“I think our job, partly, is to create a magical experience. Something that’s different from the everyday.”
Xenia Pestova Bennett
One of the most inspiring things about today’s contemporary music landscape is the amount of organisations actively stepping up to support early-career composers. One of these organisations is the London Symphony Orchestra — one of six organisations on the The Hinrichsen Foundation’s Multi-Year Partnership — whose groundbreaking work supporting the development of composers has been a huge inspiration to us at PRXLUDES.
We’re delighted to be presenting the first of two articles in 2026 featuring some of the London Symphony Orchestra’s supported composers. This month, we’re thrilled to be working with the four composers featured on this year’s LSO Soundhub scheme. We’re grateful to the London Symphony Orchestra for their partnership on putting these articles together, and to The Hinrichsen Foundation for supporting both of our organisations throughout the Multi-Year Partnership.
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The London Symphony Orchestra’s Soundhub development programme provides a platform for emerging composers to explore, collaborate, and experiment. Throughout the course of a year, Soundhub members undertake a project at LSO St. Luke’s, either with a small group of LSO players, or independently with space, resources, and mentorship provided. Composers previously supported by LSO’s Soundhub programme include Luke Mombrea, Jasmine Morris, Delyth Field, Hugo Bell, and Amy Crankshaw, among many others.
The cohort of LSO Soundhub composers for 2025-26 consists of Connie Harris, Cameron Graham, Sam Longbottom, and Xenia Pestova Bennett. Their works are being presented on Wednesday 22nd April at LSO St. Luke’s, at the culmination of their time on the Soundhub programme. The works draw from a variety of different influences, exploring the endangered French Celtic language of Breton, the tapestry of cinema from history to today’s modern media, the intertwining of dance and the sound-world of shaving, and the combination of electromechanical clarinets and organ pipes. More information about the programme and tickets can be found here.
Ahead of their premieres on Wednesday 22nd April, Zygmund de Somogyi caught up with this year’s Soundhub composers to discuss narrative structures, intertwining different mediums, the physicality of sound, and more…
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Zyggy/PRXLUDES: Thank you all so much for joining me today! You’ve each recently had workshops with players from the LSO, ahead of performances at the Soundhub Showcase on 22 April at LSO St. Luke’s. Can you tell me a bit about where you are in the writing process — how did the workshops go?
Connie Harris: We all recently had three-hour workshops — [to Cameron] I think we had ours on the same day. I mean, three hours… I want to say first how exciting that is. It’s such a luxury. We get to experiment and delve into the real nitty-gritty of the pieces, which you often don’t get the chance to do when working under a time crunch. That was helpful for me: the chance to test out the sound in the room, with the players and dancer there, and to explore the physical practicalities of making the sound — choreographing the piece, almost.
Cameron Graham: This is the second workshop we’ve done. The first was in January — that one was [more] bringing sketches, seeing what hell you’ve brought out of your mind. For me, this was incredibly useful, because of the sort of mediality of this project. It was very good to hear the space — it activates very differently in the hall. The feedback from musicians is always invaluable. Bringing together different generations of musicians — I’m working with Chihiro Ono, who’s kind of a veteran, as well as some younger players — it was really useful. It’s created a bit more mess for me, but that’s kind of how I work: with spreadsheets, schematics, figma [white]boards. For me, the work is really starting now.
You’re each using some kinds of electronic elements in your works — whether these are live manipulations, recordings, or performing electronic parts yourselves. Can you tell me a bit about how you’ve used these elements in conjunction with the ensemble?
Sam Longbottom: My piece [is] for four clarinets and organ pipes — and each of the clarinets, instead of the barrel of the clarinet, have a solenoid valve. That means that air can be stopped and let through; and that’s controlled with a computer. This valve really changes everything [the performers] know about the instrument — the valve produces a lot of resistance, so producing notes is quite a challenge. The instrument is really detuned from having [the valve] in place; it’s like if you use a PVC pipe instead of a barrel. It really wants to squeak, and overblow, and make weird sounds. I found it an interesting piece to approach! The [players] have been really happy to go for it. And very few complaints, which is surprising — I tried it on a clarinet, and it’s not the most comfortable experience… So I’m really happy they’re up for it. -laughs-
Xenia Pestova Bennett: In addition to featuring live instrumentalists, my piece uses electroacoustic elements; there’s an audiovisual part that weaves in and out. We have a narrative, as well — with a voice that narrates in Breton [ed. a Celtic language spoken in Brittany, in modern-day France] — and the story is about dying stars. There’s a loose connection between the lives and deaths of stars and endangered languages, human minority languages. I’m really interested in the sound of language itself — even if it’s a language we don’t understand, we can still hear it in a musical way. I’ve been fortunate to work with Emrys van Seventer, a radio presenter from Brittany, who has narrated the story for me.
We all met on Monday [ed. at time of interview]. Everybody was super helpful, super open. It was really interesting to hear the instruments in context with the pre-recorded elements. A lot of the work in April will be on balance, because everybody’s amplified; so it’s about finding the same sound world that live instruments and the electronics can share. They have to be part of a whole; they’re not separate entities. In terms of notes, we are there — but it’s about holding the space, finding the right sound, listening to each other to create the shape, finding the balance.
The one person we didn’t have in the reading session was Ruth Wall. She is kind of the soloist in this piece, without being the soloist. I’ve been working with Ruth remotely; she’s been sending me recordings, which has been really helpful. She will play three different harps (concert harp, prepared lever harp, and the beautiful wire-strung Gaelic harp) — I’m really excited to see how that comes together.
Cameron: My route to, from, and back to contemporary music has been pretty circuitous, and messy. This is the first project for a number of years including scores for musicians; I finished my PhD a few years ago, and it really took me quite outside what I understood to be the “orthodox” infrastructure of contemporary music. I consider myself an intermedia artist now; composition and sound are very much containers, within larger containers, within larger containers. It’s a given for me that there’s extra media.
A little bit of detail… My piece is kind of a quasi-sensory percussion concerto. I brought a drum kit — a sensory drum kit — that I’m going to be playing in the work. I’m using the drums to challenge and question the history of percussion, and the instrument, and consider it as an active automaton: yes, it triggers sound, but it also triggers film — it changes the texture of film — it triggers text, and it will hopefully spatialise sound live.
This is the first of my pieces ever that has almost no extended techniques, which was terrifying — but I decided to challenge myself with that. I feel very vulnerable. -laughs- I guess the media landscape we exist in, we listen to so much, all the time — and for me, putting almost “trad” harmonic technique in a space feels very naked. I’m thinking “where’s the reverb, where’s the sub?”… -laughs- For me right now, the radical experimental thing is four incredible musicians playing instruments.
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And Connie, I understand your piece also involves choreography and dance, as well as electronics — how did you approach bringing those elements together?
Connie: The biggest challenge when approaching this was creating a space in which I could have both the dancer and the musicians active, but make it not seem like I’d written music separately and asked a dancer to dance in front of it. I wanted everyone to be a musician, in a way, and everyone to be a dancer. When I was scoring for everyone, I was really thinking about the physical implications: when they’re making a sound, how do they look? The dancer joins in the sound world at certain points too, so the roles all blur — I didn’t want the separation of the two worlds.
The electronics are really intertwined with what I’m doing with the percussion. As well as the vibraphone, marimba, and bell plates, the percussionists are working with a lot of “foley” elements; a lot of really close contact-mic’ed sounds, really poppy, juddery, strange sounds. I’m trying to take these close, uncomfortable, tactile sounds — that are manipulated live by the percussionists and also present in the fixed electronics track — and bring them into focus.
It’s really [the] physicality of sound. I keep finding myself drawn back to how interlinked the body is, or the physicality is, with the sound we create. For me, writing for performance, a physical occurrence, comes naturally; I find myself drawn to dance, performance art, or spoken word. I also perform, too — I come from the perspective of both a composer and performer, so that sometimes that really helps me get [to] the core of a piece, or approach it from a different angle.
Let’s talk a bit more about the concepts behind each of your pieces. Sam, your work centres around these explorations of winds and organ pipes — how did this come about?
Sam: I work a lot with organ pipes. The valves I’m using for the clarinets, I primarily use on organ pipes. So for this piece, I’m combining the two; having the clarinets and organ pipes. It had been an idea I had for a while — put[ting] a valve on an instrument. I wanted to create this strange, electronic-like sound that’s generated completely acoustically, that a player could play quite free[ly] or dexterously. But I discovered that the kind of material that works really well when you’re turning [the valves] on and off is quite sustained; if there’s a lot of change in the sound, you lose the “on and off”.
It’s all made in MaxMSP. I work a lot with transcriptions of recordings, and create a patch where I can improvise with that transcription; that generates pitch and rhythmic material. That’s all recorded, and goes out to the valves that control the clarinets.
The organ pipes basically play a MIDI track — it plays exactly the note at exactly the time — whereas I’ve found the clarinets are really unstable. They give perhaps these two sides to the piece: one that can be controlled by myself, where I decide “it plays this pitch at this time”; and this more “free” side of the piece. [Throughout] the piece, the valves for the instruments turn on and off in unison between the four players, but they all play independently — so it creates this very strange weird “overall-clarinet” that’s built from all these smaller parts.
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Xenia, you mentioned that your piece features narration in Breton concerning cosmic phenomena from dying stars. Can you tell me how these elements come together in your work?
Xenia: This piece is actually part of a triptych of collaborations with video artist Steve Lee. The first work was written for myself to play (‘All Aglow’); it’s a 50-minute piece for prepared piano with video and narration. The second piece, ‘GLOW’ for ensemble and video, followed on from that; I wanted to use languages that I don’t speak, hence the choice of [text in] Danish, Welsh, and Turkish. For this project, I thought: I’d really like to explore another language, Breton — and somebody put me in touch with the narrator, who was just fabulous.
The story came first. It came from another obsession that I have with various glowing phenomena; inspired by an article by an astronomer called Phil Plait. He has a newsletter called the Bad Astronomer newsletter, and he also writes for various publications, including Scientific American. He was writing about this phenomenon of light echoes: when a star goes nova, if we observe it from a certain angle (from far away), we might see light gradually expanding like a ripple — “echoes” that expand in concentric rings. But that’s really not what’s happening at all. It’s only because of the speed of light — it travels at a finite speed — and it illuminates matter [that] was ejected from the star. It gets illuminated gradually for us, as the distant observer, but in fact the event happens only once.
And I imagine there’s these parallels between the “ghosts” of these stars — the light echoes — and the Breton language…
Xenia: Breton is considered critically endangered, although there are people actively trying to change that. Every few days, a language goes extinct; it’s part of a wider problem of homogenisation of language and culture. This is the nasty side of globalisation — erasing minority languages, minority cultures — and it’s extremely unhealthy for us as a species to lose that diversity.
Connie, your piece for Soundhub explores sounds of shaving, relating them to notions of beauty standards. Can you tell me how the idea for the piece came about?
Connie: This piece had been marinating in my head for quite a while — or at least the initial concept of it. When I came to write the piece, I started with the physical gesture of shaving, which then formed particular stuttering, slicing sound shapes. When you think about it, certain beauty standards — the expectation to be smooth, inoffensive, not being too “spiky” in many ways — I [find] quite disturbing. That’s where the piece first came from — especially surrounding intimate areas of hair removal, how disturbing it is that it’s become normalised.
Bringing the act of performance into this: such visceral sounds are produced from this simple gesture, which are then “sliced up” and granulated further. There’s violence inherent in that kind of movement. I think it has real musical potential.
In my piece, I was initially trying to record the sounds of skin, real shaving and razors — and I [eventually] became more and more removed from that, and started to record and produce metallic, prickly sounds. I thought taking it further away, but still having the root source and reason for that sound was more important for me. The music becomes increasingly chopped-up. It’s about the removal of material, or the removal of phrase; it becomes so, so small, that it returns to itself again.
Cameron, alongside centring around sensory percussion, your piece also explores the history of cinema. In what ways does your work for Soundhub explore cinema, and how does this make its way into the structure?
Cameron: One of the things that has really stuck with me is a figure in history called Florence Lawrence. Florence was the “first movie star” in the silent era. She was the daughter of a vaudeville actress, and she starred in around 300-plus movies — this was the early film era, movies were just churned out. She was the progenitor for the movie star. (Side point, she is also credited as inventing the indicator system in a car!)
At that time, studios refused to credit their actors; and the reason they refused to credit their actors is because if you credit the actor, they’re gonna get known, they’re gonna ask for more money. While Florence Lawrence was acting in these movies, she partnered up with one of her co-stars, and they made a number of production studios that ended up really pushing the industry forward, all the way through to the talkies — [and] as the talkies took over, she was getting less and less roles. So she was the most successful and famous actor of all time; but we never heard her voice.
So this piece is a weird homage to her. The ensemble are essentially scored as a cinema orchestra; they’re playing a changing tempo structure, moving between these short movements. The short movements are in a way different temporal leaps between imagined film histories… Right now, the piece features the Dickson Experimental Sound Film — the first ever sound recorded for film — and then it leaps to a scene from the first filmed opera, La Poupée. The [sensory percussion] kit and ensemble constantly build their way into this structure, and there’s this physical-medial blend that happens between cinema history and the “mise-en-scene”.
How does this Hollywood actor, Florence Lawrence, fit into the composition — or was she just part of the inspiration?
Cameron: Florence will appear, but only in oneiric form. I’ll be playing her on the kit, and I’ll be playing out a “presence” where she appears as a spectral host. It kind of sits between these spaces.
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I understand you all come from different musical backgrounds, and are at slightly different stages in your careers. Can you tell me a bit about your musical backgrounds, and how LSO Soundhub has contributed to your creative journeys thus far?
Sam: I studied composition at Leeds Conservatoire — Leeds College of Music when I was there — and then I did a Masters at the Royal Northern College of Music. I’ve always been interested in making things for instruments. Towards the end of my Masters, I made a collaborative installation that used turntables, string instruments, and fishing line; the turntables and the fishing line bowed the string instruments. From that, I became quite interested in automated instruments — I’ve been developing ways of creating strange sounds through automation, and electromechanical instruments.
I have a kind of dual aspect to my practice, where I write pieces for people to play, but then I also create strange contraptions to perform myself. Over the last year or so, I’ve been trying to incorporate them more — where I’ve been bringing these instruments into concert music — and Soundhub offered a chance to explore the two, together. It’s been really nice.
Cameron: [I] started playing drums when I was 15; played in punk bands, rock bands, started supporting some big hip-hop artists when I was 18. Then someone said “do you have a laptop, have you heard of this thing called Logic” — and I was like “what the hell’s that?” -laughs- I remember sitting down when I was 18 [or] 19, opening up Logic and making what I would then find out was bad versions of Denis Smalley… -laughs- And then I was like, maybe this is a thing; maybe this is a route to making music.
At the age of 20, I was like “maybe I should go to university, that’s a thing — people do that, right?” — and that kind of spiraled. I was at Brunel University; that was when Jennifer Walshe, Christopher Fox, Bob Gilmore, [and] Sarah Nicolls were there — really key figures in the experimental scene. I remember, I chose Brunel because I saw Jennifer Walshe somewhere and was like “who the hell is that?”, and kind of ran to Brunel. I started composing, or what I thought composition was; I had a workshop with Apartment House, [and] was completely ripped to shreds by Anton. -laughs-
After I graduated, I went and did a Masters, went to conservatoire, and then pursued doctorate until 2023/24. The drums disappeared from that point until the end of the doctorate. I got signed to an independent label called Phantom Limb for a series of albums, and released an EDM album; I was chatting to the head of the label, James Vella, and he was like: “How are you gonna tour this? How are you gonna play your album, live, not from a laptop?” — and lo and behold, I found sensory percussion.
I stumbled across this small, New York-based company, who were making these custom sensors for drums. They were doing the ROLI Seaboard of drums back then… I’ve been working with them for a number of years. It really brought me back to writing and performing, neither in a “classical” sense nor a “popular” sense — somewhere between the two. That led to a number of people in the musical and artistic community, being like “hey, you make music, and you’ve got this crazy drum kit”… And I kind of got dragged into the art world! The last couple years have been pretty wild; intermedia shows, touring, bigger commissions with international arts organisations from FACT Liverpool to the Guggenheim Museum. So Soundhub has come at a really good time, where I can put myself in the most uncomfortable position — putting myself in a piece written for other musicians — and reminding myself of the potential of notation. It’s been extremely helpful for that reason.
Connie: I compose, I act, I write as well. I started by writing songs early on; [then] writing plays, writing songs for plays. I started experimenting more and more with sound, and I realised there was something I just needed to keep exploring there… I got hooked so I had no other real choice. -laughs- I’m definitely the earliest in my career, compared to everyone else here. I’m still studying. I’m at the Royal College of Music right now, I’m still in the trenches. -laughs- It’s a wonderful place to be though — very inspiring and supportive, and it’s impossible to be bored.
I like working across different art forms, and writing for theatre and film. Recently, I did a piece called ‘Surge’ with the London Schools Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican; it was [an] orchestral piece and I performed in it as well. I did a new play last year in the US with the brilliant director Mya Onwugbonu — ‘Baby Baby Baby’ — which won an award… We want to bring it back to London, if there’s any producers reading this… -laughs- That’s the next thing I’m looking forward to — blending the contemporary composition world and the theatrical world. I don’t know why there’s separation; for me, it’s all creating.
Xenia: I always composed and performed [together], really, up to a certain point. When I did my undergraduate degree — this was years ago, in New Zealand — I studied both performance and composition. But then I went on to do postgraduate study in London, in Amsterdam, Paris, and Montreal, in piano. I had to focus on piano because that’s what was really taking off for me at the time. Perhaps other people could do both things, but I couldn’t — just because of the eight hours of practice a day! I had no mental or physical space for composing.
I then built a career as a performer; mostly of contemporary music, but also classical repertoire. That’s what I do, mainly, and I suppose that’s what people know me for. I’d say it was maybe seven-ish years ago that I gradually came back to composing; mainly through playing and improvising myself. When I was first studying composition, I would loath to write for the piano, or for myself — I would never write for myself to play — so it was a complete turnaround.
Now, when I write pieces, I write a part for myself pretty much all the time. I want to be on stage, as well, and I want to have fun; I want to work together with other musicians. So now, I’m doing both: performing works by other composers, but also composing myself. I think it’s pretty difficult to balance and to find time for both. I’m very impressed by composer-performers who are able to have busy careers in both fields and seem to juggle the two effortlessly… But I suspect that everyone finds it tricky!
I think Soundhub is really, really great. Everyone’s been really amazing, and really sweet. You know, there are so many “emerging” or “young” composer schemes, and I certainly wouldn’t make it into any of those. I’m already too old for anything like that. And because I missed that whole “developmental phase” as a composer, that means [I] automatically can’t get the opportunities to try things out, to do workshops, to play around. So it’s really great to be able to go for something like this and not automatically be excluded. I think Joyce Lam and the team have been amazing, for all of us, at facilitating these crazy ideas.
Sam, I’d love to circle back to your work with automated and electromechanical instruments — would you consider yourself an inventor, of sorts?
Sam: I wouldn’t consider myself an instrument inventor — I definitely don’t have the skills for that. -laughs- There’s a high degree of precarity in them, where you can’t predict what happens. It’s this big tension in a lot of my pieces, and definitely in this one [for Soundhub]: between being interested in the flux and unpredictability of instruments, but then also being like “I really like that bit — how do we [create] more of that?”
That’s a big thing for me, with automated instruments. In a very strange way, they manage to produce all the glitches that an instrument might make — like the end of a violinist bowing, or the end of a breath on a wind instrument — you’re able to sequence those, and have those reappearing. Those glitches become the material, which I think is really fun.
Xenia: I really love this idea — working with glitches. Things that don’t work, [or] things that don’t work in the way that they should; but then that becomes the new way to use the interface, or instrument. Working with the Magnetic Resonator Piano (MRP) has also been a really interesting way to experiment: I found some strange glitchy sounds that the scanner was making — because it was misreading the position of the keys — and that formed the basis of a new piece. But then one component of the scanner was changed in a subsequent version [of the MRP], and it just wouldn’t do that anymore. Now the designer (Andrew McPherson) is working on incorporating this “glitch” into the next version of the hardware. So, when you work on new instruments, it’s fun to take the glitches — the “wrong” things — into consideration. Because then that becomes the “proper” way to play it, right? You’re making history, as it were.
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Do you feel like there’s anything in particular that Soundhub has taught you about your practices? Or anything you feel like you’ll take with you from participation in the scheme?
Connie: Recently, I’ve been working a lot with larger-scale shapes and ideas, thick layers of sound coming in and out. But for this piece, I want[ed] to push it in a slightly different direction. I’m trying to make a detailed, “beat”-y, violent piece with much more rhythmic definition; at one point I have the percussion playing a live “beat”, but then the electronics crossfade in with the same material — but it becomes more overdriven, grizzly, and removes it from the acoustic capabilities.
What I’m really focusing on is doing as much of everything that I can. Right now, I have so many fields of interest, and so many avenues that I like to go down. I’m still discovering what drives me; and recently, it seems to be writing pieces with elements of performance in them — because that’s something that comes very naturally to me. But I think I need to keep writing to see and that only comes with time.
Cameron: Because of how I’ve been working in the last couple years, which has been very particular in its collaborative nature — like working with dramaturg Klara Kofen, or Bahar Noorizadeh, an Iranian artist who has created a number of works in Unreal Engine — where I am the person doing sound and sonic dramaturgy, the porosity of those roles is very clear… For this project, I made the mistake of thinking the same way: what does film do, what does sound do, what does interaction do, what are the drums doing here? Creating the CSI board. -laughs-
It sort of goes without saying, but this, I think, the first concerto that’s ever been written for sensory percussion. Yay — my USP is burning. -laughs- I think this instrument, interface, container for a host of art and research — the potential of it — is something I really believe in. Off the back of this, I want to think about how I can commission composers, work with composers as a performer.
Xenia: I’m really interested in narrative — language, story — but not in an obvious way, not in a programmatic way. More, how do you structure a narrative arc? That’s something I’d love to learn more about, do on a bigger scale; not just 15, 20 minutes, but 50 minutes [or] an hour… That would be something I’d love to do next. I’m on a residency in Sweden at the moment, and I’m sketching some new ideas — so there may well be something that follows on from this experience with storytelling and narrative.
Sam: Even just from the first workshop that I had with Joyce — where we tried [ideas] out on different instruments — I was like “I need to save that, and do that again in the future”. Finding ways of working with players, with mechanics… Moving towards longer durations. Every piece that I write, I almost always start being like “maybe this is the one that’ll be 40 minutes or just one thing”. But I never quite manage to do that. -laughs-
It gets towards the kind of material that I’m interested in: repetitions, near-repetitions, and installation type works — the idea that an audience member can come in, at any time, and experience a similar thing. Combining that with concert music, and mechanical instruments; figuring that out, and making new things, is the plan — whoever will let me do that. -laughs-
Finally: is there anything in particular in your upcoming works that you feel like it would be good to listen out for on the 22nd?
Sam: You know, every composer gets asked this question, and I never know what to say. I prefer leaving it blank. There’s two types of introductions composers give before a performance: there’s one that’s really didactic — this happens, then this happens, then this happens. And I’ve seen a lot of friends that go up, and one spoke about car insurance. -laughs- That’s the one I prefer.
Xenia: I think it’s good to leave for people to discover for themselves. One thing I can say about all four pieces is that people will be transported somewhere. I think our job, partly, is to create a magical experience, no? Something that’s different from the everyday.
Sam: I think that seems to be what the scheme has afforded us to do. Come up with something that’s out of the ordinary — whatever that means.
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The London Symphony Orchestra’s 2026 Soundhub showcase takes place this Wednesday 22nd April at LSO St. Luke’s, London – learn more and buy tickets at:
Learn more about each of the LSO 2025-26 Soundhub composers:
- https://www.instagram.com/connie.m.harris/
- https://camerongrahammusic.com/
- https://samlongbottom.com/
- https://xeniapestovabennett.com/
Photos (left to right): Connie Harris (Photo Credit – Daniel Solomons), Cameron Graham, Sam Longbottom (Photo Credit – Brian Slater), Xenia Pestova Bennett (Photo Credit – Phil Barnes)
