Tansy Davies: A Reboot to the System

When Tansy Davies was four, her parents came upon her standing transfixed in their sitting room, her face just a few inches away from the television. She was watching an opera. “They closed the door and left me to it,” she remembers. “They could see I was having a good time! The feeling of opera just reached me, even at that age. But sadly, I can’t remember which one it was. Nothing modern, I’m fairly sure.”

But it wasn’t just opera that obsessed the young Davies, now one of the UK’s most exciting contemporary composers: it was music – any music. She lists a glorious grab-bag of musical memories and obsessions: Bonnie Tyler’s pop-rock Lost in France, the Desmond Dekker and the Aces rocksteady classic, 007 (Shanty Town), the theme tune from the TV series, The Life and Times of David Lloyd George, and the seven-inch singles she bought religiously, every week. “I was influenced by whatever landed in my vicinity,” she says. “My ears were very open.”

And they still are. Her career – like her music – has been characterised by unexpected shifts, a sense of fearlessness and an urgent need to explore. Her early commissions – the jumpy, funk-driven and wildly original neon back in 2004 and the alternately dreamy and nervy salt box (2005) announced the emergence of a major new talent. Between Worlds, her first opera (with libretto by poet Nick Drake and directed by Deborah Warner), debuted at the English National Opera in 2015 and was inspired by the events of 9/11. “At times, it tears at the heart,” said Ivan Hewett in the Daily Telegraph, while Charlotte Valori’s Bachtrack review praised Davies’s “vivid, shattering sound world”.

Transformation, both personal and in the wider world, is a thread that runs through much of her work, she says. She segued from the horrors of 9/11 to the joy of renewal with her conductorless collaboration with the National Youth Orchestra, Re-greening.

In 2017, she imagined a forest in music: her Forest, a concerto for four horns and orchestra, was premiered by the Philharmonia at the Royal Festival Hall and conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. Her most recent opera, Cave, also a collaboration with Drake, is a call from the future for urgent action to save the planet.

“It’s always the difficult things that create transformation. If writing an opera doesn’t transform you, you’re probably not doing enough. You need to get down to all the dark, frightening stuff within and find clarity. Joni Mitchell said that when she was writing Blue, she was scraping the bottom of her soul. You have to go there if you’re going to find the good stuff and make something that reaches people.”

Davies has never been afraid of pushing the boundaries – or crossing them. At primary school, she played in a recorder group led by a headmaster obsessed with musical excellence. They won every competition they entered. His insistence on being the very best didn’t scare her, she remembers: it excited her. She was in awe of music: its weight, its power, the need to take it seriously, and she took whatever she could get from it. Given a French horn to play in her secondary school orchestra rather than her first choice, a flute, she made it her own. She played Schubert, joined rock bands, took up the guitar, discovered musique concrète, Pink Floyd and the Kronos Quartet, and composed prog-rock songs. “The horn and the guitar were two sides of me. They felt like very different sides and I always thought I wanted to bring them together, but I didn’t really know how.”

During her undergraduate degree, she met composer Alan Bullard, who gave her the confidence to enter competitions. In 1996, she was one of 12 composers selected at the BBC Young Composers’ Competition. It was there that she met Robert Saxton, then Head of Composition at Guildhall, who suggested she apply. “And I had no idea what I was doing, but they let me in.” And it was at Guildhall, she says, that “the world really opened up”.

She studied with Saxton and with Simon Bainbridge, and found in her class a group of musicians who were “spectacularly brilliant. It was just amazing to be in that environment with so much positivity, and desire to explore and experiment”.

There were strong personalities, as well: all the better for striking creative sparks. “Robert is a very serious teacher and wanted us to take music incredibly seriously, which was great for me. And I got on fantastically well with Simon Bainbridge. He conducted a piece of mine called Ocean that I had written in the summer before we started – a really complex piece which he helped me pare down a little and make slightly more transparent.” Bainbridge also arranged for Gillian Moore, then artistic director of the London Sinfonietta, to hear a concert in which Davies had a piece, which resulted in her first commission.

“From that point on, there’s always been a commission,” she says. “That first commission, though, was a very good experience for me. It was the beginning of something. Then, I had a lot of instrumental commissions, which helped me define a rhythmical language that was quite unusual: it was complex as well as groovy. There aren’t that many people doing that. The groovy stuff tends to be quite simple. For a time that line of rhythmical exploration and archaeological digging into what’s possible for me was very fruitful. And later on, I came to write for the voice, which was my breakthrough. They’re two very primal things: rhythm and voice.”

But her Master’s in composition also had an education element, which Davies credits with helping her learn how to communicate with anyone, using musical materials such as rhythm. “It was wonderful to talk with not only incredible players but also amateurs and people who, from a sociological point of view, needed something in their lives and, amazingly, were open to it. And at the same time, I was learning as a composer, learning how to communicate with professional musicians at the highest level.”

Davies is currently Composer in Residence at the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, for the 2018/19 season, and has “some thrilling potential things” in the works. More and more, she says, her work is about finding the right collaborators for each piece. “Finding the right tribe, if you like. And then it’s just: enjoy the ride. I get so much from collaborative work. Once I find the right musicians, I know we’re going to get very excited and sparks are going to fly. There will be problems, but it will be a roller-coaster ride. A good one!”

And the trick to enjoying that ride, she says, is not to be afraid: not always easy if you’re the person who wants to do things differently. “I think the strength of what I do is the fact that it’s something slightly different. Now, I’m older and I’m confident and I’m happy with that. But it can be confusing if people are telling you this or that, and you don’t know what to do. Trust your instincts. The universe has got your back. Don’t worry if they’re slightly different. Work hard, and always go to what feels like the highest vibration.”

This article first featured in the Spring/Summer 2019 edition of the Guildhall magazine, PLAY, and was written by YBM for the Guildhall School of Music & Drama.