“What interests me the most — and what has had such a strong impact on how I write — is sensoria. How something feels: a tactile sensation, a particular scent, the pressure of gravity, the temperature around me, the force and agility required to move in a certain way… The beautiful meeting of the body and the world outside it. The points at which they intertwine.”
Amy Crankshaw
Amy Crankshaw is a South African-born composer currently based in London, UK. Amy’s music has been described as having “a real feeling of ecstasy” (Planet Hugill), “carrying images and sensations” (Ôlyrix), and as “an act of love” (Opera Now). Her work is performed internationally, with commissions by Radio France, Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, and the South African Music Rights Organisation, at venues such as the Barbican Centre, La Scala Paris, Vorarlberg Museum, ISCM World New Music Days, Bloomsbury Festival, and National Arts Festival, among others. Amy is a London Symphony Orchestra Helen Hamlyn Panufnik composer for 2025-26 and was selected for the LSO Soundhub scheme in 2023-24. She won the Richmond Concert Society’s Muriel Dawson Composition Award in 2024, the Priaulx Rainier Prize in 2015, and has held multiple residencies with Académie du Festival d’Aix-en-Provence. Amy studied her doctorate in composition at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, supervised by Julian Philips, Hollie Harding, and Nell Catchpole; she studied an MA in Opera Making and Writing at Guildhall, and previously studied at the South African College of Music (BMus, MMus) with Hendrik Hofmeyr.
On Sunday 29th March, Amy’s work ‘Sound of Harvest’, commissioned by CoMA, with support from the Vaughan Williams Foundation, is being premiered as part of CoMA Festival 2026 at Brady Arts Centre, London. Amy’s orchestral work ‘Superbloom’ was also recently workshopped by the London Symphony Orchestra, as part of Amy’s time on the LSO Helen Hamlyn Panufnik scheme. Ahead of both of these, we caught up with Amy at a café on the outer edges of south London, to discuss sensoria, ritual, eco-emotions, empathy for nature, and more…
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Zyggy/PRXLUDES: Your work ‘Superbloom’ is [at time of interview] going to be workshopped by the London Symphony Orchestra, as part of your participation in the 2025-26 LSO Helen Hamlyn Panufnik Composers Scheme. Can you tell me a bit about your experience on the programme?
The experience has been wonderful. One of the things about composing is that we’re often alone — you know, it’s a lonesome thing — which is helpful in its own way, and often necessary. But what I’ve loved about this particular scheme is that I’m part of a cohort of composers. Even though we have our own artistic endeavours, we’re all working towards a similar goal. We’re experiencing the workshops together, and interacting with LSO performers… It’s a shared experience, which you don’t often get as a composer. In this way, it’s a special combination of working on your own project while sharing this fruitful experience with each other. I just found it so supportive.
It’s been fantastic to interact, face-to-face, with members of the LSO. We have often seen them on stage, heard them playing — and now we’re behind the scenes with them, talking about their craft in depth. It’s a whole new layer of learning, being in a workshop setting with them; it makes so much difference to the composition process. It feels like I’m not just writing for me, but for other people as well. They’ve been so generous in our discussions and I’m really looking forward to playing around with some new ideas at the workshop.
‘Superbloom’ takes its name from natural phenomenon of flowers blooming — can you tell me about the concept of ‘Superbloom’ and how you approached writing for the orchestra?
Yeah, that’s it. A superbloom is a casual term for a rare desert botanical event, in which vast amounts of dormant seeds — sometimes millions — suddenly germinate and bloom together, flushing the desert floor in a wildflower spectacle. Something of what I was aiming at with this piece is what if might feel like to experience this phenomenon.
The piece is quite “high-energy”… and I suppose the feelings I associate with it are a kind of psychedelic joy, as well as warm and grounded sensations — like earthbound materials with a strong sense of connection, a deep warmth, gooeyness. The ecstatic roar of tiny blossoms turning and opening towards the sun for the first time… I just love that idea. How intensely happy that is, how full of life that is. The feeling of the sun baking into you, for the first time in a long time — or ever.
You’ve got this landscape in the desert, and when this phenomenon happens — which is not very often at all — it comes by surprise. For many seasons, winds will come through and deposit different dormant seeds on the desert floor — and what has to happen for these blooms to erupt is, you’ve got to have the right timing and amount of rainfall in the months before spring, and the right amount of time for moisture to settle deep into the sand as well. A lot of specific elements have to come together for this to happen. So, when they do bloom… suddenly, across the whole desert floor, you’ve got densely-packed crowds of contrasting blooms — and they all move and jiggle in different ways. It’s vivid, ecstatic, and the behaviour of the flowers remind me of that poem ‘Don’t Hesitate’ by Mary Oliver…
“If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case.
Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.”
How did this natural phenomenon make its way into the composition and orchestration process?
The piece uses forms of collage – in terms of colour, texture, and other composition elements; drawing on this idea of crowds and hockets of flowers, bustling and competing for attention from their various groups in different locations in the orchestra. Often, those sorts of things have been at the forefront of the composition process; instead of prioritising “I’m looking for this instrument colour”, it’s a bit more like “I’m looking for this place — where in the orchestra can this colour come from?”.
Harmonically, there are lots of cluster-y chords and a lot of glissandi. Is it too much? Maybe… -laughs- I also wanted to conjure up that psychedelic feel of hyper-colour, so I thought that using gooey glissandi could be one approach to explore that… creating a kind of happy wooziness that might embody the experience of the blooms themselves, and of someone encountering millions of bright wildflowers. Woohoo.
That’s some of what I have been exploring through writing this piece, and it’s a privilege to have the opportunity to workshop these ideas with the LSO.
The way you’ve described these kinds of pitch clusters and glissandi really reminds me of your piece ‘Notes from a Wilderness’, which was performed by the Guildhall Symphony Orchestra back in 2023…
In ‘Notes from a Wilderness’, I use glissandi as well — but it’s a different sensory context. ‘Notes from a Wilderness’ deals with dizziness in a more physical, athletic way — it’s like that sense of needing to find your vestibular equilibrium after climbing a mountain — whereas in ‘Superbloom’, I feel like the wooziness that I’m going for is at a visual level. What I associate with those bold, contrasting colours… Getting lost on that sort of psychedelic level. Not that I know… -laughs-
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You’ve described your music as drawing from “visceral experiences of the natural world” — can I ask where your interest in the natural world stems from, and how it impacts your work?
Although I’ve always engaged in eco-minded creative work to varying degrees, it is in recent years that my creative practice has evolved to deal with the natural world with greater specificity, and direct intentionality. My approach seems to be gently shifting from “there’s something over there that I can write about” — a material, a landscape, a process, a phenomenon — to “how does it feel to interact with these things?” and “how might I relate to the natural world in an artistic context?”
Physical, visceral experiences are fundamental to some of the pieces I’ve written recently. Rather than writing about a concept, I’m usually exploring different kinds and degrees of experience with the natural world. It’s become more about relationship with it. What I love about that, what gets me going about these things, is the points at which the natural world (outside my body) and my actual body, meet… that is really interesting to me — the level of contact when you can no longer differentiate between the two. That happens through physical experience.
I understand — is there a particular process of transformation for you as you turn these ideas into musical form? What does that feel like for you?
What currently brings me energy in my practice is finding ways to musicalise what I encounter because of the world around me. I’ve realised that a lot of my recent music tends more specifically towards musicalising sensation, rather than musicalising “the natural world”, which is kind of overwhelming — it’s just so vast -laughs- — so I am trying to musicalise aspects of my experiences with it. Composing with, from, and about the natural world.
What interests me the most — and what has had such a strong impact on how I write — is sensoria. How something feels: a tactile sensation, a particular scent, the pressure of gravity, the temperature around me, the force and agility required to move in a certain way. That is the way I can experience the world viscerally, somatically: through my senses. The beautiful meeting of the body and the world outside it. The points at which they intertwine.
I enjoy thinking about musical material in terms of how it might relate to material and physical properties. How heavy is it? How might I musicalise humidity? Temporality comes in quite a lot too, because maybe I’m not writing about a process or experience end-to-end. By composing through a sensorial lens, it’s really embodiment and embodied knowledge that plays a big part in my practice. And so, in terms of temporality, things become less about how long it took to hike a trail, for example, and more about how long it felt… These kinds of intuitive and embodied approaches to composition sand down logical and conceptual approaches. Things I can feel in my body more easily than reason in my mind — I find that mesmerising and motivating.
I grew up in South Africa, and I was lucky to be able to play in a big backyard as a kid — rugged grass, blue gums (invasive, sadly), guava trees, and shady corners of ferns. I spent lots of time outside. I also enrolled in the Scouts when I was 11, and was there for about seven years; so we’d spend a lot of weekends hiking, camping, and learning bushcraft and wilderness skills like map reading, and observing vegetation and wildlife. That has had a big impact on me. I found those experiences extremely absorbing. I also enjoy long-distance running — which has taken me into trail running, too. Just getting outside for long periods of time. The UK’s public footpaths and bridleways are a wonderland for that. So naturally, these experiences inform my interests, and have infiltrated into how I think about composing.
Do you tend to think about audience experience when you compose, as well? Do you see composition as something akin to translation, or something more personal or subjective?
I don’t intend, necessarily, for the audience to fully understand the experiences that often inform my pieces. It would be impossible – and of course, we all have our own interpretations of physicality. My visceral experiences and embodied knowledge go into the making of the piece, and what comes out on the other side is open to interpretation, you know? It’s a kind of creative sharing, or maybe an offering of something.
Of course, I hope that someone listening might enjoy the music to some degree, but what is heard, and how it is interpreted, [are] perhaps less important to me than the creative journey through making the piece. And for me, the aesthetic outcome is a product of creative experimentation, rather than a value judgement of the subject matter — which I think is an important one to think about when dealing with something like [our] relationship with the natural world. I think my desire is not really that the creative intention will be understood, so much that it will be somehow, to some degree, be felt… That at best (in the words of musicologist Denise von Glahn), it might “sensitise listeners to ideas close to [my] heart”.
It’s about opening a portal of the imagination — opening a portal to the body and the heart. “What might it sound like, how might it feel, if I’m a flower reaching towards the sun for the first time?” And then you get to the level of empathy: empathy for the natural world, fostering ecological care. Through composing in relation to the natural world, I have to try and empathise with the subject matter. This is a shared experience between me and said tree, or me and the ground beneath my feet. Can I get into the shoes of that thing in some way? What if I try to empathise with this tiny pebble… What have I seen in my life as a pebble? What conversations have I overheard, how does it feel when I get really cold, or rained on, get polished over centuries? Leaning into other-than-human ways of thinking really fascinates me. This is why the creative arts are so powerful: we can use our imaginations for this; we can challenge, play, and experiment with philosophical thought.
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I was really struck by your percussion work ‘November moon readings’, which was performed by players of the LSO back in 2024. I really loved your use of plants and foliage in the piece — as texture, as beaters, sometimes as instruments themselves. How did you approach these ideas of channeling other-than-human ways of thinking in that work?
‘November moon readings’ takes its structure from the lunar cycle. There are different plants associated with different moon phases; lots of different plants across various traditions. A lot had to do with the season that we’re in, and what I could actually find… -laughs- But we settled for lime leaves, rosemary, and eucalyptus sprigs.
The piece goes ritualistically through these different moon cycles — and the associated plants are used in that order, as well. The plants are the connecting thing here. In this way, I’ve got the plants doing some of the creative work; there was a process of experimentation, exploring tactile and olfactory characteristics. I used the rosemary sprigs with timpani, and it produced lots of gentle sounds on the timpani skin; we rubbed it, rustled it, dropped it from a height. Whereas eucalyptus, which is much tougher, gave more resistance… The foliage dictated what we could do in the piece. Their tactile physical nature dictated so much. Rather than me pre-planning for “this is the sound I want”, the situation was “this is the sound you can have, how are you going to use it?”. It’s one way that I could try bring in the “voice” of plants into the creative process… Finding that posture towards an other-than-human way of thinking.
Eucalyptus provides a lot of resistance but is also fairly supple — there’s so much you can do with it. Whacking it against the cymbals was so much fun. -laughs- You can’t do that with lime leaves, with rosemary, it’ll just disintegrate straight away. We experimented with lots of varieties of eucalyptus: some dry, some fresh, big, small, green, silvery. You have to find what feels right — and sometimes, you just have to go with what’s available, and what’s sustainable. That’s the fun of it: what’s the natural world going to give us for this project?
Did the nature of the plants themselves dictate the ways you treated the musical material?
It’s quite a balance. It really was a process of learning about the plants; it forced me to learn about them in order to make a piece that made sense to me. They are now instruments. -laughs- On an even more micro level, the specific durability of eucalyptus didn’t only dictate the possibilities for timbre — but also the length of time that you could use them for, and the rhythmic density assigned to playing the cymbals. You can’t just go bababababababa… -Amy makes an air drumming gesture- — because you might break the stem off too soon! So even very specific things like rhythms had to be decided according to the physical properties of the plants.
There were some emotions that arose for me during the creation process of ‘November moon readings’. By using plants associated with specific moon phases, the foliage evoked the exploration of eco-emotions associated with environmental destruction… Emotions specific to human experience, that arise precisely because of ecological destruction and grief associated with the climate crisis. It’s also this sense of care that a lot of us feel when we witness environmental loss, extinction; the emotions that arise out of that.
These are feelings I think a lot of us feel already — but I never knew there was actually a term for it.
There’s a writer called Glenn A. Albrecht, who’s written a book on eco-emotions [ed. Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World]. He’s defined a lot of words, like solastalgia: it’s a combination of anxiety, fear, homesickness, that humans experience as a direct result of ecological decline — like the ice that’s melted that’s never going to be there again, or a species of coral that has become functionally extinct. It’s a very specific feeling. If we have new words for these emotions, then maybe it makes sense that we need new art, new music for them too. Do you know what I mean? I want to investigate these complex emotions as a composer.
There’s something so viscerally ritualistic about ‘November moon readings’, for me — both within the treatment of the plants and the instruments, but also the staging.
I loved the idea of blending the ritual of the moon — moon cycles, a naturally occurring ritual — with the percussion. You know, setting up percussion is a ritual! It’s so cool, and it’s unique from the rest of the orchestra. That’s what inspired this idea of setting up and changing positions of some of the instruments during the piece.
The percussionists would rotate the timpani several times through the piece — like the moon — and the bass drum was placed with the skin parallel to the ground, so that we could also add plant materials onto it, affecting the resonance. Some of the cymbals were set up during the piece, and raised up high — giving it a bit of a celestial feel, theatrically. I designed the choreography such that the musicians would move in a circular fashion too. I loved interweaving two vastly different rituals: lunar cycles, and percussion setups… It takes a lot of willing percussionists to make that work — they were brilliant. -laughs-
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Let’s talk a bit more about your relationship to place in your work, and how that relates to the natural world. I really loved listening to your song cycle ‘End of Season’, which premiered in Italy in 2022…
In ‘End of Season’, I also use plant materials; but it’s a different approach. It’s a song cycle for one singer and mixed ensemble, us[ing] text from a collection of poems by my close collaborator and friend, Clare Best. The text is all based around, and in, and with, this particular place called Cannero Riviera [in Italy]. I hadn’t been there until Clare had asked me to work on this project with her. But she knows the place very well, and it’s obvious through her text. It felt like a big responsibility, being entrusted with Clare’s words, because it meant I needed to write music in relation to a landscape I didn’t know, I needed to try to befriend it… This relationship between me and this place was new, [but] the text was coming from Clare’s very deep relationship with that place.
What we decided to do is have the premiere of the piece onsite, in Cannero — which felt really fitting. Myself and the musicians went on a little hike up the mountain, we foraged for bits and pieces — sticks, stones, acorns etc. — brought those back down, made shakers out of them, and offered them to the audience. There’s a section in the piece where the audience then plays these shakers during the performance. And then, of course, we went and put the things back on the mountain afterwards. That felt like an important step.
And that is site-specific: it’s to do with the tangible materials of the site. In that way, I thought of this as a direct way to bring the voice of the landscape in — connected to the actual place, relating to a place that I didn’t know very well. I don’t have embodied knowledge of, or years of visceral experience in, this place, this is a young, different relationship. It takes time to foster embodied knowledge, and to foster friendship — years and years of getting to know something. That’s why I needed something more direct from the landscape: gathering materials, getting them to do some of the talking.
As you’ve mentioned you didn’t have a strong relationship with Cannero when writing the piece — are there any other ways you tried to tie yourself to place during the compositional process?
There was a fair bit of research about the cultural history and specific ecology of the place. One of the things that helped was visiting Cannero with Clare while in the early phases of developing the piece, and meeting people and materials that Clare had become so fond of and familiar with. We went on walks together as Clare shared her stories and experiences of the place with me.
There are lots of citrus fruits in Cannero. The climate is such that it’s perfectly set up for growing citrus fruits. So when I was back home and composing the piece, I went and collected a lot of different citrus fruits from my local area, and tried to find fruits that I knew were also grown in Cannero — [and] had them at the piano with me while I composed. -laughs- It sounds silly, but it really helped me with finding registers, and sharp timbres! The tang that sometimes hits your tongue, [or] the quite hallucinogenic smells you can get from some citrus-y things. It’s so precious — it makes the compositional process more meaningful and more playful for me.
Speaking of site-specific works, your piece ‘Moonflower’ was performed recently at the Barbican Conservatory — how did you approach place and ritual in that work?
‘Moonflower’ was really fun. Like ‘November moon readings’, it’s quite a ritualistic piece as well. It was written for a site-specific performance in the Barbican Conservatory. The performers were two percussionists, and the piece was staged on one of the bridges, with the audience looking up from underneath the bridge, on either side. Within the music, there’s this process of destroying these flowers — whacking them on cymbals, among various other things going on, as though the players were sowing and reaping something – musical or otherwise. Part of the ritual within the piece was that after the flowers were “harvested”, the petals were picked up off the ground and tipped over onto the audience.
That’s so fun. -laughs-
Those of us watching the performance ended up with petals in our hair. It felt more ceremonial than I had expected. It also made me feel sad about cutting flowers for our own decor and stuff; there are lots of mixed emotions in there, if you start thinking about it and unpacking it.
About both of those pieces — ‘November moon readings’ and ‘Moonflower’ — what I loved about using percussion with such fragile beaters as foliage and flowers, is that you’ve got this tension between huge, powerful instrument, and small, delicate plant (though powerful in its own way, of course). There’s something really special — almost like a sensual nature — about having a big, potentially loud instrument, but making subtle, gentle sounds on it. I love that tension. It talks a lot to fragility, sensuality, sensitivity to sound and tactility. Big instruments, small sounds… I love that dichotomy.
To talk about what you have coming up: this Sunday [29th March] is the premiere of your work ‘Sound of Harvest’, commissioned and premiered by CoMA as part of CoMA Festival 2026 at the Brady Arts Centre, London. How have you approached all of these themes we’ve discussed in this work’s compositional process?
‘Sound of Harvest’ explores that sense of dichotomy inherent in seasonal change. Harvest time is often connected with abundance and celebration, and somehow is also marked by sacrifice, vulnerability and loss. I’ve used repetition and a variety of timbral “situations” — like experimenting with mechanical and agricultural-type sounds, as well as sounds associated with the natural world.
‘November moon readings’ was fully graphic scored; and some things were quite open to interpretation. ‘Sound of Harvest’ is traditionally notated, but there’s flexibility within the notation and instrumentation, and it unfolds in a fairly methodical musical process. It’s ritualistic in those ways, I suppose, and this approach enabled me to explore different layers of engagement with seasonal change and transformation. That’s the beauty of working with CoMA — there are many possible outcomes because of the flexible instrumentation. The ensemble has been wonderful to work with, so enthusiastic. It’s been such a joy to do this project with them. We have got some natural materials in there — which, when you come to the concert, you’ll see… -laughs-
It’s going to be really fun. Going to a concert is of course a ritual in its own way. We take part in this ceremony of sound and community — which is intriguing. Of course, music-making is also inherently ritualistic in its own way, and after the performance, we take it away with us in our minds and hearts, and of course, our bodies.
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Catch the world premiere of Amy Crankshaw’s ‘Sound of Harvest’, alongside a host of other works by composers including Mathis Saunier, at CoMA Festival 2026’s final concert The Finishing Line at Brady Arts Centre, London – learn more and buy tickets:
Learn more about CoMA Festival 2026:
Learn more about Amy Crankshaw and her practice:
References/Links:
- Mary Oliver, ‘Don’t Hesitate’, from Devotions: Selected Poems of Mary Oliver (Hachette UK, 2023)
- Arne Witt, ‘Eucalyptus – the ‘thirsty’ trees threatening to ‘drink’ South Africa dry’ (2020), CABI
- Denise von Glahn, ‘Music and the Skillful Listener: American Women Compose the Natural World’ (2015), Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, 19(1):192-196
- Glenn A. Albrecht, Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World (Cornell University Press, 2019)
