…
Header photo by Wai Lok Cheung
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Patrick/PRXLUDES: You’ve recently had a large-scale premiere of your work ‘Ladies in Bloomers’ with the London Sinfonietta, centring on gardening. As well as being a composer and performer, you are also a keen gardener — how did those experiences first seep into your music?
Omri Kochavi: I started gardening during the time that I was writing ‘Kishtatos | קִישׁתׇתוֹס’ for the BBC Singers, which was inducing a fair bit of stress. It was also not very long after I had moved to London, and I saw a flyer in my local park advertising a community garden. So I began to volunteer there, and I would go there every Tuesday.A community garden is a very special meeting place in our city; it has the natur[al] element, but it also has the social community element that parks don’t necessarily have.
I kept that on for a while and it definitely helped, and gladly now I get less stressed when writing music. I think it was around a year later that I started to explore a connection between gardening and composition. At first, it was quite an abstract relationship, but after some time gardening has become more explicit [in my work].
Gardening also plays a role in your current composition PhD that you’re undertaking at Durham University. Do you feel like you were dipping your toes in tentatively first, and then you started to bring the theme in more overtly?
Whilst I don’t think that it was a directional process, the PhD that I am currently working on is about composing site-specific works for community gardens — but within that, there are a variety of ways in which the connection can manifest. ‘Ladies in Bloomers’ was on the more explicit end of the spectrum — the whole story is about gardening, and it also featured on-stage gardeners who were participating in the piece.
For a while, it did feel like this theme was converging in a directional way towards [being] more and more explicit, but I think now after ‘Ladies in Bloomers’, it has started to take on a bit more of a holistic/constellation form, where you can explore gardening in oblique ways. For example, perhaps in the future, there will be a work that goes even further in the participatory direction — more towards the community music aspect — but also a parallel direction of not having participation, but having the content more present in the work; such as using natural materials or electronic sounds that are sampled from gardens.
Of these works inspired by gardening and nature themes, ‘anafim | עֲנָפִים’ — commissioned by Britten Pears Arts for the Aestus Quartet — is the oldest. What elements of gardening did you bring into that piece? How did it relate to the musical material?
It’s an example of a very abstract version of this connection. In that piece, it’s more of a loose inspiration. anafim (עֲנָפִים) is a translation of “branches” in Hebrew, and the work explores that theme; there are different kinds of branches, how they can be supple or snappy. It’s one of my most focused pieces, it’s very single minded, just a very simple idea that goes through several layers of rhythmic transformations. If you imagine the piece as an image or a video, the video will just be a bunch of branches, gradually zoomed in through a microscope.
At that time, I was also influenced by thinking about how natural gardening and natural processes could affect the writing. It’s more of a process piece than the works before and after. There is a pattern which includes two melodies of different lengths that hocket with each other, and then that gets shifted around — I was into this kind of generative ideas at that time. I think now, I have an element of self-criticism towards that kind of thinking: if I didn’t tell an audience member that the piece was about branches, then I don’t think that they would know. On the one hand, there is nothing wrong with having these looser and abstract connections — but I think that it also makes me try to push myself to incorporate the subject matter in the works in a more upfront manner. I was actually asked to make another version of this piece for a different instrumentation, and perhaps also because of these thoughts that version will try to go one step further and include playing actual branches as part of the percussion part.
Did your works prior to ‘anafim’ deal with the relationships of abstract materials?
Yes — at the time, I wanted to have some more focus and give my pieces a clearer structure. I think that it is something which many composers think [about]. I still think about it now, but in a slightly different way — more about the big picture form rather than the details and the generation of material.
I think we always try to balance where we give ourselves freedom and where we restrict ourselves. With pieces that I’m working on now, I think these thoughts are more [at] the macro level. Of course, when you write for a longer duration, it allows you to do that a bit more. The smaller things can remain a bit freer, but at that time, I was interested in stricter generation of material and the processes behind it.
A slight tangent, but when you start to think about generative music and all of that legacy, a lot of it is focused on the system. I think the fact that the system is great, doesn’t mean it creates great music. So I was interested in still having the initial musical idea being created more freely, and then trying to reverse engineer it to see which system could have created it — essentially “arriving” at the system from the result side, and not the other way around. These are things that I think about less now, but it did help me focus my practice at that point, which was needed to then branch out a bit.
It’s as though when you are wishing to bring in a new element, you need to focus and simplify what you are already comfortable with…
You need to kind of overdo it! I enjoy that piece [‘anafim’] — it was great working with the Aestus Quartet, who have since performed the piece several times. I think sometimes when we “overdo” something, it ends up in a result that’s not very interesting and more transitional — but in this particular case, I do actually like the piece, even though it is a bit more extreme with its focus.
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The second of these nature-themed works is ‘gilufim | גִּלּוּפִים’, translating to “carvings” in Hebrew, commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra. It was originally written as part of the LSO Helen Hamlyn Panufnik scheme in 2024, and then was subsequently fleshed out into a six minute work. How did you adapt your approach in ‘anafim’ when dealing with the theme into ‘gilufim’?
They were written around the same time as each other. In an early sketch of ‘gilufim’, it’s much closer to ‘anafim’ — not necessarily on a musical level, but in terms of the systematic nature. It did start out that way, but during the writing of the piece [‘gilufim’], I gradually let go of that approach. There is a constant element of a marimba and vibraphone texture which continues throughout almost the whole piece, which in many ways is similar to ‘anafim’ in how it was written. The material around that core [is] the instruments of the orchestra picking up the percussion texture and then later transforming it into other material — but that constant percussion motor did allow the piece to progress and move more easily.
I think that moving time is a difficult thing to deal with as a composer. It can be comforting when time is already moving and you need to react to it. It’s a more hybrid kind of thing [with ‘gilufim’]; this percussion texture is based on a controlled generative process — where I choose the harmonies and various other parameters — but then the time does move for you and you need to respond to that. So I think that sometimes I like to try and reverse the role of the composer and listener…
What do you mean by that?
When you try to compose music as a listener, that can create a different relationship to the music. I originally trained as a jazz guitarist, so for me, one of the most natural modes of operation is improvisation and listening — I think the listening part is almost more important than the improvisation. When I started out composing, I remember a feeling I had during a workshop — that we all know — of being surprised when you hear your music being played for the first time. Obviously that can be an exciting thing, but sometimes you might think “oh, I didn’t think that it would sound like that” — and recently, I have been experiencing less of this, because I think I’m trying to internalise the listening a lot and constantly use my ear. So for example, having something like that percussion texture written out, you can sit back and listen to it going on for three minutes and start to imagine what could happen within that time.
In a funny way, the percussion texture is almost like a jazz backing band, and you are essentially improvising with orchestral instruments over it…
The whole conversation around improvisation and composition is a deep discussion: where does one start, and where does the other end? And that spectrum in between. I think if you try to write composed music that sounds like improvisation, it would still have a very different nature to it than actual improvisation — because the time dimension is so different.
So once you’ve established the backing — which in this case would be the percussion — as an improviser, you would then choose the moments to fill the space and how to react to that. Obviously, when you are improvising on the guitar in a more standard jazz format, you might play a gesture, then you might repeat that, then go down in pitch, then back up.
Definitely — although the decisions that you need to make are quite different. You can also just do nothing. There are moments in the piece where there is space; the piece is quite short and I imagine if the piece was longer, then it would also have these longer moments of nothing going on, or a few sustained notes. There are some instruments that act as resonators to the percussion, and there are bars where there is nothing else going on apart from these two elements.
In jazz, one of the main things that excites me is that you can play a small gesture, then sit and listen, thinking of what that gesture created in the musical landscape now, and how that affects what happens next. I think composing gives you the luxury of not having to make a decision within a five second timeframe; but inherently, it is the same type of decision making. I think something that appeals to me is bringing composing slightly closer to performance. Apart from the fact that I grew up as a performer and I still perform — it can help bring composing into a more playful kind of territory.
Throughout the years, I was interested in forming a composing process that gets closer to making musical decisions in an intuitive free-time way, and in less of a purely cerebral process. The cerebral part is there, you don’t necessarily need to worry about it. I think that intuition and process are both a part of what we do, and how these engage with each other is always an interesting question.
When you developed this work into the six-minute version for the LSO commission, was it a case of adding more in? Or was it more about accommodating more space and stretching out a few of those moments?
It was more of a case of the second. The piece wasn’t extended by a huge amount — from three and a half minutes to six — but it is still different.
The very first sketch for the piece was just really dense. -laughs- And then instead of going through the dense texture and carving things away, which was the original plan, I took the elements [and] developed them in a more multi-dimensional way. The original sketch had the percussion texture, and it had this overlapping melody in the winds that we hear throughout the piece. That sketch did end up supplying almost all of the material in the final version. So the carving theme was still there, but not in the original way that I intended it to be.
When I extended the piece, I went back to wood carving as inspiration. The beginning and the end stayed more or less the same; however, the middle is using more detail. Imagine that you did a first draft of a wood carved hippo sculpture — you would maybe do it with not much detail — but if you went to a more refined version, you would put in a bit more effort, and work with finer chisels after the first rough shaping. That’s where the extra work goes in. So it did give me an opportunity to take some of the ideas that do appear and develop them a bit further. Had I made a ten minute version of the piece, then it would have probably been the same process too, but just longer.
How did nature and gardens inspire your orchestration?
The middle section is the one part of the piece that has more actual “wood-like” sounds from the percussion. The percussionists in the piece mostly only play the vibraphone and the marimba — and one passage for bowed crotales and glockenspiel in the second version — but in this passage they switch to playing sounds that don’t necessarily sound like typical “orchestral percussion”. In general, every percussion part that I write for has “play with jazz brushes” — whatever the instrument is, it’s always a good tactic. -laughs- Anyway, one percussionist is playing the tam-tam with brushes, a second one on timpani with brushes, and the third is playing a special nut-seed shaker that really has this crackling sound — which belonged to my partner’s grandfather, who owned quite a vast array of eclectic instruments. The sound is incredibly loud. If you shake it around the house, it is louder than a trombone… I don’t know why. -laughs-
In the original score, they all had a constant tremolo with dynamic changes, which gave it too much of a “musical” result. When we did the workshop, we ended up using a much freer texture, because I realised that this was actually supposed to sound a lot more “non-musical”, like a crackling woodfire — or someone that was chopping away at some wood. So in the final score of the instructions, I gave up the notation and just had a verbal instruction to “imagine that you are watching a YouTube ASMR video of a crackling fireplace”… -laughs-
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The most recent of these works, ‘Ladies in Bloomers’, takes the themes of nature and gardening to their most extreme — you include live, onstage gardeners. What encouraged you to have the theme more direct in that piece?
‘Ladies in Bloomers’ was a bigger piece, scored for chamber ensemble, four singers, and on-stage community gardeners. I began working on it around the time when the first version of ‘gilufim’ was workshopped. Like any piece, there is a lot to do before you start to write the music; but when you write a 45 minute piece, you do need to plan it a bit more. I always enjoy working with text, and I like the idea of a piece being about something very specific — preferably quite niche — that I can dig into and learn about through writing the music.
I think that the previous work that was more in that direction [was] ‘Kishtatos | קִישׁתׇתוֹס’ for the BBC Singers, which I wrote back in 2022. That one is about ancient Jewish-Iraqi ghost-busting traditions, combining text from archaeological artefacts from around 200-600BC in Babylon with a newly commissioned text by poet Amira Hess. That is quite far from gardening, but there is something a bit similar to the choice of texts.
‘Ladies in Bloomers’ is based on An Almost Impossible Thing, a book by Fiona Davison, who is also the head librarian of the Royal Horticultural Society. Going through the archives, she came across a reply to a letter written to the RHS on behalf of one Olive Harrisson in 1898, asking to claim her bursary to work at one of the RHS gardens. At that time, in the early 1900s, you would sit the RHS exams, and if you got one of the top marks, you would be eligible to receive a paid scholarship to work at the RHS gardens to train to become a professional gardener. Olive got the top mark that year, but was then refused the scholarship by the head of the RHS, on the grounds of being a woman. That led Fiona to look into the lives of six women that wanted to be professional gardeners at the time; all of them from different backgrounds, and ended up in different places.
The piece follows the lives of these women using real archival text and letters — as well as some imagined ones that I wrote to connect the dots. So I think that what links the ‘Ladies in Bloomers’ and ‘Kishtatos’ is the timeless nature of both subjects. For example, in Fiona’s book, there is a passage about how two of the women started a violet nursery, and struggled with the snails in their garden that were eating away all of their violets. If you garden in the UK today, that is your number one worry every growing season!
For ‘Ladies in Bloomers’, we worked with community gardeners. So that was another way of bringing the past and present together — which to me is always an interesting thing to do. It also has a side-effect that I then hold some very niche knowledge. From ‘Kishtatos’, I know a lot about ancient Iraqi-Jewish ghost-busting; and now I’m also very familiar with the politics of the professional gardening world in the UK at the beginning of the 20th century… -laughs-
With ‘Kishtatos’, you were also bringing together the past and the present…
It’s more extreme in that piece, because it was using a very old text, from inscriptions on incantation bowls from 200-600BC. It is in Jewish-Babylonian Aramaic, which is a language that I don’t speak — it’s also [a] language that we don’t really know how to pronounce, so we can only guess. When I was writing that piece, I consulted an expert on Jewish-Babylonian Aramaic; even they can’t be 100% certain [on the pronunciation], but it’s the best guess we have, which is an aspect I always like about anything that’s really ancient.
Alongside it, we commissioned a new text by poet Amira Hess, who has sadly since passed away. She was this larger than life figure; she was Iraqi-born and Jewish, and embodied these Babylonian, mystical elements both in her life and in her work — but at the same time living in the 21st Century and very connected to modernity. So the idea really came from her persona, and her spirit had a huge influence on the piece.
The Aramaic text originated from archeological artefacts called incantation bowls that you put under your doorstep, and they have scripture written on them which is supposed to drive demons away. So I asked Amira what she would write if she was to write a text for one of these bowls today. That prompt resulted in this half-Hebrew, half-Aramaic wondrous text that also includes some made-up and extremely colourful language. When you then work with something like this as a composer, it immediately imprints some of its unique identity on the piece. I also used an actual recording of Amira’s voice reading out her text, which is layered on top of the choir at two points in the piece.
How did your approach to text with ‘Kishtatos’ influence how you worked on ‘Ladies in Bloomers’?
With ‘Ladies in Bloomers’, it was fun to mold the text myself. For example, we had the rejection letter that was sent to Olive Harrisson, but we don’t have the original request letter — so I wrote it, trying my best to sound a bit Victorian! I enjoyed working with this historical stuff and filling in the bits that went missing. In the case of the source material for ‘Ladies in Bloomers’, of course at the time there were no digital traces. Fiona [did] a lot of piecing together during her research for the book: she was going through census records and even reached out to the descendents of the women that she was researching. I think that’s a fun thing that historians get to do, and I enjoy doing it myself once in a while and put on the historian hat with these kinds of pieces.
I think that the reason that I like to work with these very specific and niche things is that it encourages a distinct taint to the music. ‘Kishtatos’ is quite mystical and ritualistic, whereas ‘Ladies in Bloomers’ has this very playful, almost goofy and humouristic nature to it, each incarnated from its subject matters. A lot of the letters and newspapers [when researching for ‘Ladies in Bloomers’] are very funny when you read them, both for the right and wrong reasons. Some of them are ridiculously misogynistic… So I think that sarcasm and irony is a core part of the piece. It’s about making composing a reactionary and conversational process, interacting with the text on a deeper level.
When you were “filling in the blanks” of the text, it’s as though you are putting on a hat and acting as the other character during the composition process.
It also often ends up in a completely different place than you planned to. I think that ‘Ladies in Bloomers’ ended up being a much more theatrical work than I had originally intended — which wasn’t a territory that I had explored before, but I really enjoyed it. I also enjoyed the different relationship that was created with the audience, which is something that I am thinking more about. I didn’t really think that the piece would go so much in that direction, but I’m very glad that it did. As you said, it puts you in a different hat, considering the human drama side of things.
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Let’s talk a bit more about your PhD working on site-specific works for community gardens. How are you starting to develop these ideas in your research?
It’s important to mention that ‘Ladies in Bloomers’ was supposed to be performed in an outdoor garden, but then we were faced with British weather — so it took place indoors in the end. I feel that with that piece, we brought the garden we were working with [Story Garden] indoors: we took a lot of plants from the site, and also had on-stage gardeners from the garden, but it was in a theatre space, which gave a different flavour.
It made me think of the concept of offsite site-specific works… It’s like when you go into a museum, you see a Monet painting, it depicts a specific place — but you experience it in a very different, often sterile place. Thinking about what kind of shape that can have in a piece of music is interesting for me. So although ‘Ladies in Bloomers’ didn’t happen in a garden this time round, it was still very much affected by the fact that it was supposed to be in Story Garden. It had the people from that garden participating in the piece — but also the community surrounding them that came to the show as audience members.
Tell me about some of your upcoming projects. You’ve got a large-scale piece for Plus Minus Ensemble that you’re currently working on…
That will be a work for ensemble and vocalist — Plus Minus Ensemble and Louisa Rosi — which will tie in with some of the threads that I have been talking about. It is once again based on an ancient text — Hortulus, written by a Benedictine monk from the 9th century named Walafrid Strabo, who lived on this isolated island in southern Germany. It’s one of the oldest surviving texts about gardening. You would think that it would be very didactic or purely instructive, but it’s actually a very illustrious poem about different plants. The text is essentially about one man who really loves his garden.
That said, there is some good knowledge in there. Apparently, if you mix fennel roots with the milk from a pregnant goat, it helps with tummy aches! But also it’s just a touching document. For this piece, I’m going to set a selection of these poems, and we are going to do several performances of it around the country; with each performance, we are going to partner with a community garden from that area. I will do interviews with its staff and volunteers, asking them to describe some of their favourite plants, and then intersperse extracts of these interviews between the songs, alongside a video element from that specific garden space. I think it follows through on ‘Ladies in Bloomers’ but from a slightly different angle, collaborating with actual community gardens in a different way.
Another project I’m really excited about is a new work for trombone quartet Slide Action, based around concepts of no-dig gardening, which will premiere this summer in the 2026 Spitalfields Festival.
There’s also a piece [I’m writing] for Chris Clarke for solo harp, willow rods, secateurs and audio track. That piece has no participation and no gardeners, but it involves using natural materials; using the willow rods on the harp strings, as well as the secateurs snipping the willow rods, and then using the off-cuts to play the harp as well. The piece title, gizumim (גִּזּוּמִים), means “prunings” — so it’s another example of trying to embed the content world in the piece in a more concrete and tactile way.
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Learn more about Omri Kochavi and his practice:
- https://www.omrikochavi.com/
- https://soundcloud.com/omri-kochavi-984880996
- https://www.instagram.com/nomrik
References/Links:
- Fiona Davison, An Almost Impossible Thing (Little Toller Books, 2023)
- Helen Briggs, ‘Olive Harrisson: Story of unsung gardener revealed’ (2018), BBC News
- Krista Dalton, ‘Incantation Bowls and Embodied Knowledge’ (2020), Ancient Jew Review
- Walafrid Strabo, Hortulus (c. 9th Century), edited by George H. M. Lawrence
