Kate Young

Listening to Kate Young’s new album, I find myself travelling through extraordinary sounds and stories from folk traditions across the world. Its title, Umbelliferæ, she tells me, means plants who scatter their seeds in the wind; a rich constellation of musical histories she’s assembled to stunning effect. It’s the culmination of nine years of perseverance that illustrates the deep wells of determination required to succeed in being a composer, and the wide-ranging impact an Award like Paul Hamlyn Foundation’s Awards for Artists can have both practically, and mentally.

Young is driven by the exploration of new sounds found in traditional music around the globe, and has attended ​‘Ethno’, a festival in Slovenia, since 2014 every year, building deep connections with music creators from across the world that have fed into her compositional approach. ​“By the end of the week you have this world music orchestra and it’s just so magical.” She invited a number of them to be part of the album, and got Leo Abrahams to co-produce some tracks too. ​“It was just the dream, to be able to record in the way I wanted to. They speak a shared language: all music is essentially communication and I was just really grateful to bring together musicians that carried their expression and character of playing with them. I feel incredibly lucky to know these people who are so enthusiastic about playing this music.”

As a result, the album doesn’t fit neatly into one genre:

She taught herself to write notation to be able to compose for the string quartet, so they could learn the score and then ​“forget the score, in order to create these happy, unexpected moments where the music breathes and it’s a conversation between us all. The sweet spot between the score and the freedom of playing.” 

Young is quick to recognise how rare it still is for awards to recognise composition beyond classically trained notation, and how important it was for her to have her value as an artist recognised without having to justify her work. That validation is societal, as well as individual, she explains: ​“If you only get rejected you start to feel that no one cares; and especially as a largely self-taught composer it was so important to have this moment of recognition, to feel you belong somewhere. If your whole life is about that then from a mental health aspect it really is huge.” Seeing that people recognise the value of the artistic community as part of the fabric of society was incredibly encouraging. 

The way music brings people together across their differences – ​“listening and connecting without anyone having to explain it” – is critical to Young’s motivations, and what makes the fragility of her chosen career ultimately worth the job juggling and dogged determination required. ​“Sometimes I teach violin, and people ask for my advice. I think people imagine playing an instrument is just a nice thing to do, but actually most musicians know it’s 90% hard, repetitive work. But then you get those moments of sublime connection and it’s so important for helping people get through hard times. I think that’s just so powerful.” 

Another risk the Award helped Young take was to move to the Netherlands for two years and undertake a Masters in Scenography: 

Inspired by her adventures in scenography, she has become fascinated by the concept of constellations which capture the spectrum between random and meaningful. To illustrate, she describes how the night sky looks like a random smattering of lights, but over thousands of years people have projected myths and shapes and stories onto them, giving their randomness meaning. ​“I started collecting things that looked random and looking for linkages and connections and I see that as essentially the same as composing; a kind of assemblage. So I’m keen to keep exploring and challenging what composing is.”