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.

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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.

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Anoushka Shankar is our guest on this latest episode of Composing Myself, beaming in from her home in London for a captivating chat with Wise Music Group Creative Director and CEO Gill Graham and Dave Holley. During the course of this enchanting conversation we learn how a childhood discovery of Peter and the Wolf led to a realisation of the power and imagery of music and her subsequent interest in playing the sitar, how studying with her father Ravi Shankar shaped Anoushka's musical discipline, how she fostered a conscious change of relationship with her instruments - “I had to find a way to see my instrument more as a friend than something scary”, how she “never rebelled around the music”… and indeed, the answer to the great question of where music comes from.

https://www.anoushkashankar.com/

To read a list of Anoushka Shankar’s accomplishments is to read many life stories in one: masterful sitarist; film composer; impassioned activist; the youngest and first female recipient of a British House of Commons Shield; the first Indian musician to perform live or to serve as presenter at the Grammy Awards with nine nominations under her belt, and the first Indian woman to be nominated; one of the first five female composers to have been added onto the UK A-level music syllabus. Immersed from a young age on the world stage, with over a quarter-century’s performing behind her, she is a singular, genre-defying artist across realms - classical and contemporary, acoustic and electronic.

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