What do you do when a composer announces that the work you’ve just commissioned for 15 musicians will need 1,000 performers; or asks for the premiere to be in a boarded-up shop; or wants you to time precisely how long it takes to get from the top floor of your concert hall to the bottom?



Smile, breathe deeply, and cheer. Today’s composers like to tread new territory, and in hearing things afresh, they sometimes need to rewrite the rulebook. This urge to explore is what makes contemporary music so exhilarating and so unexpected. And it’s why I love it.

As I prepare to leave Birmingham Contemporary Music Group at the end of June, after almost 30 years with the ensemble (the last 15 as Artistic Director), I’ve found myself reflecting on the amazing inventiveness of composers and the lengths to which they will go in order to produce just the right sound and create just the right effect. And how they know just how far to push the commissioner to get what they need. The challenge has been to keep up with their ideas, and at all times to keep your head while all around are (gloriously) losing theirs.

David Lang’s Crowd Out

The US composer David Lang certainly threw down the gauntlet with his 2014 BCMG commission, Crowd Out. He had previously written a piece for BCMG that almost tripled in size (from an original 15 players/minutes to 40 - admittedly, he did ask) so I should have known that he might harbour even bigger ambitions for the next one. It was over lunch at home in New York that David confided that the piece that he really wanted to write was “for 1000 people shouting in the street!”, and beguiled (or perhaps bewitched?) I heard myself say “OK, of course.” Only on the plane home did I wonder what I’d done. It took us six years to find a way to put on Crowd Out with its chanting, singing, shouting all-comer participants, and it’s one of the premieres of which I am most proud.



When composer Michael Wolters asked for just one performer for a requiem commissioned for Birmingham’s Weekender Festival last autumn, it came as something of a relief. Sometimes, though, the devil is in the detail. Michael and his collaborator James Yarker from Stan’s Cafe theatre company had a beautifully poetic idea about the sadness of empty retail spaces; there was a quietly subversive element to this work, conceived for a festival sponsored in part by the city’s retail sector. Michael wanted the work, Requiem to Let, to be performed in a forlorn, disused shop unit. We took to the streets to find an evocative abandoned space into which we could squeeze an audience (we’re now unexpected experts in person per square metre ratio) and was defiantly empty (not easy in a fast-moving retail economy – as soon as we spotted one, it would invariably be sold or let). The search went to the wire, but seeing and hearing the dead space come alive with music and people, we, of course, forgot the agonies.

Michael Wolters’ Requiem to Let

One young composer wanted the sound of a specific Italo Calvino paperback dropped onto a drum

Young composer Shiori Usui, during her year-long stint as BCMG/Sound and Music Composer-in-Residence was happy for her new piece Deep to be performed in the regular CBSO Centre concert hall, but the normal conventions stopped there. Since this was an “underwater” piece, drawing inspiration from the oceanic sounds of the BBC’s Blue Planet series, please could we clear the chairs from the auditorium, light it dark blue, mix audience and performers around the floor and exploit the balconies of the CBSO Centre for different “depth levels”, hence the request to time player journeys from top to bottom. The result was hypnotic.

‘The result was hypnotic’ - the CBSO Centre’s concert hall is set for Shiori Usui’s underwater piece, Deep. Photograph: Richard Lea-Hair/Sound and Music

Not every composer’s request has an immediately discernible reason. When a young composer wanted the sound of a specific Italo Calvino paperback dropped onto a drum at the back of the ensemble, I did wonder if the audience would hear the difference between this and, well, any other similar-sized paperback, let alone see it. But, I like the fact that even at a formative stage, composers are thinking differently. Sometimes the concept is all and in this as with other pieces, our first instinct is always to give the composer what they want – to be the ensemble that likes to say yes.



With Benedict Mason, whose new work Horns Strings and Harmony BCMG will premiere on 1 May, it is axiomatic to expect the unexpected. Benedict’s requests during the composing process, arriving thick and fast over the last weeks, can often send us scratching our heads over how to achieve (and afford) them, but you always understand that he knows exactly why he wants what he wants. His previous BCMG commission, the wonderfully-named Nodding Trilliums and Curve-Lined Angles (1994), was comparatively straightforward, but I recall my predecessor Simon Clugston saying something like: “please do choose your instrumental lineup, but it would help if you didn’t use percussion.” What turned up was a quadruple percussion concerto with one of the largest batteries of instruments we’ve ever fielded. This may sound perverse, but more likely it’s an artist needing some resistance to work against, with perhaps the power of suggestion as inspiration; whatever the reason for that transgression, Nodding Trilliums is a gloriously exotic piece precisely because of all that percussion (complete with toys) and well worth it.

So what have been the seemingly bizarre requests for Horns Strings and Harmony? Its composer knows only too well the power of surprise, and I’m certainly not going to give the game away here. All I can say is expect the unexpected. After all, that’s what makes life worth living, isn’t it?



•Birmingham Contemporary Music Group gives the premiere of Benedict Mason’s Horns Strings and Harmony at CBSO Centre Birmingham on 1 May, and at the Aldeburgh festival on 11 June.

