Classical Music Now

Jo Cheung is director and founder of Olympias Music Foundation, a Manchester charity championing diversity in music – from violin lessons for children on free-school meals, to community choirs for vulnerable BAME women and school children. Since 2015, they have delivered over 2000 free music lessons to 250 children in Manchester, and engaged with many more through workshops and performances. We chat how Olympias got here, where it’s going and stop off along the way at:

• The completely unregulated nature of teaching music
• Taking music education from school to the community and what that really means in practise
• Olympias’s huge Making Manchester project and their plans for the next year

Raymond Yiu is a Hong-Kong born, London-based composer, jazz pianist, conductor and writer on music. Originally trained as an engineer, Yiu was self-taught as a composer until he undertook his DMus under the auspice of Julian Anderson at Guildhall in 2009. His debut album The World Was Once All Miracle showcases his talent with three identity-exploring works informed by his time at Guildhall.

• How to get your foot on the ladder as a self-trained composer
• Why he won’t be getting a publisher any time soon
• Why Raymond never wrote the Cantonese pop songs that inspired him so much

Lara Agar is a composer, violinist, and collaborator who recently caught my eye with a credit on Shades of Blue, a dance piece performed at Sadler’s Wells and broadcast on the BBC. We talk about how the piece came about, curating nights, and the different relationship musicians, dancers, and actors have with their art. Also in the episode:

• The benefits of long-term creative partnerships
• Lara’s accidental rock opera
• Lara’s love of chaos
• Music’s uniquely non-visual role in today’s world

Aubrey and I geek out about marketing in the classical realm.

• Why classical’s core product will always be live music
• Why we shouldn’t be streaming whole concerts for free
• Plus Aubrey gives her advice on how new groups should approach finding and keeping new listeners, and how to get around the fear of the unknown with newly written music.

If you’re a musician or arts administrator of any kind, this is an essential listen. If you fall outside of that, enjoy looking behind the curtain at what an orchestra exec spends her time thinking about.

Some Aubrey bio fun facts: she grew Seattle Opera’s BRAVO! Club to the largest group for young patrons in the US, led the Bumbershoot Festival to achieve an unprecedented 43% increase in revenue, and propelled the California Symphony to double the size of its audience and nearly quadruple the donor base. 

Ellie and I have a really open chat about our experiences with choral conducting and running a music group. Plenty of golden advice from Ellie, plus she explains why conductors shouldn’t silo into orchestral or choral, the weirdness of masterclasses, and creative administration.

Ellie is a conductor, and founder of Kantos Chamber Choir (who I sing with). She recently debuted with the Hallé and toured with Matthew Bourne’s Romeo and Juliet production as the Young Associate Conductor. She is musical director with the Hallé Youth Orchestra, Radius Opera, Stafford Choral Society; and associate conductor with Manchester Chamber Choir and Huddersfield Choral Society.

Shruthi Rajasekar is a composer from Minnesota USA who straddles the worlds of Western contemporary music and south Indian Carnatic music from a truly unique position. Having grown up in the US with prominent Carnatic musician Nirmala Rajasekar as a mother, Shruthi is a joy to talk with as we cover:

• Choral culture and education in the US vs UK
• How the pandemic is actually improving conversations around pieces in the rehearsal process
• Shruthi’s experience at SOAS and RNCM
• We also get super into the weeds discussing how despite its insane cross-rhythms, Carnatic music never changes time signature – plus how Shruthi breaks those rules in her piece, Numbers.

or Picking Weird Enough Instruments That People Can’t Look Away

Cello/singer–accordion duo Good Habits perform live for us all the way from New Zealand. We chat musical storytelling, capturing attention, and moulding a bar gig into a full blown concert by playing the room right. We also hear about their experience writing pop songs for a Chinese media company!

⭐ Revolutionary alternatives to tokenistic diversity programmes
⭐ Deconstructing boundaries between jazz and classical and freeing yourself to make the music you want to make
⭐ Methods for sneaking improvisation in front of classical musicians without them freaking out

Vijay Iyer is an ECM-signed artist. He has worked with Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble, written violin concertos for Jennifer Koh, and music for the LA Phil New Music Group. He has been ‘Jazz Artist of the Year’ more times in more magazines than it is polite to count and it is my immense honour to welcome him to Classical Music Now.

Ah what a lovely chat. We begin with a love letter to new music and Manchester, work through why everyone should be improvising and the parallels between graphic scores and electroacoustic soundscapes, before ending with the role of music in activism, and electro finding a mainstream home in horror music and Amazon’s Alex Rider adaptation.

Illy Quane: trumpet player extraordinaire, composer, and very funny guy. If you’re looking for some light lockdown distraction, this is it.

We chat about our disappointment with existing brass repertoire (apart from one piece for brass ensemble), Illy explains his developing thoughts on creating gran-friendly contemporary music programmes, and Joe recounts the moment he realised The Sixteen had more than sixteen members.

All in-betweeny music composed or arranged by Illy, and can be heard in full at the links below.

Links and Show Notes

Today we’re chatting improv and Adès with the Vonnegut Collective. An enjoyably Coronavirus-free interview recorded back in March with a healthy dose of silliness and fun to complement the deep thoughts on what makes a good piece, and the place of improvisation in music education.

Today we are blessed with a great window into the world of arts reviewing and writing thanks to Hugh Morris, and the similarities and differences to creative writing thanks to Georgia Affonso.

The pair collaborated on a piece for No Dice Collective in 2019 based on a photo of Anthony Burgess (the Clockwork Orange guy) walking his dog, and we share the stories behind the piece in this episode and play the piece in full.

Today I’m thrilled to share an interview with Adam and Rakhi of Manchester Collective. Emerging in 2017, they're already an established part of the Manchester scene thanks to their impressive work ethic and immersive concert experiences.

We discover their origin story: how the group was founded, its roots in changing the makeup of classical audiences, and how they came into the world seemingly full-formed with three seasons planned ahead (hint: a whole year of planning).

We also find out what their secret sauce is, their ‘warts and all’ approach to live performance, and Adam’s #logisticslife revealing the glamorous world of lighting rig updates and taping down crystal glasses that makes a concert really shine.

I chat with composer David McFarlane and writer Gregory Kearns on their 2018 collaboration about the Christmas apocalypse, which all stemmed from a set of small bells David received in a Christmas cracker set.

As well as hearing excerpts of their piece, Carol For Our Children, performed by No Dice Collective, we branch out into chats about leading community workshops, space to make mistakes, struggling to take our own creative advice, hang-ups about writing overtly emotional work, and the role of intuition and emotion vs formalised thinking in the creative process.

A really interesting, cross-disciplinary chat that touches on broad themes of individual creative processes. Should be interesting to anyone with a creative urge!

Hello there! Come on in…

Today I’m speaking to Czech composer Jiří Kadeřábek and No Dice pianist Jasmin Allpress about their shared journey bringing the piece Hindyish together.

We’ll hear how they worked across Europe via Skype and phone calls to bring the piece together, how Jiří makes this very stylistically post-modern piece sound cohesive, as well as walk through the piece itself before ending with a recording of Jasmin playing it at our Soloist concert of June 2018.