Sally Beamish's House of Wonder

Sally Beamish is in celebratory mood. As she approaches her seventieth birthday, the multi-disciplined composer and viola player has a new album to mark the occasion, in the form of Delphian’s House of Wonder, released in June. Equal parts birthday present and musical autobiography, it reinforces the strong Scottish bond felt throughout Sally’s music.

“It all hit me when I moved to Stirlingshire in 1990”, she says. “I had no idea I would be so aware of the culture in Scotland, it wasn’t something I’d been aware of in London, particularly of any folk culture. It really opened up a whole new world of sounds, and it really helped me find my voice as a composer, with confidence. It was a very important time. It took a bit of courage, but at the same time, there was all this inspiration coming from the landscape and the music, and it all came together.”

The House of Wonder album is a communal celebration, for it features contributions not just from Sally but from her husband, writer and narrator Peter Thomson, and new pieces from each of her three children. Not only that, but she also plays the viola for the first time on record in decades. “It’s amazing how it’s come together”, she says, smiling. “To be doing an album featuring the viola, with me playing, was really not what I expected, and then to also have three children who are all writing music in their own ways, I suddenly thought it would be so interesting to learn from them and see what they come up with.”

The two brothers, now in their thirties, have branched out. “They couldn’t be more different! Tom Irvine’s band in Scotland is called Urvanovic, and he is now in a new band called Celebrant. My elder son, Laurie Irvine, set himself a project the year before last of writing a song every week, with different influences. His two bands are Uncle Bucket, which is metal, and Middle Toe is a very catchy kind of pop. I'm so proud of them, because they've really taken their world somewhere else, but with Tom’s music you can really hear the ‘stringy’ influence. Laurie now lives in Sweden and Tom in Copenhagen.”

Sally herself began her musical odyssey at an early age. “I started composing when I was four years old”, she recounts, “because my mum, who was a violinist, taught me to read and write music. The next thing was the piano, and I really took to that like a duck to water. It was absolutely my natural environment, and I used to sit for hours playing through my grandmother's stack of piano music. I started the violin when I was nine, with my mother, but that didn't go terribly well – we used to end up with a lot of foot stamping and tears! I stopped learning, but I carried on playing, which was fun."

"I played in the school orchestra, then the London Schools Symphony Orchestra, and then the head of music at my school suggested I change to viola because he said there would be a lot more demand. I learned the clef, and got a viola, and I managed to get into the National Youth Orchestra on viola! I didn’t think there was any chance of getting in, except as a general musician – like Simon Rattle and Judith Weir, who were there the same time as me. They played in the percussion section, so I prepared an audition on tambourine, but I got in on viola – though I was told it was more because I was composing!”.

The NYO proved a transformative experience. “It was a fantastic environment. Just playing in an orchestra, at that level and at that age, was incredible. I played in one of the first UK performances of Shostakovich’s Symphony no.15, at the Royal Albert Hall, and to be doing that at the age of sixteen was amazing. I knew I wanted to be a composer, but it, it just never occurred to me that I could do it professionally. I thought I needed to find a way of supporting my composing, and the viola seemed a much better bet than the piano – socially and being in the middle of orchestras and chamber groups. It was good for learning my skills as a composer. I went to the Royal Northern College of Music, doing viola, but I ended up writing pieces for teachers and friends. I grew in confidence and thought maybe I could do a postgraduate composition course. I applied for three or four places but didn’t get in, and I can’t help wondering if that was being a tonal composer in the 1970s, which wasn't really okay.”

She persisted, leaning in Germany with Bruno Giuranna. “That extra time gave me the impetus to do much more with the viola. I started the Raphael Ensemble with the cellist Andrea Hess, and I played in a lot of contemporary music groups, which was amazing. I was getting to meet all these composers, and they were all very generous, helping me with my work – especially Oliver Knussen, who was really helpful.”

Ironically, it was a tragic event that moved her on as a composer. “The terrible thing was that my viola got stolen from my house, a beautiful Italian instrument. I thought, “Maybe this is the moment I stop playing and become a composer. We moved to Scotland, with my then husband, the Scottish cellist Robert Irvine, and I pretty much stopped playing. I did buy another viola and carried on with the Raphael Ensemble for a bit, but it was just too much because I got so busy as a composer! At that time I was expecting my third baby, Stephanie. When she came to do her gap year, at the age of eighteen, she did an apprenticeship with an instrument maker in Amsterdam, and came back with a viola, which she’d made. I think she was as surprised as I was, it was the rebirth of my viola career!”

More windows were opened as a result. “I ended up doing a lot of music festivals where I was composing in residence, but also useful as a player. It’s been fantastic, because I've realised how much I did learn from playing, and how it opens up another side of my musical brain, being in the middle of it. Commissioning myself, that was really extraordinary, and playing my own music – I hadn’t done that since I was a child!” The House of Wonder album is built around her new compositions, either solo or collaborative – exploring new combinations, such as viola and accordion in Laurie’s piece, Lurk. “I start on my own, but I tried to make it so you can't tell whether it's the viola or the accordion that's playing, there is so much similarity in the sound as well. Aquamarine Depths, by Joseph Havlat, is similarly striking. It goes into a really singular world, which is very original and unusual.”

Sally’s birthday celebrations are well underway, with IZAKHI, the Zulu word for ‘elements’, completed as a basset clarinet concerto for Michael Collins and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, with whom Sally played viola in the 1980s. “Most of my orchestral music is concertos because it's the soloist who I know. This was a multi-commission, and of course it was a very personal connection, because not only did I play with them, but my mother played with them, and I went to rehearsals as a child. Sir Neville Mariner was incredibly supportive, and he listened to a cassette of something I had done. A year later he wrote me this lovely letter saying he wished he'd listen to it before, and would I like to write something for the orchestra? I couldn’t do that at the time, as I was still a player in London, and I'd never written for orchestra at that point. I just said, “Can I wait a few years?” And he said yes, and didn't forget, and a few years later I wrote Walking Back for their 35th anniversary, which was performed in the Royal Festival Hall in 1994. I wrote several more pieces for them after that and had a residency more recently. That's been a lovely connection, and I was very fond of Neville.”

Also performed at the celebratory concert was Seavaigers, a double concerto for Shetland fiddle (Chris Stout) and Scottish harp (Catriona McKay). The duo wrote Sally’s Tune for the album. “That was fun, because I had to learn how to make a very different sound, not a classical sound at all. The same with my daughter Stephanie’s song, House of Wonder, making the viola a fiddle. The choice of Seavaigers by the Academy was just perfect!”

As a composer, Beamish has an impressive discography. “It makes such a difference”, she says warmly. “I was so lucky that BIS took me up in the late 1990s and wanted to record my concertos. It was amazing. Now of course it’s much more difficult to get music recorded because you have to fundraise like mad. But I was so lucky, because it means things can be played on the radio as well – and now on a Scottish-based label as well. Delphian have definitely featured my music in a big way, and it feels a really special way of cementing that relationship.”

Putting herself in the mind of a prospective radio listener, Sally considers the impact of her music. “I wonder sometimes if people get a bit bewildered because they might hear something like Gerropaedie, from the disc, and then find my Violin Concerto, which is like Birtwistle meeting Dutilleux, and is completely different! I can’t really be pigeonholed, because I've got the music that's very clearly from Scotland, with those influences, and then the music influenced by all the music I played when I was in Lontano and the London Sinfonietta – Berio, Maxwell Davies and Knussen. The last few pieces I’ve written for viola have been for myself to play, and I've made them much simpler. I don't want to get caught out!”

Is it a temptation to write something fearsomely difficult? “I've been so lucky with the players that I've written for – Tabea Zimmermann, Håkan Hardenberger, Steven Isserlis and Branford Marsalis, that you can write anything – and particularly on stringed instruments, as I know exactly what the limits are. So I push them! If I'm writing for wind I tend to be more careful, and go more on what I’ve heard sounding good, through all those years sitting at the back of the Philharmonia, listening to the winds. I remember Lawrence Power saying you would never guess that I was a viola player, because the music was so hard!”

Her wish for the new album is that there will be ‘useful’ pieces, for exams, extras and encores. “I can imagine Tom's solo piece being a really useful, not too challenging piece, but very expressive.” Exam pieces can of course be formative in the career of a performer. “You want something that makes you sound good, not as if you're not managing to play it! It's really important to learn that as a composer, to learn about how the instrument wants to sound, and how it will ring true.”

This point prompts her to recall a particularly helpful episode with Dame Judith Weir, soon after her switch to composing. “Judith was very helpful when I was first in Scotland, and she very kindly looked at a score of mine and was really encouraging. I needed that at time, because believing that I was a composer was hard for me. Now it’s the other way round. I have to pinch myself that I’m playing the viola again, holding the album and saying, “How did that happen?!”