“My interest is people. I love people — quirky people, people with a story to tell, people with an interesting way of viewing the world.”
Samuel D Loveless
Samuel D Loveless is a neurodivergent composer and interdisciplinary artist who works across a wide range of media. Samuel’s works explore the relationship between performer, space, and audience, with a strong emphasis on accessibility and inclusivity; his creations often blur traditional genre boundaries, employing unconventional techniques and structures to bring his immersive sound worlds to life. Samuel has been commissioned by leading ensembles and institutions such as the Philharmonie Luxembourg, Explore Ensemble, The House of Bedlam, Residentie Orkest, and ITV — recently scoring ITV’s September 2024 documentary Mr Bates vs The Post Office: The Impact. Samuel has been a Britten Pears Young Artist 2023-24, a composer at Luxembourg Composition Academy 2024, and resident artist at CAMP FR; he studied performance at Goldsmiths, University of London, with Mira Benjamin and Pete Furniss, and composition at the Royal College of Music and Royal Conservatoire The Hague, supported by the South Square Trust and the Vaughan Williams Bursary.
Samuel has recently been one of CoMA London’s Composers-in-Residence for 2024-25, who commissioned his work ‘BENCHES’, created in collaboration with artist Tim Hart. ‘BENCHES’ premiered with CoMA London at City Lit Theatre, London, in December 2025, with subsequent showings at The Crypt Gallery in January, and in Plymouth in April 2026. Following the premiere of ‘BENCHES’ with CoMA London, Zygmund de Somogyi caught up with Samuel in a café in west London to discuss referentiality, notation, accessibility, daily life as art practice, and more…
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Zyggy/PRXLUDES: Hi Samuel! We’re talking following the premiere of your interdisciplinary work BENCHES, which took place as a performance with CoMA London and as an installation at The Crypt Gallery. This work is a collaboration between yourself and artist Tim Hart — can you tell me a bit about how this work came about?
Samuel D Loveless: I like to see music as a medium that can create new worlds. I’ve done a lot of work with fashion designers, florists, and more recently documentaries, to try and create this environment.
Tim is my uncle — I’m his nephew. Obviously, I’ve known him for a long time. I’ve always known, in recent years, that I wanted to do something with or about Tim, because he sees the world in very interesting ways. He has these huge collections of stuff: for BENCHES, we’re focusing on his photography collection. Tim takes photos of a few things — benches, letterboxes, postboxes, funfairs, teddy bears — but he’s [also] got huge collections of keyrings, weighing scales, Doctor Who memorabilia— he’ll have all of the videos, all of the DVDs, and all of the different versions. I think that’s really fascinating. There are a lot of artists — myself included — who go their whole lives trying to find their voice; and in many ways, Tim has found his complete unique voice, almost by accident.
When looking at this, I thought: having it in a white-cube, gallery setting, would be totally taking away the key things for Tim in this project. He takes photos of things that are for him; they’re never meant to be seen by anybody. He has no sentiment towards them particularly; the act is taking that singular photo. In that sense, his bench photography is a singular piece. So [I thought], we need to allow people into Tim’s world — rather than chang[ing] his thing into our world. And with that, the curation of the photos is in the display of them, which Tim and I work out together.
The music for BENCHES was first composed as part of your time on the CoMA London Composer-in-Residence scheme. What do you feel like working with CoMA London on the music brought to the project, and your collaboration with Tim?
Tim and I share a very similar brain-space. A good way of explaining this is, there’s a game called Codenames: it’s a five-by-five grid with words on it, and you have to link as many words together. If you put Tim on a team with someone else, or me on a team with someone else, we’ll lose — but then when we’re together, it’s these most random links and we just kind of get it, and see how the other person’s thinking.
BENCHES is talking essentially about a person who has no photography experience; and the photography isn’t really the most important thing. It’s allowing people to have their own practices, and frame the things they do in their daily life as art practices. It was so important to follow on from that point by having an amateur ensemble — work with an ensemble that anybody can join. So CoMA was an obvious group.
The process started in about January 2025. We’d try various things out — we had this back and forth. What was really interesting working with an amateur ensemble is there’d be some sketches I’d bring in, and I’d think in my mind “this will definitely work, and this definitely won’t, but I want to see how it sounds” — and I’d be totally wrong!
How did you approach creating the musical material with the ensemble — was it developed in tandem with Tim’s photography?
It was about trying to create an environment. Knowing Tim quite well, I tried to extrapolate — not to make it a soundtrack to him and his life, but to think about who Tim is — and I was able to try and pull out various aspects to nudge what we were trying to say along. It opens with a big phrase akin to 2001: A Space Odyssey, and then moves on to weirder, bubbling textures — PVC tubes with clarinet mouthpieces, and tinfoil, and things — that reframe a little bit what audiences are expecting to hear.
My whole concept was having sounds that everybody knows — beautiful melodies and harmonies being one aspect — alongside having very bold textures. A good example here is maybe horror film music: when you have that string drrt, drrt, drrt, we all know what that sounds like, but what if we use those same playing techniques for the most beautiful harmonies you’ve ever heard? How does that converge? For me, that’s what was exciting and important: it’s the everyday things, but it’s flipped on its head in a sensitive way.
The film for the performance with CoMA is very much a holding film. It’s in the hands of two people — Clare Richards and Cassandra Roberts — who are documentary-makers by trade and are incredibly creative and interesting people. They’re creating [a] film, that will be the final thing we see, [to] the music we’ve heard from CoMA.
You’ve worked in a variety of different fields — both artistic and non-artistic — before going into composition. How has your background informed how you think about composition?
I’ve had a lot of odd jobs along the way, really: an art technician being one. It’s something I’m asking myself now — and have to be aware of, as well — but I think they’re kind of one and the same. To be totally frank, a large part of it probably comes down to ADHD, and wanting to try various things, and then wanting to try something else. That’s also probably why I’m also a composer; exactly because of that.
Being an art technician was very interesting, because people come to you with an idea — we want to make a fountain that’s set in a wall, but instead of water, there’s light coming down — and then it’s problem solving, essentially: how are we going to do this? Through these, and through these other jobs, you meet people. And composition is all about people, isn’t it? I worked as a postie for a couple of years, as well; and the local blokes that you’re working with are the people that should be the subject of the creative art, because that’s what life is. That’s what gets me: my interest is people. I love people — quirky people, people with a story to tell, people with an interesting way of viewing the world.
I absolutely love that. Tell me a bit about your musical background, more specifically — and how you found yourself moving into composition?
I studied trumpet and performance practice at Goldsmiths, University of London, with Mira Benjamin and Pete Furniss. That was the first time, musically, where I had this thing of “oh, let’s play” — which I’d be so bold to say that music generally (in this setting) isn’t so good at. No shade. -laughs- A field like acting is — it’s play, intrinsically — whereas music, we like to talk, and then do the thing. That was really interesting to me.
I got really into performance art. I did a lot of work with florists, and fashion designers, and we’d create these shows that we’d call “flower shows” — they’re often linked around the solstices, equinoxes, that time of year. They’re very visceral, and human, and bodily-engaged, which I really like. Going into a space where we then invite an audience to be part of that space, part of that happening, is important for me — especially in a world that feels disconnected. It’s a real skill to get people in a space. If people can foster an environment where everyone can feel equally comfortable, that’s a wonderful communion that’s going on there.
I discovered I wanted to foster more of these environments. Over covid, I was a minibus driver for key workers; and that was really interesting. And then I restudied: I did a Masters at the Royal College of Music, and then Royal Conservatoire The Hague, in composition. Looking back at my work then, it was very bitty: I was trying to extrapolate ways of translating something that would work for everyone in a room. It would either look like creating a happening, and making sure everyone felt comfortable — finding ways of communicating that doesn’t feel daunting to people — or writing pieces that were equally playable by an amazing professional string quartet, [and] Grade 1 beginner string players. It’s not dual at all: it’s a singular focus, being accessible.
For a moment, accessibility was the focus of what I was doing. I’d be writing these pieces for accessibility, doing research projects for accessibility. I felt it was a bit on-the-nose, perhaps: “this is what it is, it’s gonna hit you like a brick”.
Do you feel like you’ve been looking for more layered ways of exploring these themes in your more recent work?
Hopefully, this is what BENCHES does. If you want to look at BENCHES as a collection of benches, and a nice film, and a piece of music you can listen to, awesome. If you want to come and engage with Tim — [and] what are the things that I do that other people might perceive to be “odd”, but it’s quite special and important to me, and framed in the right way as an art practice… And then you go one layer back: actually, we all have these art practices, we all have these nuances which are wonderfully beautiful. Kind of unmasking, essentially — something I’ve missed from my own work previously.
Do you feel like this approach has been a gradual one for you — or was there a particular moment where you realised “this is how I’d like to start approaching things”?
I think it’s been from shifts in practice. I’ve been trying to achieve certain things in my compositional practice, and it’s been very isolated — trying to build this skill, then this skill. No two scores even follow the same way of notation, let alone anything else. I was very keen to amalgamate things a little bit more.
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Let’s talk a bit more about notation. A lot of your work uses nontraditional notations, or alternate systems of notation — does that relate to what we’ve discussed about accessibility?
I hate notation. -laughs- I’ve got quite bad dyslexia — dyslexia that impacts me quite deeply. The thing of white-on-black is never kind; obviously with notation, you get that a lot. That’s one thing. The second thing is, I’m quite an auditory-based person: I can have an idea of a piece, I can think of this whole piece in my head, [and then] that barrier to get it out on paper — written in dots on a page — can be excruciating, and take a long time. A good example I look back to is my final composition for my undergrad; I wrote the piece in an evening, essentially, and it took me three weeks to write it out — every day, trying to do it. I think I have tried to find ways for myself to write music in other notations, essentially because I won’t write it if there’s that huge barrier there.
I did some text scores, and graphic scores: but my graphic scores are never “here’s a drawing, do what you want with it”. They are still very specific with directions; it was just trying to maybe mitigate traditional notation. But within that, I then found sometimes that my pieces came away from me, because they weren’t necessarily always the thing I wanted them to be — which of course is fine, in many ways.
It was interesting studying composition formally. At RCM, I had a lot of weight on me to write [with] traditional notation, and we had a lot of debates and discussions about this — and why I didn’t feel that was necessary. And then when I went to The Hague and studied there, I had a professor called Jan van de Putte — who was my composition tutor — and he was like, “Why are you trying? Why are you even talking about traditional notation? You’re wasting your own time…” -laughs- You’re letting the final stage come in even before you’ve created anything — they have to be totally separate identities! You’ve got to create, then you can look at the practical side of it. That was the first time I had anyone be like: Sam, you’re trying to write music and be creative — why are you doing it to someone else’s expectations? It was the first time I’d even flirted with the idea not to do that, let alone boldly encouraged to. Ultimately, that’s changed the way I do things.
Can you give me an example of how you’ve explored alternate methods of notation — perhaps with BENCHES?
So BENCHES [created] a way to use no traditional notation, but every time it’s played, it’s the exact same sound world — you’ll get the same things at the same time. That was my struggle to work out how to do.
It’s been really great with CoMA. This is a huge affordance of working with an amateur ensemble: they show up every week to play new music, and they’re so invested in the creation of new music that they all have their own opinions of the way something should be or shouldn’t be. What the score looked like was text saying what I want — a good example [would be] two stones rubbing together, it would say a little bit about how you would do that — and then there would be a visualisation of how to do it. Because I’m not gonna be reading that stuff; I don’t want to be reading a score, with words… -laughs- But if it says “rub stones” and there’s a visualisation of how to rub the stones together, then great! I’ll follow the pictures. I personally love a visualisation.
There’s a humming section — one of the moments that does need to stay the same the whole way through. There are two ways you can do this: there is traditional notation, the conductor can introduce it to people that way — or there’s an audio file! You listen to the audio file and follow that simple phrase; it’s four bars and repeats, and hopefully is a little bit of an earworm.
There’s a brass entry at the beginning… There’s an option for written notation for those who find it more comfortable — but there are also words provided: very loud, very brash, as loud as you can play… give me a fucking huge sound, but always think bright and brilliant. We want to hear that first trumpet absolutely go for it! Some musicians who are used to traditional notation, when not given that, find it quite challenging. The idea of this piece is to be accessible for everyone — so that stays in. So you can follow what’s written, or as an ensemble, decide on a way of playing that really works.
Do you see this approach for BENCHES being taken on by other ensembles?
It will be performed later in 2026 by Free Range Orchestra, in Canterbury! They are all non-traditional notation readers. The way it will be done is completely verbally cued by me — no-one will be given any pieces of paper. Within the piece, there are fourteen cues in total; each part [will] only have a maximum of five. So you’ve got to remember your five things — three of which will be humming, rubbing stones, and playing tinfoil. So it can be quite simple, provided it’s set up in an appropriate way. That is still something I am massively learning.
From my perspective, there’s certain things about classical tradition, and notation, that can often feel inherently inaccessible — especially if it’s not a tradition you’ve grown up around. I’d love to hear more about ways in which you feel notation could be more accessible, and if there are things you’d like to see institutions doing?
If I knew the answer, I’d be doing it. -laughs- I did a research project called I Want to Break Free a couple of years ago. We went into various schools, community choirs, brownie groups, Masters students at other universities, training teachers, and things like that; our sample range was from the ages of 7 to 80. It was trying to challenge the pedagogical approaches of music in schools. The school setup for GCSE and A-Level [Music], for example: you have to be able to read traditional notation — which is a huge barrier — and it also means you would’ve had to have formal education of music, which is incredibly expensive. We’re getting this whole world of creativity and art, and you’re going “voomph” — only you few people can do it. So we challenged [that] a lot.
It’s all about framing it. A wonderful thing about traditional notation is that in the classical/contemporary trained world, it’s the simplest language that everybody knows. Traditional notation is fantastic for telling you what melodies to play, what harmonies to play, the dynamic, the tempo… It’s not great for telling you the tone of the note, or the intensity you’re meant to be playing. I’m a trumpet player; if I see ff, does that mean it wants to be brassy and brash — that streaky texture — or should it be song-like and played out? They’re totally different things. Yes, traditional notation has a lot of affordances, but it doesn’t have all the answers.
Another thing that rooted from this research project is that lots of conservatoires and music schools would only allow you to touch (for example) John Cage’s 4’33” when you’re at Masters level — I know examples of this in real life. You have to be able to play all these wonderful, but very challenging pieces — you know, Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky — at your undergrad to then be able to play no notes at all. It’s great if you have that knowledge, and fantastic, but they don’t have to be one and the same practice. Anyone can play 4’33” — it’s all about intent. There shouldn’t be gatekeeping around that.
I totally understand that. I’ve noticed that a lot of musicians end up having to do very narrow repertoire during their studies at conservatoire — and then only find their voice after leaving the confines of the institution. Which isn’t what conservatoire should be doing, surely…
When I was at RCM, I did Neil Luck’s module — I performed Nam June Paik’s ‘One for Violin Solo’, and then ‘Dragging Suite’. ‘Dragging Suite’ is when you drag a violin behind you with a piece of string, and ‘One for Violin Solo’ is when you slowly raise [the violin] above your head for five minutes, and bring it down very quickly — and there happens to be a surface underneath you, and it smashes. And I got a formal complaint written to the head of RCM at the time, Colin Lawson — it was this very official thing, and went through the Head of Composition — because it was sacrilege to be dragging this instrument down stairs! That’s not music, it’s not what RCM was about… The shock factor for a piece like that should not exist anymore, it’s 60 years old! -laughs-
It’s so interesting that we show this new music world that we live in to the institutions, and some people go in with no engagement to music made over half a century ago — not even now. You can say it’s not “real music”, but it fundamentally is — it’s not even a new thing.
It’s like being a pop artist and refusing to listen to any music made since The Beatles. -laughs-
I think unfortunately, that might be a catalyst for the elitism and inaccessibility that happened. Of course, you’re a product of your surroundings; I’m sure that person who complained will listen to loads of pop music and love it, for example. But it’s this belief, sometimes, that if it’s not done in this way, or if it’s not written properly, they won’t look at it. Like, why? It’s my voice, this is what I want to say, and I’ve been very specific about why I’ve done it like this. There shouldn’t be this weird power dynamic.
Perhaps it’s a product of a lot of these hierarchies and dynamics that are inherent in classical music.
It’s all one and the same, isn’t it? I’ve been reading a book recently — We Break Strings, [by] Thom Andrewes and Dimitri Djuric, which came out about 10 years ago. I know Thom, and we’d been saying that lots of the things that I’ve been doing, lots of the things that have been happening at the moment, contemporaries of Thom’s were doing 10 years ago. And people 10 years before were doing a similar thing. And it does feel slightly that in these experimental scenes, these grassroots scenes, it hasn’t actually been able to come on so far in the past 30 years that you would’ve expected it to. That’s interesting. And lots of people who find out about [it] — random people who stumbled across BENCHES because they were around St. Pancras waiting for a train, for example — were like “wow, I never knew this scene of art existed!”. It’s so hard to find out about it.
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I wanted to finish by talking about a recent residency you embarked on in France, as part of CAMP at Aulus-les-Bains. I understand you were there for quite a while?
It was quite a long time, actually — it was for 18 months, but on the on-season. So the summer of ’24, and the summer of ’25. It’s [a] really interesting setup there; essentially, people can come for independent residencies for up to six weeks, or you come as part of a course to learn something from someone — like Gavin Bryars, or Chris Watson. A few [of] us were the crew there, who facilitated; one day, you might cook for everyone, the next day you’re helping Gavin Bryars, the next day you’re walking in the mountains, the next day you’re creating your own thing. There’s a lot of time to think. There’s a lot of people creating, all the time.
It’s two hours out of Toulouse. In this village, there’s 30 people who live there full-time — none of whom really speak English at all — and the people coming in are coming there to create something. It really is a merging of exciting things; you feel like you’re at the epicentre of something happening. I could spend the whole rest of my life there.
I was there doing different things, in three stints. The first one, I was working on something for Rainy Days in Luxembourg, centring on laughing. I’m the type of person who’s always thinking about something else — I tend to be quite busy for no particular reason, I guess — but the most recent time I went, I wanted to go and not have to do loads of stuff. This was when I felt a bit stuck in my practice, and ultimately I wanted to go somewhere like CAMP to get that energy back a bit. To create for creation’s sake.
How did you feel like CAMP gave you that space — to become more in tune with your creative self, so to speak?
I think creating is an interesting one… Especially doing it to make a living, as well. Creating, in many senses, is a selfish act — it doesn’t have to be, but it often is. You’re saying the things you want to say, and you have to give the time for that. Obviously, giving time for yourself is not a selfish thing, but it’s a very inward-looking act. But then, when you’re living somewhere like London, there’s a lot of outwardness; there’s a lot of other things happening. You can be less enclosed.
I’ve struggled with this; I think I never found my voice, compositionally and artistically. When I started making music at university, I would write the score, and then it would be in a drawer — I’d never have to get anyone to play it, because I would’ve played it in my head. When I was in Luxembourg, Rishin Singh asked me an interesting question about one of my pieces: why do you create? And I was like “oh, so people can play my pieces around the kitchen table” — it’s for other people. And he was like, that’s great… But you can’t create purely for other people, that isn’t why you create. You create because you have something to say. It’s been on my mind since then.
I’m slightly moving towards the space that instead of worrying about what people think about it, creation is an act for me. That’s important, and CAMP was trying to get that back, essentially — taking control of my own practice.
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Learn more about Samuel D Loveless and his practice at:
- https://www.samueldloveless.co.uk/
- https://soundcloud.com/samueldloveless
- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCanjcVhTYVuIjXXlI_7sSwA
- https://www.instagram.com/samueldloveless/
Learn more about BENCHES, Samuel D Loveless’ multidisciplinary collaboration with Tim Hart:
References/Links:
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), dir. Stanley Kubrick
- The Shower Scene, from Psycho (1960), dir. Alfred Hitchcock
- John Cage – 4’33” (1952)
- Nam June Paik – ‘One for Violin Solo’ (1962)
- Nam June Paik – ‘Dragging Suite’ (1963)
- Thom Andrewes and Dimitri Djuric, We Break Strings: The Alternative Classical Scene in London (Hackney Classical Press, 2015)
