Vents MagaZine Music and Entertainment Magazine
Related Articles
- We’re very excited to have some time today with acclaimed British-American composer Freya Waley Cohen; welcome to Vents Magazine, Freya! Before we meander down the proverbial Q&A musical pathway, how is the freshly-minted New Year treating you and yours?
It’s going well so far thanks! It’s a busy year coming up, but I’m trying to dive into it with some calm.
- Major kudos and accolades on the February 1 world premiere performance of your complete ‘Spell Book’ (Volumes I and II) at Milton Court, presented by the Manchester Collective! Starting at the top, what does it mean for you as a composer to have your work featured at such a distinguished venue?
Thank you! It’s the first time my music has been presented at Milton Court – and I’m immensely grateful to them and to Manchester Collective to believing in this project. I’d been wanting to complete it for a long time, and I felt sure that the Barbican’s Milton Court was absolutely the place for it to be premiered as a complete song cycle. The barbican is such a melting pot of different art forms – people go there to have their minds opened and their perspectives shifted. That’s what I felt happened to me when I first read the poetry collection that inspired this work, so I wanted to share that wild experience in a place where people would be up for it!
- Word ‘round industry campfire has it that the performance of Spell Book at Milton Court also featured the world premiere of two new songs; congratulations! Can you give our ever-inquisitive readers a hint or three as to what they can expect from these two new tunes?
Absolutely. The two new songs are spell for change and spell for the Witch’s Hammer. Spell for Change is the most intimate of the songs, just set for mezzo soprano and harp, with a couple of quiet, almost ghostly, interjections from strings and flute. It’s sort of dark and slow and delicate and fierce all at once – it’s about huge tectonic change, geothermal, natural and terrifying. In this song, the earth cracks open and the singer quietly asks the listener ‘are you scared yet?’
Spell for the Witch’s Hammer is, by contrast, extremely extroverted – one long crescendo of driving rhythms and playful clashes – it’s set for 3 singers, and the whole Spell Book ensemble.
The ‘Witch’s Hammer’ is referencing the Malleus Maleficarum, which was a dangerous and influential demonology treatise first published in 1486. It became a best seller – second only to the Bible – for around 200 years. It’s essentially a witch hunters handbook, with guidance about how to identify and punish a witch and includes weird salacious details and fantasies about what witches might be out there doing. It happened to published when the printing press was pretty new and was changing the way information was spread. It had a fake (or stolen from somewhere else) Papal Bull, and all of this meant that the ideas spread like wildfire across Europe. The Spell for the Witch’s Hammer conjures up some of the tropes, accusations and fantasies found in this books, inverts them and the three spell-casters take ownership over them, before destroying them by eating them.
- Can you talk about the origins of your complete Spell Book? How did this gorgeous music come into being?
I read the poetry collection WITCH by Rebecca Tamás in 2019 and was captivated by the world outlook in these poems. While reading it, I started to have strange and witchy dreams and felt a strong impulse to engage creatively with what I found. Among longer poems, there are several spells, and the idea of a spell poem felt perfect for a song cycle. These beautiful, vivid, confrontational, witty poems formed the basis of this song cycle. A spell is something that is ritualised and performed – and the concert hall experience is a ritual in itself, so it seemed right to bring these incantations into that space.
I had two commissions for song cycles that year, and the first, written for Katie Bray and the Britten Sinfonia, I called Spell Book volume I, the second, written for Héloïse Werner and the Tippett Quartet, was spell book volume II. During lockdown, I was commissioned by Oliver Zeffman to write spell for reality for Julia Bullock and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. These were staged in the summer of 2022 at Longborough Festival Opera, despite the cycle being incomplete. The staging and performance there stunned me, and I felt even more fiercely compelled to complete the cycle. The two songs became possible because of conversations with Manchester Collective and the Barbican who jointly commissioned both the performance and the writing of the new songs. Along with Héloïse and Katie, Fleur Barron joined to complete the trio of singers, and there we were – it all came together!
- Just a few weeks after the world debut at Milton Court of Spell Book, The Colin Currie Quartet gives the world premiere of Stone Fruit at Wigmore Hall on 27 February 2024! What can you tell us about this venue and what the participation of The Colin Currie Quartet means to you?
Yes! I’m so excited for this concert – coming up very soon! It’s been so much fun to write for Colin and the quartet. They are total superstars of the percussion world, and I felt so lucky that Colin approached me to work together and that the Wigmore Hall and Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival co-commissioned this work.
I had been thinking about small daily rituals and how powerful they can be, and this lead me to mix in 17 vintage teacups, 32 vintage saucers and a set of 8 pyrex mixing bowls. These make up the centre piece of the percussion quartet, while each percussionist has their own set up of more conventional percussion instruments with things like glockenspiel, tom-toms and wood blocks. These they keep pretty much to themselves, but when they play the teacups and saucers it’s much more central and communal. A tea-party of sounds. The teacups and saucers look delicate and dainty, but can make quite a disorientating microtonal sound wall, and the whole experience made me think of biting into a stone fruit – a peach or a cherry for example. There’s this sweet lyrical flesh, but a hard stone centre in the middle of it, so that you have to watch out not to chip your teeth. That’s what the piece is like.
The Wigmore Hall – other than being the premiere chamber music venue in the Uk and probably Europe, with a storied history that is continued by astonishing musicians that perform there – is where my parents would sometimes take me when I was a little girl who played the violin. I’m lucky enough that my music has been played there fairly frequently over the last few years, and I was their associate composer as part of their celebrations of Beethoven’s anniversary. I feel so lucky and honoured to be part of the music making of the Wigmore Hall. This latest piece is no exception – it’s always a huge honour for my music to be heard there.
- All roads seem to be leading to the release of your debut album Spell Book set for release on NMC Recordings on 25 October, 2024! Who served as your producer on your debut LP and what did the collaboration between artist and producer look like in the studio?
The producer was Matthew Bennett. He’s a real magician – and I can’t wait to hear the first edits and get stuck into the next bit of the process! He and I sat in the sound booth together – and his ears were so sensitive and his musicality so intelligent that I really rarely had to say much of anything. He’s also an incredibly lovely person, so his combination of meticulousness, humour and kindness made everyone in the recording space and all the musicians feel positive, safe and creatively free.
- What makes NMC Recordings the perfect home for Spell Book?
NMC is a really special and unique label. There’s no better place for a composer to have their debut album – which is what this will be for me. They believe passionately in projects that have artistic depth and integrity as well as inventiveness – no matter the fact that these are often the most risky and least commercially sure sorts of projects! I’ve spent a lot of time wandering around listening through their catalogue over the years, its pretty amazing to think that I’ll get to be part of their Debut Disc series!
- Speaking of record labels, you are a founding member and artistic director of ‘Listenpony’ concert series and record label. How did this endeavor come about?
In 2012, William Marsey, Josephine Stephenson and I were three aspiring composers – fresh out of uni and trying to work out how to get our music heard in London. We had this whole community of musicians we were part of, all of whom were also at about our stage of life. We had the idea to pull together a concert that was curated to make sure that our friends who didn’t regularly go to concerts would have a fun evening. We had a variety of different ensembles, music both very old and very new, and a short set from an indie rock band to end the evening. I think it was To Kill a King that first time, although it might have been The Melodic – I can’t remember who was first and who was second! We divided all the classical music into short sets, each set mixed up the different ensembles and genres of music – a bit like how you might skip around on a playlist that isn’t too strictly dictated by genre – and our composer friends as well as our selves wrote some new music for each ensemble. It was all held in a foyer bar that had a cabaret space. It was at capacity pretty quickly, and we had to turn some people away. So it became a series, and we commissioned lots of works over the years, hopped around from bars to galleries and crypts, and we always recorded everything. Someone high up at Apple Music Classical came along a few times and loved it, and told us we should make it into a record label. We always used fully live recordings, and only ever released EPs rather than full albums. We went along pretty full tilt for 10 years, but decided to take a hiatus in 2022. Each of us is busy with our own projects and it was quite a lot of work to make sure every single concert and recording was really special! Maybe we’ll find space for it again one day…
- You’re celebrated for your instinctive use of colour in music. Is this something which comes naturally for you, or have you had to develop that sense over the years?
I think a bit of both! I don’t always realise I’ve written an unusual sound colouring in a piece until it’s pointed out – I think I just follow my nose… or ears. But having said that, my teacher Simon Bainbridge was always looking for new combinations of sounds, he was a real sound-explorer. And, Oliver Knussen, who was also my teacher and became a real mentor to me, was a master of orchestration. I am eternally grateful to have been taught by both of them, and can’t underestimate how much I learned from them both.
