Composing Myself – Details, episodes & analysis

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Composing Myself

Wise Music Group

Music

Arts

Frequency: 1 episode/34d. Total Eps: 25

Composing Myself is an official Wise Music Group Podcast celebrating Wise Music’s 50th anniversary, presented by CEO Dave Holley and Creative Director Gill Graham. Over the course of this series, we will be talking to various Wise composers around the world about their lives in and out of music.

https://www.wisemusic.com/

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🇬🇧 Great Britain - musicCommentary
08/08/2026
#59
🇬🇧 Great Britain - musicCommentary
02/08/2026
#78
🇬🇧 Great Britain - musicCommentary
01/08/2026
#55
🇬🇧 Great Britain - musicCommentary
15/07/2026
#98
🇬🇧 Great Britain - musicCommentary
24/05/2026
#98
🇬🇧 Great Britain - musicCommentary
23/05/2026
#70
🇬🇧 Great Britain - musicCommentary
16/03/2026
#91
🇬🇧 Great Britain - musicCommentary
15/03/2026
#59
🇬🇧 Great Britain - musicCommentary
23/04/2025
#93
🇬🇧 Great Britain - musicCommentary
22/04/2025
#56

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Jonathan Dove

Episode 25

Thursday, November 28, 2024 • Duration 01:00:58

Wise Music Group CEO Dave Holley and Creative Director Gill Graham talk to English composer Jonathan Dove in the latest episode of Composing Myself, in a wide-ranging conversation spanning his accidental entry into the operatic arena, formative experiences on both sides of the Atlantic, and his first creative project - “a large vacuum cleaner”: listen on to find out more!

https://www.jonathandove.com/

Jonathan Dove’s music has filled opera houses with delighted audiences of all ages on five continents. He is one of the most performed living opera composers and few, if any, contemporary composers have so successfully or consistently explored the potential of opera to communicate, to create wonder and to enrich people’s lives.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Ellen Reid

Episode 24

Monday, September 16, 2024 • Duration 50:07

Composing Myself returns for 2024 with Wise Music Group CEO Dave Holley and Creative Director Gill Graham speaking to American composer Ellen Reid. In this episode, we learn how both Tennessee and Thailand shaped Ellen’s musical language, what it’s like to win Pulitzer Prize, and delve into the thinking behind her pioneering “GPS-enabled work of public art” Soundwalk.

https://www.ellenreidmusic.com/

Composer Ellen Reid has lived in a lot of places: she grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, went to college in New York City, and spent a couple years in Thailand before settling in California, where she ultimately found her creative voice.

Ellen’s love of sounds and music blossomed early; she was fascinated by the natural world, sang in her church choir, and studied piano and percussion in school. She didn't meet another female composer until she was 25, and never dreamed writing music could be a viable career path.

Ellen is inspired by landscape, emotions and storytelling. She started composing her sophomore year of college, writing a musical and creating sound design for theater and film productions, before “stumbling into opera” working with Thai musicians in Thailand. Her beautifully-wrought music easily creates a sense of place, whether physical or emotional, conjuring sunlit valleys, heartbreak, craggy cliffsides, joy, or bustling cityscapes.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Paul Mealor

Episode 15

Wednesday, April 5, 2023 • Duration 49:47

Welsh composer Paul Mealor is our guest on this week’s episode of Composing Myself, presented by Wise Music Group CEO and Creative Director Dave Holley and Gill Graham. Topics covered across this warm and inspiring conversation include:

- a childhood discovery of Iron Maiden -“people were just singing from the heart; they didn’t care about anything other than the music”

- why boys get into heavy metal

- the “visualness” of Debussy and Ravel

- being “step friends” with Aled Jones

- the benefits of daily composing in fending off writer’s block - “you’re not afraid of the blank manuscript”

- Dylan Thomas’ influence on Roald Dahl

- how his Military Wives Choir number one single changed the rules of the UK charts

- composing for the Royal Family

As ever - not to be missed!

https://www.paulmealor.com/

Paul Mealor’s music has rapidly entered the repertoire of choirs and singers around the world; his music has been described as having, ‘serene beauty, fastidious craftsmanship and architectural assuredness… Music of deep spiritual searching that always asks questions, offers answers and fills the listener with hope…’. Mealor was catapulted to international attention when 2.5 billion people heard his motet, Ubi caritas, performed at the Royal Wedding Ceremony of His Royal Highness Prince William and Catherine Middleton at Westminster Abbey, 29th April 2011.

Mealor studied composition privately from an early age with John Pickard, at the University of York with Nicola LeFanu (1994-2002) and in Copenhagen with Hans Abrahamsen (1998-99). Since 2003 he has taught at the University of Aberdeen, where he is currently Professor in Composition, and has held visiting professorships in composition at institutions in Scandinavia and the United States.

Cheryl Frances-Hoad

Episode 14

Wednesday, March 22, 2023 • Duration 55:07

This week’s guest is British composer Cheryl Frances-Hoad, who talks to Composing Myself hosts Wise Music CEO and Creative Director Dave Holley and Gill Graham about her fascinating life in and out of music. Starting with her formative years leading to her getting a place as a cellist at the Yehudi Menuhin School, Cheryl talks about being a shy child and how finding composition at an early age gave her a voice she might otherwise not have discovered. We also learn about her work with young performers and in particular the I Am You, Brave and Strong project, built to ensure young creatives of all persuasions and skill levels “feel part of that bigger thing, making that great sound”. In addition: the strange connection between the cello and the swift, and the life advice Dave is going to pass to his son!

https://www.cherylfranceshoad.co.uk/

Admired for her originality, fluency and professionalism, Cheryl Frances-Hoad has been composing to commission since she was fifteen. Classical tradition (she trained as a cellist and pianist at the Menuhin School before going on to Cambridge and King's College, London) along with diverse contemporary inspirations including literature, painting and dance, have contributed to a creative presence provocatively her own.

Intricate in argument, sometimes impassioned, sometimes mercurial, always compelling in its authority (Robin Holloway, The Spectator), her output - widely premiered, broadcast and commercially recorded, reaching audiences from the Proms to outreach workshops - addresses all genres from opera, ballet and concerto to song, chamber and solo music.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Bryce Dessner

Episode 13

Wednesday, March 8, 2023 • Duration 57:12

Wise Music Group CEO Dave Holley and Creative Director Gill Graham beam out to the south of France in this latest episode of Composing Myself, to chat to American composer, performer and founding member of The National Bryce Dessner. Stops on this week’s conversational journey include:

- learning how to play at a school with no music department, utilising the musical skills of a rebellious English teacher

- why taking time off is as critical for creativity as the creative process itself

- the fascinating genesis of Mari, conceptualised and created during the COVID-19 pandemic

- what it’s like living with another singer-songwriter, his wife Mina Tindle, and how they leverage their co-existence to influence and hone their works

- the inspiration behind The National’s latest album The First Two Pages of Frankenstein

As ever, a thoroughly riveting and illuminating listen.

https://brycedessner.com/

Bryce Dessner is a vital and rare force in new music. He has won Grammy Awards as a classical composer and with the band The National, of which he is founding member, guitarist, arranger, and co-principal songwriter. He is regularly commissioned to write for the world’s leading ensembles, from Orchestre de Paris to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and is a high-proﬁle presence in ﬁlm score composition, with credits including The Revenant, for which he was Grammy and Golden Globe nominated, Fernando Mereilles’s The Two Popes and Mike Mill’s C’mon C’mon.

Dessner collaborates with some of today’s most creative and respected artists, including Philip Glass, Katia and Marielle Labèque, Paul Simon, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Sufjan Stevens, Fernando Mereilles, Thom Yorke, Bon Iver, Nico Muhly, and Steve Reich, who named Dessner “” Dessner’s orchestrations can be heard on the latest albums of Paul Simon, Bon Iver and Taylor Swift.

Outi Tarkiainen

Episode 12

Wednesday, February 22, 2023 • Duration 39:50

This episode of Composing Myself sees Wise Music Group CEO Dave Holley and Creative Director Gill Graham venture - digitally, naturally - to the wild hinterlands of northern Finland for a highly illuminating conversation with Outi Tarkiainen. Winding through subjects as diverse as motherhood, how synesthesia affects and influences the compositional process, foraying into the world of jazz, and breaking down long-standing taboos in classical music, this is forty-five minutes you’ll be glad to have spent listening closely to.

https://www.outitarkiainen.fi/en/

Outi Tarkianen was born in Rovaniemi in Finnish Lapland, a place that has proved a constant source of inspiration for her. She has long been drawn to the expressive power of the human voice, but has written vocal, chamber and solo instrumental works as well as works for orchestra and soloist. ‘I see music as a force of nature that can flood over a person and even change entire destinies’, she once said.

Outi has been commissioned by orchestras including the San Francisco Symphony, BBC Symphony, BBC Philharmonic, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic and Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestras and her music has been taken up by the symphony orchestras of St Louis, Detroit and Houston, among others. Her early work with jazz orchestras culminated in Into the Woodland Silence (2013), a score that combined the composer’s sense of natural mysticism with the distinctive textures of the jazz orchestra tradition. Major works since include an orchestral song cycle to texts by Sami poets The Earth, Spring’s Daughter (2015), the saxophone concerto Saivo (2016, nominated for the Nordic Council Music Prize) and Midnight Sun Variations premiered at the BBC Proms in 2019 (nominated for the Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco’s Musical Composition Prize). Her first full-length opera, A Room of One’s Own (2021), was commissioned and premiered by Theater Hagen in Germany.

Outi studied composition at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, the Guildhall School in London and at the University of Miami. She as been composer in residence at the Festival de Musique Classique d’Uzerche in France and was for four years co-artistic director of the Silence Festival in Lapland.

Hania Rani

Episode 11

Wednesday, February 8, 2023 • Duration 47:24

We travel to Gdansk in this latest episode of Composing Myself for a chat with Polish composer Hania Rani. During the course of this wonderful forty-five minute conversation with Wise Music CEO Dave Holley and Creative Director Gill Graham we learn about Hania’s early love for Beethoven’s sonatas and the struggle of having to choose between Britney and J-Lo, her accidental, into-the-frying-pan introduction to singing, her work on the posthumous music of Polish rock musician and composer Grzegorz Ciechowski, and why it’s not music but “all the other things” that inspire her. Enchanting, enlightening stuff.

https://haniarani.com/

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Hania Rani is a pianist, composer and musician who was born in Gdansk and splits her life between Warsaw, where she has her home, and Berlin where she studied and often works.

Her debut album ‘Esja’, a beguiling collection of solo piano pieces, on Gondwana Records was released to international acclaim on April 5th 2019 including nominations in 5 categories in the Polish music industries very own Grammys, the Fryderyki, and winning the Discovery of the Year 2019 in the Empikchain's Bestseller Awards and the prestigious Sankiaward for the most interesting new face of Polish music chosen by Polish journalists.

Rani also composed the music for her first full length movie "I Never Cry" directed by Piotr Domalewski and for the play "Nora" directed by Michał Zdunik. Her song "Eden" was used as a soundtrack of a short movie by Małgorzata Szumowska for Miu Miu's movie cycle "Women's Tales".

Her follow-up album, the expansive, cinematic, ‘Home’, was released on May 15th and finds Rani expanding her range: adding vocals and subtle electronics to her music as well as being joined on some tracks by bassist Ziemowit Klimek and drummer Wojtek Warmijak. The album reunites her with recording engineers Piotr Wieczorek and Ignacy Gruszecki (Monochrom Studio) and the tracks were again mixed by Gijs van Klooster in his studio in Amsterdam and by Piotr Wieczorekin Warsaw ( Ombelico and Come Back Home). Home was mastered by Zino Mikoreyin Berlin (known for his work on albums by artists such as Nils Frahm and Ólafur Arnalds). For Rani, Home, is very much a continuation of the work she started on Esja, “the completion of the sentence” as she puts it. The album offers a metaphorical journey: the story of places that become our home sometimes by chance, sometimes by choice. It is the story of leaving a place that is familiar and the journey that follows it. Home opens with the fragment of the short story "Loneliness" by Bruno Schulz, which can be seen as a parable of a journey that does not necessarily mean going beyond the physical door but can signify going beyond the symbolic limits of our knowledge and imagination.

John Corigliano

Episode 10

Wednesday, January 25, 2023 • Duration 47:11

The tenth episode of Composing Myself sees Wise Music Group CEO Dave Holley and Creative Director Gill Graham once again stretch their hands across the ocean to New York to embark on a wonderful journey of memories, anecdotes and musings with veteran composer John Corigliano. The conversation covers John’s formative years growing up in a musical family and how the lingering nerves he reserved for his father affected his professional journey (“for the first ten or fifteen years of buy compositional life I never sat in the hall for a performance”); the impact of the early Disney oeuvre (Bambi, Dumbo etc) on his creative spark; winning Grammys, Oscars and a Pulitzer Prize - and the award he’s most proud of; the harrowing story behind Symphony No. 1; how a personal black spot with the catalogue of Bob Dylan led to a Grammy-winning setting of Dylan's poetry; and the painstaking creation of The Ghosts of Versailles. Not to be missed!

http://www.johncorigliano.com/

John Corigliano's music has been commissioned, performed, and recorded by many of the most prominent orchestras, soloists, and chamber musicians in the world. His honors include the Pulitzer Prize for Symphony No. 2, the Grawemeyer Award for his Symphony No. 1 (given over 300 performances worldwide), the Academy Award (Oscar) for Best Original Score (The Red Violin), and, of his five Grammy Awards, three for Best Contemporary Composition (Symphony No. 1, String Quartet, and Mr. Tambourine Man.)

Recent scores include a second opera, The Lord of Cries, with a libretto by Mark Adamo based on The Bacchae of Euripides and Bram Stoker's Dracula. Corigliano's first opera since The Ghosts of Versailles for The Metropolitan Opera in 1991, The Lord of Cries is commissioned by the Santa Fe Opera for premiere in 2021. A new Saxophone Concerto for the San Francisco Symphony's 2020-2021 season will be Corigliano's tenth piece for soloist and orchestra, after his concerti for piano, oboe, clarinet, flute (Pied Piper Fantasy), guitar (Troubadours), violin (), and percussion (), as well as the orchestral song-cycles for amplified soprano, and for mezzo-soprano. Other scores include Symphony No. 3: for multiple wind ensembles, as well a rich folio of chamber works.

Ólafur Arnalds

Episode 9

Wednesday, January 11, 2023 • Duration 52:31

Composing Myself starts 2023 as we mean to go on, with Wise Music Group CEO Dave Holley and Creative Director Gill Graham embarking on a bracing, invigorating meander through the conversational hills with Icelandic composer and multi-instrumentalist Ólafur Arnalds. Subjects broached include the minutiae on how phonographs work and Ólafur’s formative teenage hardcore punk band Cone Heads, the long and winding road from hardcore bands to composing theBroadchurch score, and the development and creation of his ingenious, ground-breaking musical software Stratus.

https://olafurarnalds.com/

Ólafur Arnalds is a multi-instrumentalist and composer - internationally known for his haunting musical style. He captivatingly combines elements of ambient, classical, electronic, pop and rock music. His recent album “re:member” (2018) follows the success of his innovative musical project Island Songs (2016). “re:member” features Ólafur’s new software, Stratus, which transforms the humble piano into a unique new instrument.

Ólafur has been praised for his extensive soundtrack work, including composing the score for ITV’s Broadchurch, for which he won the 2014 BAFTA for Best Original Music. He has been involved in various other media projects and his music appears in many films, television shows and advertisements.

Together with Barði Jóhannson (Bang Gang), Ólafur composed music for “Dyad 1909”, a Random Dance/Wayne McGregor project. This music was released as an album in 2009.

Furthermore, Arnalds formed the experimental techno project “Kiasmos” together with Janus Rasmussen. They have released two albums so far: “Blurred” (2017) and “Kiasmos” (2014).

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Missy Mazzoli

Episode 8

Wednesday, December 14, 2022 • Duration 44:56

American composer Missy Mazzoli joins us from her home in New York for this latest episode of Composing Myself. It’s a customarily broad-ranging chat with Wise Music CEO Dave Holley and Creative Director Gill Graham. Topics on today’s conversational menu include Missy’s childhood obsession with Beethoven and learning to play on a piano bought in a flea market, how writing made her feel like she was “putting the world in order”, getting stuck in to the Pennsylvania Riot Grrrl scene as a teenager, her long-standing collaboration with librettist Royce Vavrek, and how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the creation of her most recent opera The Listeners.

https://missymazzoli.com/

Recently deemed “one of the more consistently inventive, surprising composers now working in New York” (NY Times) and “Brooklyn’s post-millennial Mozart” (Time Out NY), Missy Mazzoli has had her music performed by the New York Philharmonic, Atlanta Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the BBC Symphony, the Cincinnati Orchestra, the National Symphony, LA Opera, Scottish Opera, eighth blackbird, Kronos Quartet and many others. In 2018 she became one of the first two women, along with Jeanine Tesori, to receive a main stage commission from the Metropolitan Opera, and was nominated for a Grammy award in the category of Best Classical Composition. From 2018-2021 She was Composer-in-Residence at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and from 2012-2015 was Composer-in-Residence with Opera Philadelphia. Upcoming commissions include works for Opera Philadelphia, Chicago Lyric Opera, Norwegian National Opera and Third Coast Percussion. In 2016, along with composer Ellen Reid, she founded Luna Composition Lab, a mentorship program for young female, nonbinary and gender nonconforming composers. Her works are published by G. Schirmer.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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