“I don’t want to always do the same thing. I think that’s why I follow these new trails. Turning 30 a few years ago, I was thinking to myself: ‘I need to explore something else’ — feel the change of that new thing that I’ve learnt coming into what I already do.”
Eleanor Cully Boehringer
Eleanor Cully Boehringer is an artist and award-winning composer with a diverse artistic practice encompassing composition, performance, sound art, curation and installation. Eleanor’s work draws from poetic text, fragments of song, imitation and imagined sound, exploring repetition, memory, space, and places and contexts amplified in dialogue with sound. Eleanor has composed for ensembles including the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Chorus of Royal Northern Sinfonia, An Assembly, and Musarc; she was the youngest composer ever featured at hcmf// (Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival) in 2014, and more recently won Kantos Chamber Choir’s Carol Competition in 2023. Eleanor writes and performs her own music for voice, keyboard, cassette tapes, and hearing aids, having performed at Boundaries Festival, Tor Festival, and Prague Headphone Festival (as part of duo Kneeling Coats). Eleanor studied musical performance at Brunel University, London, and holds a Masters degree in Composition from the University of Huddersfield; she currently resides in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where she composes, teaches, collaborates with artists and community groups, and runs Newcastle-based concert series /current-Edition.
Over the past couple of years, Eleanor’s work has involved a commission for the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra as part of Tectonics Festival, three choral works for Musarc, and an installation featuring new works for Litany for the Border, a public art installation in Berwick-upon-Tweed. With these projects in mind, Patrick Ellis spoke with Eleanor over Zoom to discuss her involvement with choral music, interlocking processes, listening inside the sound, and following new trails…
Header photo: Charlotte Summers
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Patrick/PRXLUDES: Hi Eleanor, thank you for taking the time to chat with me. What I find interesting about your practice is that you started out working in more experimental spaces — with field recordings, text scores, and solo performance — and in more recent years have become involved in writing choral works…
Eleanor Cully Boehringer: Yeah, that’s well observed! Twelve years ago I was writing pieces like ‘Fixations’ and exhibiting my Private Sculpture Series at hcmf//. These were conceptual, text based works articulated through imagination, either with a short, prescriptive text score, or by way of suggestion through framing. I was working with brevity, tactility, context, and the essence of an experience with an instrument. Back then I was doing my Masters and I was pretty involved in showing work in exhibitions and concerts curated with others, so it’s interesting to think about where I am now.
Over the last few years I’ve been working much more with notation. I wrote three notated choral pieces for Musarc a couple of years ago. It was a unique opportunity to work with such a unique group of singers, and lately I find myself thinking about what I could have made with them. They do all kinds of things, but because I am so involved in the choral world as a singer myself (and more recently as a conductor), I’d had conversations with Joseph Kohlmaier about scored repertoire, and I was drawn to making something more “choral” for them.
Were there any other factors that influenced you to move more into your choral direction?
The real turning point was when I started singing in choirs. I had finished my Masters, and I was working in Huddersfield doing lots of teaching for the council music service — as well as giving some private tuition.
During that time, I realised that the majority of my income came from using my voice, and so I thought that I ought to be in a choir. Up to that point, I wasn’t interested in singing in a choir. I found them really cliquey. At Brunel, I sang with an improvisation ensemble called New Noise and we had a choir called Vox which was quite easygoing and somewhat focused on improvisation. I can remember when one singer asked “do you perform any Mozart?” after she had joined, and our choir director looked at her in complete disbelief that someone would even consider that. -laughs- So I went from years of contemporary music study straight into weekly rehearsals with the Huddersfield Choral Society — and with that, you don’t really get any more traditional.
What initially spurred you to join Huddersfield Choral Society — if it was such a large jump from the choir at Brunel?
I wanted to be part of music-making with other people and a lot of my peers had moved away. I missed the opportunity to be in the university choir — it seemed worlds away from the music I was engaged with during my studies — and I hadn’t really been performing like I did at Brunel. I didn’t have any real experience of writing for a group, going to the rehearsal, [or] knowing how to even be a part of that process. So joining the choir stemmed from wanting to make music as part of my routine and to immerse myself in a big ensemble.
I suppose it was at that point when things shifted for me from solo experimental music — for instrumentalists or exhibitions — into being able to consider music for ensembles. I start[ed] conceptualising composing for choirs — getting ideas, being in rehearsals, and understanding how that whole ensemble thing worked. The same year I joined HCS I was also composing ‘Deer Tracks’ with Sarah Boulton for Jack Sheen’s ensemble An Assembly. ‘Deer Tracks’ was my first chamber work for more than three instruments, and I think I’d started to fall in love with rehearsals and working with interpretation.
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When you compose for choirs, do you consider the abilities and types of choirs that you are writing for?
Yes, absolutely. I don’t always make it easy in terms of the harmony; it’s often clashing and falling on top of each other. Sometimes it sounds intentional, and other times it sounds a bit obscure. I think that I’ve discovered [that] although the pieces are simple with lines and repetitions, if the harmonies were more “rewarding”, then the piece would be a fairly straightforward sing; the score looks simple, but doesn’t necessarily feel that. -laughs- With my music, you need to let it unravel through repetition and not to seek harmonic gratification or predict where anything is going. It’s not composed that way.
I now work and sing with people who have been in choirs all their lives and were choral scholars back in the day. I would be a much better singer if I’d gone down that road, but I don’t think I’d be a very interesting composer! I’ve come around the long way, and it’s not your typical route.
Would you say that the more that you’ve written for choirs, you have started to implement what you’ve learnt from rehearsals? And what have they been?
Definitely. I think more and more about harmonic satisfaction, even though this isn’t what drives my music. Recently a friend turned to me in a rehearsal and said that she didn’t like singing in fifths because their openness made her anxious. So that’s something that I will be thinking about, but probably not changing! It’s dawned on me that I’ve stacked a fair amount of fourths and fifths in various pieces to create a sense of ambiguity and openness. It’s the sort of comment that might help me clarify my approach in a performance note, or clarify an intention in rehearsal.
For example, a year or two ago a conductor turned to me as a composer and said “What do you think about this? And what is your take on what these words mean?” — I just said, “I’m not interested in talking about that, it’s absolutely open to your own interpretation”. I used to detach from giving things away, and so I wasn’t very helpful, but now I’m more willing to open up a conversation about perception without giving away my intention. I think perhaps singers need to be given permission to take an individual position or a role in the text. If I engage in the conversation it might inspire the choir to ultimately draw the audience into the mystery.
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As a singer and more recently as a conductor, what have you learnt from those experiences — how has that come into your practice as a composer?
It sounds simple to say, but even the process of physically conducting the score through… Printing it and saying to myself, “I’ve finished with the composing, now I’m going to think about it in terms of what a director would do” — which sections they might rehearse, and therefore what performance notes I need to give. I never used to conduct my music. I wouldn’t really take responsibility or figure out how the piece would be rehearsed; that would all just be down to whoever was leading it. I would just send it in and hope for the best.
Now, I work out if the tempo and the time signature have the correct feel, or whether some parts would be best unconducted, and I try to predict questions that a director might ask. It’s a completely different role, and I feel more confident composing with the understanding of the position on the other side; but it hasn’t drastically changed what’s on the page at the same time.
I have recently written for multiple choirs in and around Berwick-upon-Tweed as part of an installation that featured three new pieces. I wouldn’t have been able to achieve as much complexity in the writing, had I not had the experience of singing in choirs myself, and working with different choirs (youth choirs, church choirs, community choirs, etc). I can’t always predict what will be straightforward, difficult, rewarding or challenging for each group, but luckily, in the case of these most recent works, all of those things were the case for all of us.
You’ve moved from a purely conceptual mindset, to interweaving pragmatism with conceptual thought.
When I look back on my earlier piece[s], I think “wasn’t it great that they didn’t have any music in them?”. There were no barlines, bars, melodies… The pieces were purely concepts that were articulated through words. Occasionally there was the odd bit of notation. I think my work has moved away from pure concept, but there are more layers and details now. I know what I want to prescribe, what I want to leave up to interpretation, and how to best communicate both. The concepts are deeper, the sounds can be transcribed or written down, and the ensembles provide the opportunity to have multiple shapes on top of one another. I know the poetic essence I am working with, and I am able to offer ways of engaging with that.
Every time I write something it feels new, and I think that just comes with developing. I am always trying to find a new way of composing each time. I don’t want to always do the same thing. I think that’s why I follow these new trails. Turning 30 a few years ago, I was thinking to myself: “I need to explore something else” — feel the change of that new thing that I’ve learnt coming into what I already do. I love the simplicity of some of my earlier work, but as time goes on there is more to reflect upon and develop. But as always with something gained, you might lose a bit of something else along the way. I’m happy when I’m moving forward.
Having worked with a lot of people involved in amateur or community choirs, when they talk about music, their judging criteria can often be centred around the harmony. How is it juggling that expectation with having more of a murky, abstracted harmonies?
I don’t know if it’s about convincing people, I think that creatively you’ve just got to do it. That’s one of the biggest things about conducting that I’ve found useful — building confidence to go into a room as a “person who’s presenting this music to you”. People will just go with you, because they trust that it’s what you are there to do.
There is so much more to the craft of a composition than the harmony, and I think there is an opportunity instead to let the choir into what makes the form, or discuss interpretation of the text, or context. Choirs can often sight-sing music off of the page just fine — but if the process of composition doesn’t function as melody and accompaniment, then they shouldn’t expect to move through it vertically without question.
I think there is an opportunity to structure rehearsals differently to connect back to the compositional process. I rarely start composing from beginning to end and I certainly don’t have all the layers in place at once. A concert audience will hear the piece from start to end, but we don’t have to approach it that way in rehearsals. In fact, in my experience we should save the energy of the beginning until last. Music doesn’t always begin at the beginning in our minds and in our memories.
I would love to be in more rehearsals where more experimental music is being worked on. Sadly, I don’t get to be in those spaces enough. I’ve got a list of repertoire that I would really like to lead, but for now, I am regularly conducting repertoire by women composers and living composers with the choirs I work with. I think that soon it will be time to start an ensemble, or a group of my own… -laughs- Where we can really experiment.
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On the subject of setting things up, you have started your own concert series named /current-edition…
Yes, though we have only done one event so far. I wanted to find more opportunities for new music in the North-East. There isn’t much going on; there are a few groups here and there, but they don’t necessarily engage or collaborate with composers living here. I guess people just aren’t able to commission other people, and I am not in that position either. So /current-edition is rather DIY. It was intended for composers who live locally, who wanted to write, workshop and present works regardless of financial gain.
There’s a group named ‘Composers North East’ who meet occasionally — I think that it used to be once a month — but I couldn’t always go to the meetings. The group provides a space to talk, share and listen, but I thought: “What is the use of a group of composers?” — we need people to play our work, and we need to collaborate. So I just suddenly thought “why don’t I just run a concert series?”… I wanted to offer composers the opportunity to explore instruments they hadn’t necessarily written for.
I approached an organist [Drew Cantrill-Fenwick] I had been working with recently, and I put out a call. The exact number of spaces were filled and we all got together at the organ workshop in August. Some of us knew each other, but most of us didn’t, and we just started.
Having studied composition, I have missed that community in Huddersfield — we organised concerts and exhibitions with friends and the staff and hcmf// was on every November. I think that it’s stemming from a place of wanting to hear more new music and be involved in a scene. Setting up this series also means that I get to write more of my own music too, although I barely had time to compose anything!
On the subject of writing more of your own music, you also wrote a piece for Drew. Can you tell me a bit more about what that piece is based around?
That piece comes from a set of pieces that I have performed over the last few years as a soloist. I often use a small keyboard along with my voice, and I have various objects, such as hearing aids, which are used as part of these solo sets. I wanted to start the series and I have been very busy this year, and so it was more a case of “what do I have that fits the organ?”.
I wrote a figure, or pattern, that I keep referring back to and repeat[ing] in different works. It’s based on the open strings of the guitar which gradually ascend a semitone as the piece goes on. It’s an accompaniment figure in my arrangement of ‘I Will Give My Love An Apple’ as well as a choral setting of ‘Who Has Seen the Wind?’, and now it’s become an organ work of the same name.
I wanted to learn about the instrument at the workshop and compare the different stops. I brought the accompaniment to the workshop, and I really enjoyed listening to Drew playing it whilst altering stops slowly. I left a lot of space for Drew to orchestrate and explore it live, as the pattern is simple enough for the hands to freely move about to gradually alter the stops and shift the colour across a version of the piece without words. However, because of the title, a friend of mine said that during the five-note repetitions she could hear the words “Who has seen the wind?” repeating in her mind. Those phantom words, combined with the air of the organ, feel like a fitting alternative to the choral version, which has never been performed.
Would you say that you maintain some of your experimental practices from your early days working as a composer?
Absolutely. I still work with elements like chance and soundscape. Thinking back to what we have discussed… I don’t want this interview to read as if I started off as an experimental composer and have become more “traditional” over time. But the reality is that since I moved away from Huddersfield, I am no longer surrounded by that culture of people going to new music concerts, let alone putting them on or asking me for work.
I’d love to return to sounds I love, like the inside of a sea shell or whatever else that I used to do. -laughs- Ideally, some of those early pieces will get performed again or revisited, or someone will take an interest in them. But those kinds of pieces feel like they’re in the past at the moment. But I think that things circle back.
I’ve always been inspired by rooms and spaces. I remember I was asked to write a piece for Apartment House in a beautiful church with a round ceiling in London. I don’t know which I was most excited about, the space or the ensemble — certainly both — and I kept looking at photos of the space in imagining what to write. I was gutted when it was cancelled over covid and the piece became a recording session later.
I prefer to consider the room or architecture part of the composition, and I continue to consider formation and movement as part of the music I write. But as time has gone on, I’ve found that if I ask too many questions about a concert location or set up, organisers act a bit like I’m expecting to know too much ahead of time. As much as I’d like to in rehearsals that I run or spaces I work in, you can’t just remove all of the chairs and start with just the room as I would with a gallery space. It’s not always easy to disrupt the default way of rehearsing, and often you can’t be sure if the rehearsal space is the same as the concert space anyway. I think this has slightly disheartened me and instead of working outside in from the space, I have had to work inside out.
So whilst I’m working with amateur groups, it’s all about balance. The North-East choral music scene has been very kind to me. I have made some really meaningful music since I’ve been here and that’s why I continue to work with what’s available to me. I’d love to write for a professional choir one day!
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Would you say though that you are now more mature and pragmatic as a composer when you write music?
Definitely. It would be weird if I said I wasn’t! What inspires me is much the same but as time goes on I have more experience working with musicians. Sometimes I worry that I’m less bold and take less risks in my music, but I think it’s actually the case that I know what I want and have taken the time to figure it out thoroughly.
The form of a piece is something that I think about a lot more now than I used to; my music in the past would often be a minute of one thing, followed by these arbitrary durations where I didn’t have a reason for it to be anything different. Now, I’m inclined to take my forms from the material itself. So there is much more awareness of thinking outside the details; and I think that I can do both the looking from the outside and then also honing in.
Concepts for me tend to be really simple. When I lived in Huddersfield, I used to drive around between schools, and during that in-between time I used to come up with ideas. I remember stopping in a lay-by or whatever to write something down, or I would hear something on the radio and think “oh, I want to reference that small amazing moment”. I would take these found experiences — these simple, but beautiful happenings — and make pieces out of them. The pieces would really be about little connections, and documents of each other.
How does that compare to now?
Nowadays I don’t get those ideas — I don’t know why. Newcastle is much bigger than Huddersfield and I’m not driving alone in the countryside much. I don’t write down many ideas in the same way anymore. I don’t find them in everyday life the same way.
This past year, I have worked on two big commissions, which has never happened before. I’ve made some big pieces. But being commissioned is very specific — writing for these instruments or this project in a short amount of time, whilst balancing teaching work and choral commitments. I used to work on a whim and then have plenty of reflection time before that idea was embedded into a work. It would exist in my mind for ages. I would have time to settle and connect. Compared to now, I have less things waiting to be realised, and I have to start from scratch.
So your methodology has become less spontaneous?
It might seem that way, but I think in the past the spontaneity and whim made the piece. That might have been what the piece was. Now, I have to create time to compose amongst everything else. So there is more structure and planning involved in the process of working on music.
I still leave room for adaptations to enter the composition or performance after the score is submitted. In fact, I’m always reworking things and adjusting the recipe for different contexts. There is rarely one absolute way to structure a performance of my music and I’m open to interpretations and adaptations for groups and spaces.
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You mentioned earlier that you’ve recently written three pieces for Musarc. I know that they are quite forward-thinking as a group — what was it like working with them?
It was a wonderful opportunity. I remember waiting outside of the location for their first rehearsal and I was singing something in the acoustic of the doorway. One of the singers came along and asked me if that was my voice he could hear, because it hardly seemed like I was singing at all. It was an interesting way to start; I was impressed that the first member of the choir I met even noticed.
We tried one of my ideas when I went down to meet the choir — a piece called ‘Slow Flower II’. The piece began with this descending line that was displaced by a beat in canon — the music would slowly feel like it was detuning as it was going on and each time dropping a consonant and altering the meaning of the words. It was something that I had performed on my own against the drone of a hearing aid. So I adapted it into a choral version where the singers would take it in turns to sing it, and it would splay out. The piece was formed in a spiral shape: so somebody would stand in the middle, and each member would curve with their shoulders touching.
The group came up with a way to feel the vibrations across the formation of the choir. Each singer put one hand on the next person’s back, where you can feel the voice vibrate; they could hear the sound travelling, but the sound doesn’t travel in a spiral, the singers all took it in turns in the spiral. There is a lovely picture of that moment.
Then I wrote ‘Snowdrop’, which contained little melodies and motifs that interlocked with each other — which is what a lot of what my music is anyway. I set the words “don’t drop the snow drop”, which were written by a friend of mine — artist Sarah Boulton — who sent me those words specifically to make a piece with, which was lovely. Again, I think those words came to me around a year before — it was material that I had ready to go — but it hadn’t been fully developed. The words ended up in an ongoing repetition, with a drawn out melody that I actually extracted from a piece of Purcell — with the words “drop, drop, drop” over it again and again.
And a piece called ‘Swan II’, which was stacked fifths alternating to fourths; doubled by the instruments of Standard Issue, who shared the concert. The text was mistranslated from a performance of another work. Sometimes I look back and wonder why I didn’t make one big work, but you work with the inspiration that you have at the time. All of these three pieces had or have now been performed again and reworked. I often end up making new versions of things for every group that I work with anyway.
We’ve talked about your work with amateur choirs, as well as groups such as Musarc — in a more general sense, how do you typically approach musical material?
It’s difficult for me to think generally, and not with specific pieces. I used to do a lot of writing at the piano, but I don’t really use that method anymore. As a composer, I don’t see myself as someone who composes harmony. I don’t think about chords as much as motifs or processes that fit together. It’s almost like all of the chords are a by-product, which is a silly thing to say. I’m not aiming for a chord change or a feeling that we have arrived at this moment in the music, [because] in my music there is as much dissonance as resolution and the whole thing is like one expanded moment to me. There isn’t a narrative.
In a recent project I was commissioned to read and listen to heaps of source material to work from. I assembled words from local residents into a poem that created a jigsaw-like structure for the piece. I filled the pitches in from the words themselves to get as close to the text as possible. So I find material in words, in found sounds, or reimagining fragments of melodies that I can open up, combine and work with. I suppose that I work on a note or a phrase at a time, and then I fit things together.
It’s as though you are working horizontally and planning a series of events within the time span.
Exactly — I’m placing things. More recently I like to have a plan and use all of these different processes that interlock, because conceptually, it makes me happy that those things are going to exist together in my work. I feel like I’m arriving at something that I [would have] not come up with myself if I just used my ear and intuition. There needs to be something there to work against and problem solve with my ears.
I often hang my music around 60-70bpm. I think it’s because I like to listen inside the sounds. I often have a juxtaposition of two different textures, like a lullaby on top of a nocturnal soundscape, as well as layering and weaving melodic material. The material is often too short to actually call it melodic, and it doesn’t always serve as a melody. Melodies are never actually melodies, and harmony is never really harmony. It’s all the same but wrapped around, interweaving. Layers might be longer, or shorter, smaller, or bigger, but one is never background or foreground in terms of importance.
Naturally, working so much with choirs requires working with text — so can I ask how you tend to approach working with text?
My favourite way of working with text is by using a simple, short, and monosyllabic set of words — either one that has been sent to me specifically, in the case of Sarah Boulton’s words, or one that I have found or lifted from chance encounters or during a moment of discovery. The less words, the cleaner the relationship between the words and the music. I like the music and the words to become fused into one so that you couldn’t have one without the other. Sculpting, setting, and embedding words into music so that the text no longer stands apart as text.
In fact, the only poet whose words I have extracted and set is Christina Rossetti. I’m drawn to the brevity and repetition in her writing, aligning with the way I like to work musically.
But hearing something on the radio, or coming across some words somewhere that kind of links to something else…. I just know when it’s the time that I want to set certain words — and they are usually short things that repeat and have ambiguity. I love to extract imagery. Ideally it’s the same phrase over and over again throughout the whole piece; maybe the meaning subtly changes through time, or certain words become other words. For example, you will get rid of the letter “c” in “cold” and then it will become “old” — so as the piece goes along the words almost chip away and they become thinner and simpler. There’s an essence that draws me and I love to dwell within it.
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We’ve talked so much about your choral and vocal music, but not so much about your instrumental works. Let’s finish by discussing your commission for the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, ‘Sink / Seep’ — which premiered at Tectonics Festival last year; how did you approach that piece?
Unlike my other music, the piece wasn’t really “about” anything in particular. It was difficult to conceptualise at first, because I realised how much I was used to working with text, and the imagery of words; so the title, programme note and the performance instructions for the conductor suddenly seemed to have more potential for significance. I was wondering how I was going to turn these little, often quite simple materials that I come up with at the start of writing a piece and make that work orchestrally. It was a massive deal for me to put all of those instruments into the score and think “wow, I’ve really got all of this to deal with”. -laughs- But once I got started, the writing happened really naturally. I really enjoyed returning to music without words.
The piece became an exploration of form and orchestration through the image of a spiral, which is a form I’ve worked with before in my piece ‘Either Sea’. I wanted to draw from the harmonic series, and I divided up the overall duration of the piece before I’d composed any notes. I disassembled the divisions of the spiral by chance and glued them down onto a piece of hardboard at my desk. And the form was set.
When I started writing, I had all of these different micro-processes going on, and I fitted each one into each segment of the piece — so what you end up with are really long, drawn out strings which change one part at a time when there is a shift in the harmony. Then there are these moments in the brass and the woodwinds which are windows into little cells that “pop”, into these textures for a few seconds. So instead of constant repetition that I think I favour with choral writing — where I start with something and have it go on and on in different iterations — the orchestral piece had these brief moments that then went back to the sustained sounds.
After the rehearsals, I remembered feeling concerned that the music didn’t have enough risk. Usually something unexpected happens in terms of interpretation or liveness that I don’t experience when I’m notating the music. But the rehearsals sounded very much like what I expected; I didn’t have much to add other than “can I hear it again?”. I suppose I was surprised that there were no surprises in my music. I wanted more time to reflect but most rehearsals aren’t going to allocate time for that; you have to know what you want in that moment. I find the same with conducting, actually. If I make a rehearsal recording and take it away, I can come up with a list of ten things I want to tackle next time. But in the moment, with a room full of people looking at you, you can freeze up from the expectation that you need to instantly know what to change.
I really struggled to answer questions about the process of composing it during my BBC Radio 3 interview at Tectonics. I felt a huge amount of anxiety take over and I didn’t know how to explain what the piece was before I’d heard it live. I’ve experienced this vulnerability a number of times now. I don’t really like to talk about my work until much much later — which is why this PRXLUDES interview is a really lovely opportunity now, whilst everything is quiet.
Looking back, I don’t know why I was so hard on myself. I knew what I wanted, I’d worked really hard composing many hours a week over a matter of months, and I was so grateful to Ilan Volkov for the opportunity to compose for the orchestra. They performed the music beautifully — and I felt the magic of it with an audience — and I am still reflecting and unravelling the experience. It totally changed up the way I work.
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Learn more about Eleanor Cully Boehringer and her practice:
- https://www.eleanorcully.co.uk/
- https://soundcloud.com/eleanor-cully
- https://www.instagram.com/eleanorcullyboehringer/
References/Links:
- Eleanor Cully Boehringer – ‘Fixations’ (2016)
- Michael Baldwin, ‘Better Know A Weisslich: Eleanor Cully’ (2015), Weisslich
- Benjamin Britten – ‘I will give my love an apple’ (1956-58)
- Christina Rossetti, ‘Who Has Seen the Wind?’ (1947)
