Bachtrack Composers Project: Lucinda Rimmer

Bachtrack is asking the same six questions to many composers this month as part of its focus on contemporary music. Here’s what Lucinda Rimmer, one of the winners of the BBC Proms Inspire Young Composer Competition 2013, had to say.

1. What influences are important to you and your music? Do you choose them, or do they choose you?

At the moment and because of the music course we follow at school, I am influenced by composers who use ideas from non-western musical cultures. This might mean combining instruments from varying cultures in an ensemble with more traditional instruments commonly used in western classical music, or it could mean a different approach to thinking about form, timbre and spiritual meaning. I enjoy music by composers such as John Mayer and Jonathan Harvey.

I am lucky to have studied music from a variety of cultures at school (The Purcell School for Young Musicians), where our teacher Mrs Cox encourages us to write music for our own ensemble of instrumentalists.

2. What (if anything) do you want listeners to take away from your music?

I would like to think that my music might take the listener on a “journey” in the same way that reading a story would. Perhaps it might unlock memories, imaginings, sights, sounds or smells.

3. Is there a composition of yours which you are most satisfied with? What makes it successful?

I have only just begun composing and am surprised at how quickly a composition takes on a direction of its own. I seem to start with an idea of how things might eventually sound and soon discover the music wants to go in a different direction; I always used to give up at this point and have only recently begun to complete pieces, so for me, at the moment a composition is fairly successful if it has an ending.

4. How important is new technology to you as a composer?

Technology is important to me because it provides access to all kinds of music that I would not have been able to discover otherwise – on SoundCloud, for example.

Software for writing music means that you can quickly create separate parts or correct mistakes. I am sure I wouldn’t have enough patience to write everything out by hand or have the skill to write without making frequent corrections and alterations.

5. What music do you enjoy listening to?

Like most teenagers, my taste is diverse and includes, pop, electronic, classical and plenty of things I certainly wouldn’t admit to, but not really any folk music.

6. How is composing changing, and where do you want new music to go in the future?

I think that composing is changing for people of my age because we are encouraged to write music for GCSE that draws inspiration from the set works and our personal musical experiences. Growing up in South Manchester I was fortunate to hear musicians from a variety of cultures from a very early age, mainly because of outreach projects that visited my primary school.

Many schools are involved with projects that offer the chance for pupils to hear their own musical compositions played live, sometimes by professional musicians. This can inspire more young people to continue to explore writing music, and become involved in making new music. I think that the values of a society can be judged by its arts, and we are lucky to have amazingly creative composers in this country. I hope that more people will have the chance to hear new music perhaps through projects in schools and through music festivals like the BBC Proms, where I think the most exciting concerts are the world premières of new commissions.

Lucinda Rimmer is fifteen years old and she entered the Purcell school in September 2012 to study oboe with Melanie Ragge and harpsichord with Clare Sutherland. She is supported by a scholarship from the government’s Music and Dance scheme.

Lucinda is a winner of the BBC Proms Inspire Young Composer Competition 2013, her music was broadcast on Radio Three as part of the Proms 2013 season, and she will receive a much-prized commission from the BBC later this year.

Lucinda is a member of the National Children’s Chamber Orchestra and the Purcell School Symphony Orchestra. She has participated in masterclasses with oboist–composer Gilles Silvestrini, and with Melinda Maxwell at the Royal Northern College of Music.

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