Taking part in the Philharmonia Orchestra's composers academy has been a transformative and inspiring experience. From the first workshop, hearing my ideas brought to life by the incredible musicians revealed new layers in my music and encouraged me to take exciting musical risks. The mentoring sessions with Christian Mason helped me to refine my compositional voice and think deeply about texture, colour, and form.
My piece, Between Ritual and Myth, is an exploration of very old forms of music - Byzantine chant, Corsican folk singing, and others - and the ways in which they are entangled with rituals of becoming and change.
In homage to our most fundamental means of sound-making, the piece explores various kinds of vocal expression: singing through instruments, vocal multiphonics (where instrumentalists sing and play simultaneously), and melodic lines that evoke wailing ululations. Through the voice, we connect with something deeply human, linking our sounds to those that came thousands of years before. Structurally, the piece follows the arc of a rite of passage, moving from separation to liminality, ecstasy, and eventual reintegration - a symbolic transformation through sound.
Having my piece released on NMC Recordings is a great honour. The organisation has such a rich history of championing contemporary British music, and to be included among their recordings is really exciting.
Soosan Lovalar, August 2025
Inspired in part by E.E. Cummings’ poem I carry your heart, my work the body remembers a heart held is a reflection on how identity can shift through motherhood; the unravelling and reforming, the spaces between joy, loss, resilience, and renewal. At the heart of the work is something extraordinary: fetal microchimerism. This is the phenomenon where, during pregnancy, cells from the baby cross the placenta and remain inside the mother’s body for life; a mother literally carries traces of her children, even those never born.
Scored for a sinfonietta ensemble formed from the Philharmonia’s orchestra, the piece leans into fragile quiet textures and woozy harmonies… a musical reflection of the emotional haze that early motherhood can bring, and also representative of the blurring of cell identity between child and mother’s body.
Writing this piece was both vulnerable and cathartic. It was a way for me to create something beautiful from a personal experience of loss. I’m hugely grateful to Philharmonia Orchestra for their support; in both providing the practical space and time needed for the exploration and development of material, but also for supporting my journey as composer and new mother, navigating what work looks like to me in this new season. The series of workshops with a smaller set of instrumentation taken from the larger ensemble gave me the opportunity to try different ways of approaching the same material, looking carefully at harmony, orchestration, pacing and structure of each iteration, before committing to the final form.
I have long admired NMC Recordings as a record label that has consistently championed composers, nurtures new voices, and provides audiences with a rich and diverse catalogue of contemporary music. Therefore I’m delighted that ‘the body remembers a heart held’ will be my first larger work released by NMC Recordings as part of the Philharmonia Composers’ Academy Volume 8, alongside extraordinary and powerful works by fellow composers Soosan Lolavar and Elif Karlıdağ.
Sarah Lianne Lewis, September 2025
Such a Lovely Day / Not Such a Lovely Day centres on the voices of some of the last surviving former pupils of the Foundling Hospital in London: Charles Fortune, John Caldicott, Charles Gowlett, Lorna Brown, Pamela McMurtry, and Herbert Bunt. The piece uses excerpts from their oral history interviews, in which they reflect on memory, identity, and growing up in an institution. Their words are presented without manipulation, so that the integrity and emotional weight of their lived experiences remains intact. My music responds to and surrounds their voices, unfolding almost like a stage work for a concert ensemble. It is not a re-enactment of their lives, but a space in which their stories are held and heard, with music as witness. The audio recordings are from Foundling Voices, (c) The Foundling Museum, London.
Creating this work was a profoundly special experience. I wanted to write something that could only have been realised with the Philharmonia, and their partnership with the Foundling Museum provided the perfect starting point. It shaped the piece into something deeply meaningful to me, and since then, I have continued to explore music-journalism in my practice, creating socially engaged works that bring together music with the real voices of individuals. My most recent stage work I started to develop in Ghent performed by the Spectra Ensemble, for example, draws on video interviews with marginalised artists, expanding on the approach I began here.
To now have this piece recorded and released by NMC is an honour. NMC is such an important platform for contemporary music, and to know that this work will reach audiences far beyond the concert hall is both exciting and humbling. It means these stories, and the music created in response to them, will live on in new contexts and continue to be heard.
All audio recordings are from Foundling Voices, (c) The Foundling Museum, London.
Elif Kurday, August 2025
On 17 October 2025, NMC Recordings released the digital-only album of Philharmonia Composers’ Academy Volume 8, featuring specially commissioned works by the participants of the Philharmonia’s 2024/25 Composers’ Academy programme.
Click here to sign up for regular updates on new releases & special offers!
