“When I’m writing, I feel very aware of the things that surround the music as much as the music itself. I understand more how I approach instrumental music narratively: in terms of remembering.”
Leoni King
Leoni King is a composer and writer based in the South-West of England. Leoni’s work contemplates her evolving relationship with formative spaces, drawing on eclectic influences and voicing these in a classically-trained language; the landscapes she has lived in are the heart of her music. Described as “nostalgic yet futuristic” and “gripping and sumptuous”, her music has performed at venues including Kings Place, Milton Court, and GIGANT Apeldoorn, by ensembles including Britten Sinfonia, Orkest de Ereprijs, and Engegård Quartet, and featured at Turnpike Gallery and Ludlow English Song Weekend. Leoni was a 2025 Magnum Opus composer with Britten Sinfonia, culminating in ‘I carried you out from a dream’ with original libretto performed by soloist Patricia Auchterlonie; this year she is a Soundhub Associate composer with the London Symphony Orchestra. Leoni graduated with Distinction in a Masters in Composition from New College, Oxford, in 2022, having previously studied there as an undergraduate.
Following the premiere of ‘I carried you out from a dream’ with Britten Sinfonia and Patricia Auchterlonie in November 2025, we caught up with Leoni over coffee at the British Film Institute, London, discussing the parallels between wild and performance spaces, her practice as a writer, storytelling as survival, and “being haunted by something you don’t want to forget”…
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Zyggy/PRXLUDES: I discovered your work through your incredible piece ‘I carried you out from a dream’, which you composed as part of the Britten Sinfonia Magnum Opus scheme. I understand that was a sequel of sorts to the first piece you composed on that scheme, ‘MISSING’…
Leoni King: I’d already started writing what turned out to be [the] libretto — but I saw it more as just prose, or poetry. I had an idea that it could match the format that Britten Sinfonia do [for Magnum Opus]: a smaller-scale piece, and a larger-scale, deeper exploration into that.
Some of [the text] comes from even 2022, I think — little bits of it. When I started writing my piece for Orkest de Ereprijs, ‘I will leave you like the sun’, that was the first time I felt like I was properly able to use my own text in my music. I never had any formal training with writing. Once I realised you can get the same sonic richness from a combination of words, and that marries really nicely with the richness of music, I felt like I wouldn’t be an impostor if I used my own text. I always like hearing what other composers are doing, other than straight up music — it adds different angles.
It felt like a continuous story, looking at on my own experiences with formative landscapes. I had in mind that there would be a missing person roaming a landscape that they deeply care about… These other “personas”, or characters, started jumping out to me, almost in a kind of “operatic ensemble” type of way. In ‘I carried you out from a dream’, there’s a lineman — a pylon engineer — and some nuns. And even though it all comes from one voice, they’re different perspectives on a landscape; it’s through them that the missing person’s perspectives on death are realised; how nature, religion, are propelled towards or away from it.
I’d already written a small poem that I intended to be in the style of a “missing” poster that would be stuck up. It talks about a search party that goes out to look for a missing person — but we never hear from the missing person.
That missing person comes to the foreground in ‘I carried you out from a dream’. They find themselves occupying the same space as a pylon engineer who, after an accident, is occupying that near-death boundary space. Through that proximity, the missing person is able to voice the story of the lineman — which dispels any magnetism the missing person feels towards that boundary space. From that, they gain peace, but also propulsion, and start looking towards how nature and religion relate to death.
‘I carried you out from a dream’ was created in close collaboration with soprano Patricia Auchterlonie. Can you tell me a bit about what the collaborative process was like?
It was crazy — the sort of synchronicities we found when we connected, and started working together. It was a few years on from seeing the premiere of Last Days, once I’d dried up my tears from seeing that… -laughs- I was surprised to have the opportunity to choose a soloist. I sent Patricia an email, and I talked about these landscapes that I wanted to write a piece around.
It’s based around where I grew up. When I would walk around there, there’s a convent quite close to a strawberry farm, with these big, expansive polytunnels. It almost seemed like an operatic scene, to me; the idea of nuns, with their habits, around these polytunnels with big sheets of polythene flapping in the wind… And it turns out Patricia lives there, in that area! She was familiar with all these places — moreso than me in some cases, because I no longer live there, whereas she does.
In writing about formative spaces, it’s often quite backwards-looking. I’d been really wanting to keep writing about those things that I love, but move forward a bit — feel like I’m building new things. It felt perfect that I then had insight into how that space is still relevant to me now. I got a feeling of what an artist who lives in that place now is doing — not that Patricia is as attached to the strawberry tunnels as I am… -laughs- It felt less fictional… Like, fiction as a vessel for truth.
How did these shared experiences contribute to the compositional process?
Patricia and I had this shared starting point for the collaboration, which made it very freeing. The things we were exchanging were musical ideas, and parameters, yes — but when I think about when we would meet up, the things we were exchanging were more enthusiasm, and encouragement, and strength. Because we started from a shared place, we were able to grow outwards in parallel. It’s like flying two kites at the same time. As it went on, we got to understand each other more — but it became equally meaningful to both of us in different ways.
There were often times when I hadn’t quite realised how much she had taken from a particular aspect of it — how much she was embedded in a certain part — until I saw her perform it, as opposed to rehearse it. Or heard her talk about her favourite parts of it… That made me see different angles.
It was the first time I felt that a piece had become meaningful to someone beyond myself. I knew it was a big deal to me — it was the biggest opportunity I’d had ever — but it was really lovely to see how much she enjoyed it, how much it meant to her, and how proud her friends and family were.
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You’ve mentioned that ‘I carried you out from a dream’ draws on your experience with what you’re calling “formative landscapes”. Can you tell me a bit more about what this means for you, and what draws you to writing with landscapes in mind?
For me, there doesn’t seem to be much of a gap between the spectacle of a wild space — a physical landscape in which we navigate forces that are on the cusp of the human; and the spectacle of a composition environment — the performance space. Of all the minority experiences you can have, I’ve almost felt frustrated: why am I drawn to writing about landscapes, when there are other things [going on]? But it’s very much a two-way interaction. You have a feeling of responsibility based on how much you understand the space; it’s guarding you, and guiding you, in a way. The word I always come back to is “spectacle”. [A] wild space feels just as populated as a performance space, almost, when you draw out each ecosystem.
I think I get what you mean — that the intricacies you see in a physical landscape somewhat mirror the intricacies you see in an artistic space. Did this perspective come from anywhere in particular, for you?
What’s coming to me is the poetry that made me interested in writing… Made me feel I could apply compositional processes [to] writing. There’s one poet, Ralf Webb, who writes about what you’d call “pastoral” spaces — with a lot of attention to the beauty, and the brutality of it. Allows them to be equally intoxicating. Another [is] Richard Siken. He has a poem called Cover Story. It was the first time I’d ever seen a composer mentioned in a modern poem. That felt intriguing to me.
When I was younger, roaming in these wild spaces, enjoying having that freedom… I couldn’t really see the connection between that and the music I was doing. It wasn’t till I started studying that I understood the relevance of that feeling to composing; I think that’s because composers weren’t very visible to me. Loads of other artists were, but composers — especially younger composers — it didn’t seem like something I could see people living. See a route from my life to that. Which I hope changes.
I hope younger composers are more visible — which is rich coming from me, who has virtually no social media. -laughs- But visible in the sense that there’s a deep sense of them in their music. This is why I often reject social media: I feel that I put as much genuine time as possible into documenting things from lots of different angles, in a piece of music. That’s the thing that I would like to present to people if they want to come to understand me.
Can you tell me a bit more about these parallels you feel between wild or natural spaces and performance spaces — what kinds of parallels do you notice, and how does that present in your work?
When I think about landscapes I want to document in my music, I think of present things, current things… Patterns in how I feel when I collaborate with someone, or go to a rehearsal, or spend the day picking up on the ways that players dismantle my music. In the same way as those poets — Ralf Webb and Richard Siken — bring out this world where seemingly passive things have a lot of influence on people, and how they relate to others. It feels like a similar spectacle; almost-normal, but slightly surreal. More joyful.
When I started writing ‘I carried you out from a dream’, [I was thinking] about how a piece that’s essentially about befriending death, or not, can be a positive thing… How is me writing about that a positive thing? I came to the conclusion that it’s about the joy of being haunted by something you don’t want to forget. If something is so pervasive, and constantly follows you around, the fact that it hasn’t gone away is a source of inspiration.
For most of your recent vocal works, you’ve written the text yourself, and you have a practice as a writer as well as a composer. In what ways do you feel like this provides an extra angle to your music?
I think my way of listening is a bit of a product of being a writer-composer, and not a composer-performer or a composer-conductor. I think what’s drawn me to that role is the ability to watch things unfold without being “part” of it — yet very much knowing that you’re within it. Classical music is often presented with a sense of distance, or isolation — and there’s no expectation that everyone who listens will become emotionally invested (some people will). I feel quite freed by that. To be what I know is honest, and vulnerable, and I almost know no one will probe me about it unless they want to understand more. It’s nice to see it be able to exist. That in itself is cathartic.
You’ve also written music that responds to existing poetry, as well…
Any composing that I’ve done [in] response to existing poems was done a bit further back, when I didn’t feel like I had a poetic process yet. I like being able to have a text that I wrote, and then when I sit down to start composing with that, it almost breeds a bit of self-respect. You have to trust that you wrote it with conviction at that time. Even if I feel differently by the time I’m composing it, there’s a dialogue between the mindset of the “poem” and the mindset of the “music”.
So I guess your writing, or your poetry, serves as an impetus from which the compositional process emerges.
Lots of my music seems to want to gravitate towards a maximalist coexistence of varying mental states. If I have the “evidence” of that from myself, in two different forms, then it’s easy for me to believe and write it genuinely. That’s why I like writing my own [text]. It also guides it structurally. There will be lines that I didn’t realise were in partnership, that form a kind of structure in the music.
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I loved your work ‘I will leave you like the sun’, which was performed by Hella Termeulen and Orkest de Ereprijs as part of their Young Composers Meeting in 2023. You mentioned this was the first time you used your own text — how did that initial exploration feel, in the grander scheme of your artistic practice?
I didn’t feel any sense of gravity around until it got to the performance in Apeldoorn. It’s [ed. Young Composers Meeting] a competitive-style scheme, where they have a panel and they choose winners at the end. I was really empowered by the fact that one of the composing mentors — one of the panelists — found it really moving. I could tell he had connected to it. Having that experience from a listener was galvanising; I felt, at that point, that I would always have some positive experience from writing the text in my music. The fear of judgement was removed, because it got judged and appreciated at the same time.
Do you feel like your approach to text in that work — ‘I will leave you like the sun’ — differed to your pieces for Britten Sinfonia?
‘I carried you out from a dream’ — as a duology, including ‘MISSING’ — felt more scenic. I could see it unfold, and imagine how it would translate to an operatic setting (if I had the resources). In a way, ‘I carried you out from a dream’ is a bit more at peace with itself, and is not trying to implore the audience to do anything, or to listen, or to act.
Even though ‘I carried you out from a dream’ [is] introspective and soliloqual, it’s still connected with narrative forces. It’s the piece that I feel is most leaning towards being built around more, if I get the chance. In a way, it’s more of a scene within another narrative… I have started to expand it. It was reassuring to me that I didn’t feel the need to leave it in the past, because it feels like it’s relevant and has space to grow.
The direction it seems to go in is that the relatively empty landscape is becoming more and more populated. In seeing landscape as a performance space — or something that’s witness to an act of performance — there are questions about what it’s witness to. Why anyone would feel the need to perform in a passive space… The specific characters that come out of it.
Another piece I love of yours is your string quartet, ‘SWANSONG’. For me, there’s something in the way you navigate harmonies that feels so wistful, or longing…
That’s like a litmus test for whether people like my music or not. -laughs- They either think it’s really boring, or they like the bits of grit in it. I found I got into a habit, where once I’ve pushed a bit of music as far as it can go, I will basically reverse it — and go through severing, inserting, and joining bits until I like the sound again. You end up retracing steps in a harmonic trajectory at a different pace, with things recontextualised. The harmonic structure becomes one of remembering; an act of remembering. Either something comes into focus if the reverse material has gone before the original; or something is distilled and viewed differently.
In ‘MISSING’ and ‘I carried you out from a dream’, I tried to be guided by the concept of the circle of fifths as a compass, where you get four points that are a tritone apart (north/south/east/west). That was an idea that was put to me almost as research; and although superficially, it sounded like it would really match my music — and I felt like it would make my music make academic “sense” — as I wrote, I found that I wanted to not feel restricted by it anymore. I’d forgotten all about it, and then found that actually my music had followed it anyway. That was another kind of process.
Another thing I continually find — I suppose it’s more of a harmonic quality — a lot of the music I listened to when I was younger often had strong, driving open fifths. Like folk, rock… A certain bassiness that’s quite hard to achieve in a classical ensemble sometimes. Trying to turn the “classical” sonority towards those harmonic, driving moments, creates unexpected results.
I think there’s a contingent of composers we know, who you can tell have listened to (and are influenced by) that kind of music. You mentioned Last Days — I’d say Oliver Leith is almost definitely one of them.
Guitarists are always good composers! When I was younger, my mum and I would listen to a band called Yes in the car. I remember feeling scared listening to it, actually; it had long instrumental passages that modulated a lot, and it was so active all the time. I wonder if that’s possibly led to me wanting to write music where every phrase is something transient. By the time you’ve noticed something is happening, it’s moved on, and when it comes back, it’s not quite how you remembered it.
When I was in a fairly blinkered study of music and composition early on, I was a bit of a Finzi head — if such a thing exists. -laughs- I liked the tension in the counterpoint; it’s abrasive, yet open… That was music [where] I started to see harmony that I found really engaging, in a more classically instrumental setting.
My first encounter with opera was as a seven-year-old schoolchild. This was possibly one of the benefits of starting an instrument at a young age. I got put in an orchestra — a very heavily wind-weighted orchestra — for a production [of] Hansel and Gretel. I heard the evening prayer, and I remember feeling really moved by it; even though when I went back and listened to it on the VHS tape, it sounds horrendous, because it’s a bunch of tiny children with wind instruments. -laughs- When I started studying composition more, I didn’t feel an immediate affinity towards opera — until I suddenly understood it as the “everything” of composition.
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I think there’s something about how as composers, and as artists more generally, our practice involves the collation — and maybe collaboration — of so many different parts of our identity.
Being a composer is like having many voices funneled through one person… Storytelling as a means of survival — the modern Scheherazade-ian idea. That’s how storytelling feels for me, anyway; continually trying to get hold of a story, and stretch it as much as it can — gain strength from it.
I resonate with this, a lot — storytelling as survival, and composition as survival. I’ve definitely had times in my life where creation has gotten me through difficult patches.
A couple of weeks before ‘I carried you out from a dream’ had to be finished, I unexpectedly hurtled into some health issues — thankfully now resolved. Being in that situation while having to finish a piece of music… The act of creating something, seeing it come into fruition — the act of storytelling — was one of the few things that was unchanged in my life. I felt like as long as I could manage to put something in, I was able to see it would bring a lot out.
At that point, I was very aware that having a creative outlet — even though it’s quite taxing in that state — does tap into all the things keeping the imagination firing. All the things that are supposed to be helpful and beneficial in varying mental states. I read that the part of the brain that’s connected to the will to live is the bit that’s responsible for imagination… Looking back at the writing I’d done from months back, and certain lines jarringly jumping out — there’s a bit where the lineman lists mundane parts of life that they miss — and suddenly, I felt like it really resonated with me when I had just been approaching it from a fictional angle before.
Before writing the poem, I’d read a book by Oxana Timofeeva called How to Love a Homeland. She discusses Aristotle’s principle of the three soul types: the nutritive, the sensitive, and the rational. The rational is what defines us — as humans — from plants or other animals, while the other two soul types are still nestled within us, in a more primitive place. I took from that that the rational, or the imagination, is the most vulnerable thing; and it’s the first thing to dissolve. The imagination — the warping of truth into fiction — in a situation where you might be vulnerable not by choice. Being vulnerable in a generous kind of way… How to Love a Homeland was part of the inspiration for some of the lines of the poem; that was the bit that Patricia liked, as well. -laughs-
It’s another thing to mention that in authoritarian societies and governments, the arts, culture that engages the human imagination, tends to be the first thing to get controlled.
Yeah. I’m not suggesting that if someone’s having a hard time, then they should have a massive project and a deadline… But it did focus me. When it was performed — and we had that lovely day where we see the outcome of everything we did — I felt like I’d put everything I absolutely could in. I was glad that I had kept creatively active in times where I slightly wanted to take a step back. Some of the music I found the most interesting [was written] when, that day, my mind was a bit scattered. I don’t want to fall into a trap of “suffering breeds interesting results”, but I do think that piece was a product of the time. The things that facilitated it really fed into it for the better.
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Can I ask if you feel a sort of personal attachment to your work? Do you feel like it’s something inherently a part of you — or a time capsule of where you were at a certain point in life?
Some are definitely more personal than others. Anything that I had more time to spend on, or had a chance to approach from different angles — with my own writing and music — feels more personal. It does feel quite documentarian because of the way, especially as a young-ish composer, that everything I do at the moment feels like a first.
The pieces are deeply shaped by the environment that allows them to happen. Like, when I was writing for Britten Sinfonia, the relationships between the players in the workshops would inform what I then went on and wrote. In the workshop for ‘I carried you out from a dream’, we had mostly different players to the performance; I remember the brass players having a great time to themselves in the [workshop]. The synergy between them led me to write music where the horn and trumpet were closely knit — even though it was played by different people in the actual performance. There’s definitely moments that are products of the situation.
It’s like an urge to document what I feel is my own perspective. Especially with those wild spaces… It felt like I was the only person that could possibly articulate that specific experience. I feel that sense of duty towards my outlet — the outlet of channeling those experiences, through a fictional, surreal lens.
To wrap up, I’d love to touch back on what you mentioned earlier about wild spaces and formative landscapes. Do you feel like your work is pastoral — or fits into that sort of canon?
This is something I think about a lot. I read a conversation that Ralf Webb had with another poet, Sam Buchan-Watts, and they arrived at labelling their poetic language as the “warped pastoral”. I found as soon as you say the word “pastoral” to someone, in a contemporary music sense, they slightly switch off… A lot of people’s minds gravitate towards the idyll, the perfectly untouched. Given everything I’ve gotten out of wild spaces, I think it would be unfair to say my music doesn’t have a pastoral thread — but I hope people would understand it as a nuanced kind of pastoral. That’s why I liked the “warped” idea at first; something is evolving, uneasy. When I listen to music that you might class as 20th Century “pastoral”, I’m seeking out the slightly roughed-up bits — they feel inevitable in my perspective of landscape.
I guess I’m thinking of what you said about “being haunted by something you don’t want to forget”…
When I sit in front of Sibelius and ponder these landscapes, I think the further away I get from them, the more my fictional world that I’ve overlaid onto it becomes prominent. When I worked with Patricia, because she lived where I grew up, I sort of repatriated myself for the first time… I had the opportunity to revisit some of these places if I wanted to, but I chose not to. I would hate for the magic to have gone away. The line between what was real — my understanding of it — and what I’ve built on it since then is all quite blurred now. That wouldn’t be possible if it wasn’t inspiring in the first place.
I am quite enamoured with opera, now. I feel like everything I could possibly want to do on the periphery of music is possible in [opera]. I am loving elaborating, and building upon, the world I put forward in those Britten Sinfonia pieces. When I’m writing, I feel very aware of the things that surround the music as much as the music itself. I understand more how I approach instrumental music narratively: in terms of remembering. To have the chance to let those newly-populated, recently-invigorated landscapes be realised is a bit of a dream of mine at the moment.
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Learn more about Leoni King and her practice:
References/Links:
- Oliver Leith – Last Days (2022)
- Richard Siken, ‘Cover Story’, Pithead Chapel
- Yes – ‘Lift Me Up’, from Union (1991)
- Engelbert Humperdinck – ‘Evening Prayer’, from Hansel and Gretel (1893), performed by the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra
- Dr Shazia Jagot, ‘A very short history of One Thousand and One Nights’ (2023), Shakespeare’s Globe
- Oxana Timofeeva, How to Love a Homeland (les presses du réel, 2021), trans. Maria Afanasyeva
- Aristotle, On the Soul (c. 350 BCE), trans. J. A. Smith
- Ralf Webb, ‘Warped Pastoral: Ralf Webb and Sam Buchan-Watts in conversation’ (2022), The White Review
