Luke Bedford

For the 30th anniversary of Awards for Artists, we interviewed 12 previous recipients in conversation with Lilli Geissendorfer. 
Luke Bedford. Photo credit: Ben Ealovega

For me, it was life changing, they caught me at a critical moment. I was so financially vulnerable, and it meant that the day-to-day worries weren’t there and I was able to write the music I wanted too. That felt amazing.” 

Luke Bedford was one of the youngest recipients of Paul Hamlyn Foundation’s Awards for Artists, in his late 20s back in 2007, the first year composers were included again since 1994. 

Preparing for our conversation, people say he was everywhere’ in 2007, I tell him, the new wunderkind composer, George Benjamin’s protégé. Was that how he was feeling too? 

In response, he leans back in his chair and zooms out: Let me share a bit of context. I’d been outside the Royal Academy for about 5 years. And at that point in your career, you’re really vulnerable, you’re pushed out into the world and there’s actually very few opportunities that actually pay you. So I was living month to month, small room in London, on housing benefit. Yes, I’d had some success with London Sinfonietta, I’d had a piece played by Hallé in Manchester, so there were people who could see my potential but at that stage if the commissions don’t come in, and you’re juggling lots of mini-jobs, if you can’t make the time to compose, there’s a very small window where you have to keep up and get to the next stage or you just…” He trails off, leaving the sense of high-pressure expectations hanging between us. 

So if I hadn’t won the Award, it’s hard to know, but my life would have been a lot more stressful and a lot more precarious… If you’re anxious for too long everything just becomes so negative and that’s not a creative place to be.” 

A year after receiving the Award, Bedford moved to Berlin for what ended up being five years, a city he valued as somewhere to just absorb: there’s art all around you, and the budgets they have for commissions are so much larger than anything in the UK.” He’s confident he wouldn’t have done anything like that without the stability that the Award gave him. 

To demonstrate, to write an orchestral piece, it might take you about a year, it’s so intricate with so many moving pieces, and rarely are the commissions big enough to warrant the time required. You don’t go into contemporary music to make money but because you feel you have something to say and it’s what you want to do…” 

Impact of the award

Back in 2007, the Guardian’s Tom Service chose him as part of a piece titled Sounds of the Future: Four young stars of classical music you need to hear’. It includes Bedford describing the most important lesson he feels any composer needs to learn, especially those who have come through traditional institutional routes: To try to find out what you want to do, and to ignore what everyone else expects. You have to try to stick to your guns.” When I quote this back to him now, he laughs: I still feel I’m approaching where I want to be – still feel I’m working towards somewhere, [that sort of ] searching and questioning, so to an extent that hasn’t changed. I feel like I’m getting closer to where I want to be, but never actually quite there.” It’s a sentiment I hear repeated by so many of the Award recipients that seems to speak to the core of the artistic mind – a deep, ongoing need to interrogate, coupled with a perhaps even deeper determination. 

The confidence the Award gave him was critical to enabling him to explore new ideas and do what he wanted to do, rather than what people expected of him. In 2009/10 for example, he started to use microtones – intervals smaller than a semitone – which were hard for musicians to play because they aren’t conventional tunings: I wouldn’t have done that over quite a few years in a number of pieces in that way without the Award and the security it gave me.” 

For me, it was life changing, they caught me at a critical moment. I was so financially vulnerable, and it meant that the day-to-day worries weren’t there and I was able to write the music I wanted to. That felt amazing.” 

He asks how many artists have received the Award over the past 30 years? I say it’s complicated by the pandemic, but, even without those years when smaller Awards were made to many more recipients, it’s well over 200. That is going to be such a benefit to society and our culture, I don’t know how you’d calculate it.” A few years after receiving the Award, he was one of the judges, an honour he found really, really difficult, because you knew the decisions we made in that room were going to affect people’s lives, and I knew what it meant and how it would change people.”

Luke Bedford. Photo credit: Manu Theobald

One of the challenges of writing to commission is that many times, the new work is premiered and played just once, and while Bedford has had a number of works brought out by a German publisher on CD, it’s only since late last year that his work became more easily accessible, with the release of a beautiful and haunting recording of In the Voices of the Living” by BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. It coincided with another major Award for Bedford, this time an Ivor Novello Award nomination for Staggered Nocturne”, for 14 players and a percussion soloist at the 2023 Ivors Classical Awards. But while it’s an honour to be recognised by his peers, there’s no money involved. 

He has been teaching at Birmingham Conservatoire and loves seeing and supporting the huge variety of students there, with their kaleidoscopes of different ideas. But I do wonder, when they leave, how are they going to make a living?” 

Money was so important. I was able to stop doing all the mini jobs I was doing up to that point and become basically a full-time composer. Which was an enormous privilege and came just at the right time as I was getting some commissions and opportunities so I could focus on those works. It was an amazing gift.” 

He believes being a young composer today has become a lot harder. There’s fewer commissions available, fewer schemes, swinging cuts to arts education and local authority funding. And there are other changes that have fundamentally shifted how the contemporary classical sector works: When I started out everyone wanted a publisher to look after them, that was the traditional pathway. And now, because it’s so much easier, with advances in communication and everything, if I was starting out now I don’t know if I’d go with a publisher. It’s a lot of work but then again, you don’t have to pay them. So that’s a huge change.” 

The advances in digital technologies have also transformed how music is created: Looking back, it seems very basic now. You don’t need a high-end computer for advanced sound work anymore, it’s all fairly straightforward… you don’t need expensive studios, and it’s not hard to get decent video and audio recordings from every concert.” He might have tried very different things if he was in his 20s now, he muses. He’s also positive about the increased awareness and recognition of different genres and wider forms beyond notated compositions, which is still dominated by men. 

There’s far more diversity now in terms of who comes through, I see it in my students. There’s more recognition of the importance of diversity in funding as well.”

We come back to the long-tail of the Award. Sixteen years after receiving it, it’s still a core bit of his CV, a milestone: If I do a pre-concert interview, or am introduced, it’s always mentioned.”

Biography

Luke Bedford is a British composer who has quietly made a significant name with a series of award-winning scores that are being performed internationally.

Luke Bedford with Klaus Simon

Bedford was the first ever composer-in-residence at the Wigmore Hall. Prizes include Paul Hamlyn Foundation’s Awards for Artists in 2007 and the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung 2012.

His two acclaimed operas, Seven Angles and Through His Teeth, have been performed at the Royal Opera House, as well as subsequent international productions.

Orchestral works have been commissioned by the LSO, The Hallé, BBC Philharmonic, DSO Berlin and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.

Four Recordings have been devoted to his music: on Col Legno, Bastille Musique and NMC. 

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