Saurabh Shivakumar

“I’ve always been a composer and a performer — but it’s just the lens that I am looking through has changed.”

Saurabh Shivakumar

Saurabh Shivakumar is a composer, guitarist, and educator currently based in London. Originally from Chennai, India, and raised in Singapore, Saurabh’s work explores embodied listening and performer agency, finding itself between improvised, experimental, and electronic music practices. Winner of The Musicians’ Company Priaulx Rainier Composition Prize in 2026 and a Southbank Centre Future Artist in 2025, his music has been performed at venues including the Royal Albert Hall, the Royal Festival Hall, and Alexandra Palace, and by ensembles including The Hermes Experiment and Riot Ensemble. As a performer, Saurabh performs in improvising duo Red on Gold with close collaborator Anastasija Stanojevic, and is a member of [flux] ensemble, Musarc, and the New London Chamber Choir. Saurabh studied jazz guitar at Trinity Laban before an MMus in composition at the Royal Academy of Music, where he is now Manson Fellow for 2026–27, and begins a PhD in September under Rubens Askenar and Alex Hills.

Ahead of the start of his PhD, Patrick Ellis met with Saurabh after a rehearsal at the Wakey Wakey Café in New Cross to chat about his evolution from his roots in rock and metal music to a jazz guitarist to a composer, “growing up” as a composer in South East London, experiments with electronics and navigating what a composer-performer is in the 21st century…

Patrick/PRXLUDES: Hey Saurabh! Thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule to speak with me. First and foremost, how did you get into music?

Saurabh: I started playing the guitar quite late at about 10-11 years old — first classical. I sped through the first few; not because I was necessarily prolific, but [because] my teacher knew how to get the job done. One of my big regrets is that he used to never put me forward for the optional sight-reading module of the exams — and now, 15 years on, I wish I could sight-read. -laughs- 

When I was 13 or 14, I was pretty fed up with playing the classical guitar. At the time, I had an incredible music programme at school with some really inspiring music teachers, and I switched to the electric guitar because we had some at our school. I can remember there was a rock school in Singapore — a lunchtime activity where we would essentially form bands. The first band I was in was called The Mudpuppies, and we would play at 8am during the school assemblies and at the annual summer fair. We would have a set list of Ozzy Osbourne’s Crazy Train, Budapest by George Ezra, What Makes You Beautiful by One Direction and then finishing the set off with Green Day. It was just my friends and me having a good time.

Throughout middle school and high school, I was constantly playing in different bands, where I was checking out stuff on YouTube and trying to learn shreddy, fusion licks. At my school, they had a huge programme to cover all sorts of music, which included a Balinese gamelan ensemble; we also had lots of West African music and Zimbabwean music, there was a Djembe ensemble — and all of this would be a part of the school curriculum.

My musical education was not “traditional”, in the sense that I didn’t go to a [specialist] music school or a Saturday arts school. I was educating myself through YouTube and sitting in my dad’s car listening to whatever he played. To this day, all of the records that I hold close to my heart are artists that were playing on my dad’s stereo. 

What kinds of records were those?

He didn’t have a niche taste, but it was quite eclectic. A lot of The Beatles, Metallica, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and Dire Straits, a lot of classic rock. There was also Qawwali and Ghazal — North Indian and Pakistani music — which my dad loved too. My grandmother also taught carnatic music to kids, and my youngest brother trained as a Carnatic musician and Bharatnatyam dancer, but I was not really into that. At the time, I had grown my hair out long, wearing skinny jeans, black t-shirts, and would be playing Metallica riffs all the time. Between the ages of 13 and 16, I had learnt all of the rhythm guitar parts from their first four albums. I wouldn’t bother learning the lead lines or the solos, I would instead make up my own. -laughs-

Another big moment in my life was thanks to my music teacher, Eivind Lodemel — he was the person that pushed me on and helped me discover so many interesting things about music, and myself. I also discovered the music of Snarky Puppy where they had a distorted electric guitar, strings and a burning sax solo as well. The music was also really funky! It was mind-blowing; I didn’t know such things existed. My dad also took me to my first jazz gig around that time — John McLaughlin — and I was blown away. Gary Husband was on keys and drums. It was a jazz fusion performance that covered all kinds of different stuff. That was during a transition period for me, where I had become quite proficient with the electric guitar on a technical level, but I still hadn’t found my own voice and wasn’t quite aligned with what I was wanting to make on the guitar. 

You didn’t want to be a composer at that point? You were adamant about being a performer…

One hundred per cent. But at the same time, I was always interested in equipment and technology. I had the original version of Logic Pro when I was in middle school. Our school had a recording studio, and I would spend all of my time in there; and one of the technicians, Ashfie Haritz, would teach me how to use everything. So my development working with technology and electronics was parallel to my studying of the guitar. 

When I was learning and working with Logic Pro, I was approaching it from a performer’s perspective, because I was interested in how records were made. I was watching videos of artists talking about a classic album of theirs and how they got a certain guitar tone or a drum sound, or how the vocals were layered on the final recording. I guess that fascination has translated into a really messed up version of whatever my music is now. -laughs-

So the seeds were sewn at that point?

I just had a thirst for more. I wanted to play more and listen to more. To this day, that’s all that I want to talk about. But that interest in technology or writing music would lead to instances where I would watch a film, and I would have no clue what was being said because I was paying so much attention to the music. Of course, looking back now, these soundtracks had the obvious tropes of Hans Zimmer, John Williams and Ramin Djawadi; I wouldn’t count them as an influence, but then, they were formative to me. 

There was a Hans Zimmer interview that used to really annoy me, where he said that the only guitarist that he could think of that would fit the soundtrack of Inception was Johnny Marr from The Smiths. And I just thought “what do you mean!?”… -laughs- He’s not playing his signature sound in that! And that was when I knew that I could become a composer — because I was so opinionated about that. -laughs-

What happened between the 15-year-old you learning jazz and you beginning your studies at Trinity Laban in 2019?

Well, I was always messing around. I would just get my hands on everything and be involved in as many projects as possible. The only thing that I didn’t touch was the school choir, which I regret not doing. But I loved playing the drums; I used to put on a song and then play along to the track for the duration of my 45-minute lunch break, before I would go back to class. By the time I got to high school, I was involved in everything outside of an orchestral context; I was even helping out with the primary school ensembles and bands.

One of my music teachers, Mark Bradshaw, who I am still in touch with now, was moving to Swaziland [ed. Eswatini] because my school has a sister campus over there. I was teaching at my school, and he made an offer to me to teach over there. During high school, I didn’t know that you could be a performer or a composer as a profession — so I just wanted to be a music teacher, because I enjoyed the job and I loved working with children. It’s almost as though the jazz thing was a stepping stone into becoming a teacher.

So I took up the offer from my former teacher and moved to Swaziland for four months, where I taught lower form students music and would help out in GCSE and Sixth Form classes. And then for the second half of that year, I worked at my old school as a teaching assistant. And then one of my former teachers went on paternity leave, and so I covered some of their classes. 

Did you apply to many conservatoires and universities in the UK? 

It’s funny, the first place that I got an offer from was the University of York. I didn’t know what that meant back then, but it blows my mind that if I went there, I would have ended up studying with Rebecca Burden — a close friend and peer. And my second option was Sheffield, which is where Alex Lyon [of Terra Invisus] went, guilty of the same. It’s a funny world!

But in the end, I applied to some conservatoires, but I didn’t get into the Royal Academy of Music (funnily). Guildhall wanted me to fly out to Hong Kong, so the only offers were from Trinity Laban and Leeds Conservatoire. At the time when I was in Singapore, there were only around what felt like 40 established jazz musicians in the country, and I was not even one of them. Compared to London, there are around 20 jazz guitarists per year, in total, at all of the conservatoires. What I loved about jazz was that it satisfied the technical part of my brain, and was great for developing my expressive language as a musician; and I understood the way the tradition worked to that level.

And so I decided to move to London. I kind of knew that it would happen, but I didn’t anticipate it happening to the scale of everything over the past seven years; it was really hard for me to imagine back then. When I look back now, I don’t know how I ever survived in a place that wasn’t London… -laughs- But I’m so grateful for the experiences that I had growing up and all of the mentors that I had along the way.

When you started studying jazz guitar at Trinity Laban in 2019, what kind of jazz were you specialising in? 

It’s funny, because I sometimes work backwards. I knew a lot of the contemporary, free, and groove-based forms of jazz, but I actually didn’t know a lot of bebop and traditional repertoire. It was like being a violinist who knows about [the] Ligeti Concerto, but not any of Bach’s music; there’s nothing wrong with that, but it was just a different angle. It was something that you don’t expect because usually to get to Ligeti, you have to go through the previous steps to get there.

And so, I realised all of this when I started my undergrad, because everyone was killing it. It was a really good feeling for a bit, but it was really hard for me, because learning jazz idioms and doing all of the transcriptions made me learn that jazz wasn’t all that I thought it was. What I was into at the time were all of these “in-between” artists such as Kneebody, Orkest Metropole, John Scofield, Kurt Rosenwinkel, The Aristocrats, and Steve Vai. So it took me a while to step back from all of that and try to embrace more traditional artists, but then [I realised] that actually, I didn’t want to step back from that… I went through that whole battle during my undergraduate studies of whether I wanted to continue studying the guitar anymore. I can remember finishing my undergraduate and just feeling like I hated playing the guitar.

Were you also composing alongside jazz guitar while you were studying your undergraduate?

At the time, a lot of my favourite artists were in prog rock — such as Dream Theater and Animals as Leaders — and lots also in the metal subgenre of djent, as well as all of these jazz fusion guys. Obviously all of their playing was phenomenal, but their compositions are ridiculous! 

There was one teacher in my undergraduate class named Gareth Lockrane, and he always told me I wrote good tunes, good melodies — and that was all I needed for me to keep going for the next week. He was a flautist, but he was also a phenomenal composer and arranger. So I was just writing all of the time. It comes back to the time when I was in high school and just being on my own in the practice room, noodling away on my guitar in all of my free time. I would have so many voice notes of melodies and ideas, which filled up my old iPhone.

How were you then introduced to contemporary music?

It’s funny, because I didn’t really know what a composer was. I didn’t know that it was a thing that people would go to study. Of course, I knew that Bach and Beethoven were composers, as well as film composers such as John Williams and Hans Zimmer, and then the “in-between” composers such as Max Richter. I didn’t really have much awareness of what was happening outside of those worlds, simply because I didn’t know about it. 

During my undergrad, I got asked to perform in a couple of composer projects because I started to meet students in the composition department at Trinity. And I really enjoyed playing those pieces, and it felt fresh to me; I hadn’t played something like that before. Some of my colleagues in the jazz department had also been getting into free improvisation as well as the more experimental side of jazz, and that was great. That was my inroad to contemporary music.

We are in New Cross right now, which is kind of the epicentre of my transition into new music. This area of London is what changed it for me. It [New Cross] was a place where there would be students from both Trinity and Goldsmiths University. With some of the things that I saw, I just felt “why don’t I do that?”. Meeting someone like James Creed for the first time, for example, was an important moment for me. 

I remember that you told me before that you had lived with Alex Lyon from Terra Invisus…

Alex moved in with me along with Jack Wood. Seeing the work that they both did opened me up to so many things. Jack was just an encyclopedia of knowledge: I would go home and have a lecture on a composer, and he would tell me what to check out, and then I would go to my room to sit and listen to a composer’s work on YouTube. And that’s still how I do things now, to be honest — but I’m just slightly more opinionated. -laughs-

When you decided that you wanted to go on and do a master’s degree, how did you build your portfolio for the application process? And what kind of music were you creating at that point?

When I had finished my final recital in 2023, that summer was very transitional for me. On a personal level, I had just finished uni, people were moving out, I had just gotten out of a relationship, and I didn’t really know what I wanted to do in terms of a career. But I can remember getting a call from a friend, Tim Pottier, who was working on the CBSO Prom — a tribute to Indian singer Mangeshkar — and Tim asked if I wanted to do some of the arrangements.

Even though I felt out of my depth, I said yes and immediately went to the library to get a book on arrangements and how to write for strings. Whilst I was working on those arrangements, I thought to myself “perhaps I should take this composition thing seriously” — but this thought was only about two weeks before the composition portfolio deadline.

So I got to work. I had a tune that I had written; and to this day, I still think that it’s the best melody that I’ve ever written, because it has the best opening chord (which I worked on for a long time) — (Original Jazz Version and Newer “Classical” Version). So I took that sketch and made an arrangement of it for a string quartet with glockenspiel and vibraphone. I say “arrangement” because the [only] composers that I really knew at that time were Steve Reich, Philip Glass and György Ligeti, and when I was writing it I was approaching it with a chord progression or melody — which is what jazz musicians (often) do. As part of my portfolio, I wrote a string quartet which was essentially a rip-off of Ligeti’s first string quartet, and then I put my orchestration from the Proms in. Then I applied to all four of the London conservatoires, and I managed to get interviews at all four institutions. 

You got an offer from the Royal Academy of Music, which you took up, and then when you started you really threw yourself into things, writing a lot of different music. Did you do that as a way to experiment and “find your voice” as a composer?

Getting into the Royal Academy was a surprise to me, because they really grilled me during the interview process. There was a pivotal moment the summer before I started. I had met Paul Newland during my Guildhall interview, and a bit later on, he had recommended me to James Creed for a concert at Music We’d Like to Hear, to play in the UK premiere of ‘Sveglia’ by Christian Wolff. To this day, I have no idea why he asked me, but I am so grateful for what it kicked off in my life. It made me realise that the blend of performance and composition was integral to my practice.

At the beginning of the master’s course, I had a solid foundation in performing, as I had done over my year out of education. But in terms of my composing, I didn’t know what I wanted to do, because I still didn’t really know what music that I could write. And so the only way to learn about myself as a composer was to go in and try everything out; because that was the whole point of me going there, and I knew that I couldn’t really fail.

Of course, I felt scared when I was going into the Royal Academy, it was very intimidating. There are so many layers you can unpack as to why it was: it was a different environment; it had different kinds of people; I was living in a different part of London (as I now had to be North of the Thames). I also felt baby-faced: the other students around me had been involved in contemporary music and composition for a while.

What was your mindset like when you began?

Aesthetically, I knew that I wanted to try new things out. I was aware of what my weaknesses were, which I had a lot of. But simultaneously, I knew what my strengths were in my personality and within my artistic voice. I just needed to figure out how to bring those things together, because you just need to be honest in what you do. That’s what I found: I was able to develop opinions quite quickly because I wasn’t trying to impress anyone. The only person that I had to prove to was myself.

During my time there, I also befriended some of the undergraduate composers. In a way, I was doing my undergrad as a composer. -laughs- I also attended some of the lectures, which really helped me out. I also had the socialness to get along with the staff, and everyone was there to give you their time. 

Overall, it was a very safe environment for me to try different things. I was just fortunate to be around a nice community of people. In my own year, there were eight people who did very different things. And I couldn’t have asked for more. During an undergraduate degree, you are told to do things a certain way, and then a bit later on, you are told to forget that and do your own thing. So in a way, I was quite privileged, because I had managed to avoid that experience as a composer.

I suppose you also had an advantage because you were a bit older and had done a full degree’s worth of training in something else… 

I had insecurities, but I was secure in myself at that point in time. I had spent my year off really working on that, and musically, I was just open to trying everything out. I felt as though I had an opportunity to learn from every single person around me. When it came to my tutors, I had picked two very different teachers; but when I showed them my work, they would often agree on certain things, even though they write music that sounds very different from each other. It was a benefit to me that I didn’t know who composers like Boulez or Stockhausen were, because I would just go to check out their work and form my own opinion… -laughs- 

And I think that is why my aesthetics have changed so much over the two years of my master’s. In the beginning, I picked four projects where I knew I wouldn’t have the opportunity to write for that line-up again (realistically). One of those was [a] recorder project; I didn’t [even] know that you could study the recorder to a degree level. -laughs- I was just so mind blown by everything. I also wrote for a Riot Ensemble project, which included the electric guitar, double bass, trumpet, harp, flute and piano. When it came to writing that piece, I approached it as having three rhythm sections and three horns, with the guitar being moving between. 

Does your jazz thinking in terms of instrument sections often seep into your classical compositions?

Yes. I was talking with one of my composer colleagues, and I was telling him that I was writing for four horns, and then halfway through the conversation, I realised that he thought I was talking about writing for four French horns — when, in fact, I was talking about trumpet, alto sax, tenor sax and trombone. -laughs-

Jazz does seep in, with the way that I approach harmony; but really, it’s all the same — it’s just voice leading. For example, when I talk about it in a chorale sense or in jazz arranging, it’s a shared language. The content is similar, and both disciplines study it.

Do you have a preferred way of working when it comes to composing a piece? 

I love the workshop setting. I think that should be something that should be normalised and encouraged, because that’s what you do in a band and in a jazz context. You bring it over to the group, you try it out, someone might suggest a new groove; or you bring a leadsheet, and the pianist will have their own ideas. That’s why I enjoy workshops with classical musicians; there is no change in approach. And that’s why my music has changed aesthetically. I’ve always been a composer and a performer — but it’s just the lens that I am looking through has changed.

With your more recent works, it seems as though you are geared towards a more pared-down structure that is texturally sparse. What turned you towards that?

Mainly experience. I was just drawn to what I liked. I learnt what got me going, and that’s a continuous process. It’s just a case of what makes me want to do more and write more, and what makes me listen out for things. In the year that I was learning how to compose before I began studying at the Royal Academy, “my teacher” Jack would show me ‘For Bunita Marcus’ [by Morton Feldman], and I thought that it was insane! At the time, I didn’t even know that you could write music like that. Even since then, Feldman has been revolutionary for me. I always come back to his work. I was also captivated by Boulez, Sciarrino, and Stockhausen during my first year at the Academy. It’s always a case of what you know [and don’t], and that’s what makes it amazing. 

In some of your works, there are also hints of electronics seeping in too…

Using electronics has become so natural. We live in an electronic world, everything around us is AC and DC. Studying with Rubens Askenar changed everything for me, because everything is so practical: every note, every technique, as well as the intention behind it. The idiom with which I express that has changed over the course of the last year or so.

Because I “grew compositionally” within a certain scene — i.e. the South East London composition “group” — I was exposed to a lot of music by Laurence Crane, Feldman, Cassandra Miller. And so in my music, I was longing for space and organic growth. There is also another part of me that is very academic and nerdy, and so I am just always looking for more of that. I also had a big phase of being into Catherine Lamb, and through her music, I found Sarah Davachi and Éliane Radigue. It’s just finding all of these pockets until I found my own voice. 

On a technical level, what did you like about those composers’ approaches?

I love the way that they organise sound, and they all do it in their own way, they all deliver it in their own way. What I love about all of those composers is how much space they can make on a granular level; that’s what I’ve realised with all composers that I am drawn to. The first instance of that was discovering Georg Friedrich Haas, Sciarrino, and my teacher, Rubens. I have listened to a lot of Rubens’ music — the way that he orchestrates, and the way that he works with such precision.

For me, the connection between myself and my teacher was that he was also a performer, whether that is on the modular synth or on an electric guitar. My teacher Rubens’ work explores composition as a field of interacting systems, situated between instrumental practice, experimental technologies, and nonlinear dynamics. When you take Feldman, for example, he forces the players to make decisions with complexity in a similar way to Ferneyhough, but their scores look very different, and the sound world that they work in is also very different. And that made me think: how can I organise my thoughts and collect my ideas and present them in a way that I want to?

I loved the way that composers like Feldman, Eastman, Monk and Cage, as well as the rest of the experimental downtown school in NYC operated… They all had their own ways of going about it. I love that in their work, they can take one element and make that the focus of a piece: whether it’s a chord, a technique, the way that you notate or engrave things. And that is why I like Sarah Davachi, for example. Long-form music has always been something that I have just loved. Seeing all of that come together, I just love how it’s so embodied when I hear it, see it, or study it. It’s hard to pick apart, and I think that’s the performer-improviser side of me, where I will just do things my way.

Would you say that when you are working with people that you know well as a musician, you are more open with your notation? 

Typically, I haven’t done a lot of summer courses or composition programmes. So when I was learning how to compose, I was mostly learning off musicians who were my friends. I also just prefer to make music with my mates or on my own… -laughs- And so my music has gravitated towards that, whether that means using an open score or the blend of improvised music within a fixed composition.

Now that I have solidified more of an identity, what I am looking forward to the most is working again with people who I have worked with before, and making something better now that I know them better. I think that working in and around the experimental music world, being an active performer over the past two years alongside studying composition, I sometimes get a bit of impostor syndrome. But the reason why my colleagues want me to play in their pieces is that I get it — I understand what it’s like to sit in that chair, and for the performers to butcher your piece. -laughs- 

It’s great to have a mediator between the composer and performer…

And that’s why I want to be a composer-performer. I get to play in other people’s pieces, but I also want to hand my music onto performers, and let them be themselves. I want to create a space either through notation or instructions describing that soundworld that they should work within, for which they would express themselves.

You always work with someone for the first time. But when it is people that you work with regularly, you get to explore the musical relationship on a deeper level. 

Some of your pieces reference a lot of mid-20th-century art and music. What drew you to those works, and was there anything in particular that inspired those pieces?  

I’m really conscious of writing in aesthetics and with influences, because I want to always try and write the most honest version of whatever music it is that I’m working on or I am exploring. 

With ‘One Has, Different Priorities’, a good friend of mine — Hayden Miller — wanted to programme ‘Why Patterns?’ for Feldman’s 100th birthday, and feature a new piece alongside it. So he asked me. At that point, I had spent a few months learning the basics of modular synths. I had been to a seminar by Tim Weiss, and he was talking about Tyshawn Sorey… He showed us this piece named ‘For George Lewis’, and I was blown away by it. It was like Feldman on steroids! I was really interested in how, on the surface, when you listen to Sorey’s music, it is similar to Feldman’s works, but there is a groove. There are notes happening in the orchestra over five bars, and there would be these polyrhythms [like his playing] on the drums. His identity is there, but aesthetically, when you read the score, you can tell how much respect there is to the way in which Feldman would approach material.

And so with my own piece, I wanted to approach the writing in a similar way to Sorey, where you would enter a similar soundworld to Feldman’s music. Program wise, you do have a very Feldman-esque event for an hour and a bit, but I knew that my piece would be different because I am writing it, not Feldman (I write far too many sus chords). 

For my piece, I created three patches, using different oscillators and LFOs, which determined events in the electronics. So [the] patches would determine when a note would be played, how long the resonances would be played. I improvised on the patches (I had put them together, exported the MIDI and then notated it down) and then I assigned them to different pitch set values and determined how to notate it rhythmically, whilst staying within the aesthetic norms that adhere to that period of Feldman.

‘Why Patterns?’ itself was an interesting piece, because the instrumentalists start together, separate, and then come back together, all whilst playing different meters together. I wanted to approach that technique in my own way, and ‘One Has, Different Priorities’ was the result of it. It was a homage, if anything. I thought that it would be a good idea to write for the same instrumentation as Feldman, and it still did end up with a different result. The piece wasn’t something that you would put in the same world as Feldman.

Was your work for clarinet, violin, cello and piano, ‘Une Méditation’, also a nod to the mid-20th century art forms?

That was also a homage. I had spent the majority of my time trying to figure out the opening chord, because that is all that really mattered to me in that piece. I went through so many different chords and keys, but in the end I settled on the one that I used (it was using all of the white keys — classic!). 

It was a homage to Mark Rothko. I had seen the Rothko room many times when I visited the Tate Modern, and I had sung in a performance of ‘Rothko Chapel’ earlier this year with the New London Chamber Choir, so I got to experience what it was like to play Feldman. Being in the choir and getting to experience what it was like to put yourself in the position of reading and performing his work… It makes you wonder what it would have been like being in the Rothko Chapel and hearing that for the first time. That ending section when the viola comes in with the melody, as well as the repeated ostinato in the vibraphone — oh my god!

And so when it came to approaching ‘Une Méditation’, I wanted it to be a meditation, because that’s how I felt when I go into the Rothko room. I wanted to recreate that sense of feeling where you feel so relaxed and so serene — just being completely absorbed in the space — because the painting takes up the whole of your eye view. That’s why the first chord in my piece goes on for ages. 

That piece was a big step for me notationally, too. It’s a practical thing as a composer that you have to learn about: how to notate things the “correct” way, and also how to convey the message that you want in a way so that the performers understand it. 

‘The Hum at the Back of my Fridge’ is a much more representational work of yours. How does it compare to some of your more abstract pieces?

I would say that was one of my most programmatic pieces, along with ‘My Cat, Your Snapshot and Me’ for The Hermes Experiment and me on the guitar. Both of those fit very much within the realm of very prepared music — but the caveat is that almost anyone can play them.

The Hum at the Back of my Fridge is very self-explanatory for performers. Someone could perform it without needing to talk to anyone about it, because all of the details are in the score, and it’s within a medium that is well understood. Thanks to my teacher Rubens, when there are doubts, I put a QR code in the preface of the score and it demonstrates a video example of an extended technique; ([in this case] a card clipped to the bell of a bass clarinet), which I found looking at some of Heather Roche’s videos — and so I linked the QR code to her demonstrating it, which efficiently removes any ambiguity.

Have you used the QR codes in any of your other works? 

When it comes to approaching the programmatic stuff, I try to make it as approachable as possible, where you don’t need to explain things. But I do like working in the grey area. Similarly, anyone could play ‘My Cat, Your Snapshot and Me’: but I wrote it specifically for those groups of people, and it was based around the musicality that those people have.

There was quite a lot of box notation to allow space for the performers to improvise. I know the way that Héloïse Werner improvises from watching and listening to her, so I wrote to her strengths. I mean, The Hermes Experiment can do anything; they are phenomenal musicians. Based on my pre-existing knowledge of them, I wanted to exploit those amazing qualities.

In your solo violin work ‘Monody’, can you tell me a bit about the processes you use in your electronics?

That was the first time that I wrote notated music that featured electronics. My favourite pedal on my guitar pedalboard is the Plus Pedal by Gamechanger Audio, which is designed to look like a piano sustain pedal — and it does just that. It has controls for attack, decay, release and volume. When I play something and press it down, it will sustain a note. And so I wrote that piece on the guitar; I put my guitar into the violin tuning, and I wrote it out in one sitting.

The way in which I used the electronics in that was very simple, but I’ve developed my electronics practice since then. I have assigned different patches into Ableton, used an expression pedal, utilised spectral time instead of a plus pedal to freeze material, and used a MIDI expression controller, and the violinist can be in charge of that. But since then, I have developed the electronics further using a few modular patches to affect the decay time, and how the spectral information is processed when freezing.

Again, this has all come out of a quest for learning and trying new things. I’ve also wanted to learn MaxMSP, and so I started writing a piece that used the tube map as a system — and during the making of that piece, thanks to Andrea Balency-Béarn, I started learning about IanniX, which is a time-based graphic interface developed at IRCAM. I’ve only scratched the surface with it. I had an interactive tube map with the Northern Line that was an LFO, and each train was a different parameter. I built an effects rack, and had things attached to it using sound samples that were triggered at certain points. The actual music itself was improvised, but I had a master cursor, so that I could control the speed that it’s moving at — which could make everything go berserk.

There is an advantage to having experience working with effects pedals…

Definitely. The next thing that I want to explore is spatialised audio, but I’m scared to commit to it. One step at a time… -laughs- But having the knowledge of a pedalboard is very translatable, as I know what the effects do, so if I set things, then I know what the result is going to be like. 

You’re about to start a PhD at the Royal Academy of Music as the Manson Fellow for 2026-27. Can you tell me a bit about what you’re looking to explore as part of the PhD?

First of all, I can’t wait to start. With the momentum that I’ve built, it is an opportunity to be given the space where I can just run. The proposal is very practice-based, looking at experimental, devised, and electronic music practices within composition. It is a continuous feedback loop of what I do influences what I write, and what I write influences what I do. It’s bouncing back and forth, as well as together, at the same time. And the aspects that I’m most interested in are getting my hands dirty and building contact mic instruments, noise boxes, learning a bit of code, and figuring out different ways to harness these elements in my practice.

Or using different ways in my research to find these strands that I can latch onto. Because it’s practical, and that’s something that I’m really determined to be practice-based, but I also want to improve my concepts and orchestration, as well as develop that grey area that I love working in. 

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Learn more about Saurabh Shivakumar and his practice:

• https://www.instagram.com/saurabh_shivakumar/
• https://saurabhshivakumar.bandcamp.com
• https://www.youtube.com/@saurabhshivakumar8334

References/Links:

• Ozzy Osbourne – Crazy Train (1980)
• George Ezra – Budapest (2014)
• One Direction – What Makes You Beautiful (2011)
• ‘A beginner’s guide to Qawwali music’, BBC
• ‘What is Ghazal? Origin, Evolution and Legendary Ghazal Singers’ (2026), Spardha School of Music
• György Ligeti – Violin Concerto (1989-1993)
• Christian Wolff – Sveglia (2023)
• Morton Feldman – For Bunita Marcus (1985)
• Morton Feldman – Why Patterns? (1978)
• Tyshawn Sorey – For George Lewis (2019)
• Morton Feldman – Rothko Chapel (1971)