Awards for Artists
Awards for Artists supports individuals at a timely moment in their careers, giving them the freedom to develop their creative ideas and contributing to their personal and professional growth.
“Have you got the photograph from the first year? Because I’m the only woman from the 20 shortlisted, so then they analysed the applications and there was only 1 in 20 women applicants. So there were questions in the press about ‘why so few women?’, but if only 1 in 20 were nominated, then what can you do?”
Sally Beamish starts our conversation in the deep end; I’d suggested over email that her reflections on being one of very few classical composers who are women to achieve significant success since the 70s, would be, if she felt comfortable talking about them, very interesting. And so it proved.
Because on the one hand, Beamish is acutely aware of her status as the only woman to receive an Award in the first ever round of Paul Hamlyn Foundation’s Awards for Artists – “I was the only woman, I was 37, 38 with two small children at that point.” Yet on the other hand, she says:
“I never felt disadvantaged at all [as a woman] because I just did what I wanted to do, and I was very lucky. I had fantastic networks. I was in a good position as a professional viola player with all these male composer/conductors in front of me and the cheek to just speak to them directly.”
“Occasionally,” she notes, “there were things you just had to swallow, like a festival saying ‘we’d have liked to feature you, but we had a woman last year’. That was just normal, we just accepted it, you wouldn’t hear that now.” Latest research into female composers suggests she’s right, though representation is still far from equal.
But a recent unexpected discovery has shed a different light on her practice and career. As she beautifully explores in the style of a letter to her younger self, inspired by Rilke’s letter to an aspiring poet, in an episode of BBC Radio 3 ‘The Essay’, Beamish was diagnosed with level 1 autism, formerly known as Asperger’s, during Covid.
“It was such a shock at the beginning.” She wasn’t looking for it, but was recommended to have a professional diagnosis after she accessed CBT support for anxiety during the lockdowns. “I was upset and relieved in equal measure to find out. I sort of think of it as my superpower now, and it explains a lot about the hours I spent composing as a child.” She explains how she’s much more aware now, of how women in particular can be on the autistic spectrum despite having “all the social skills,” because they are “extremely well trained. But it is exhausting.”
The diagnosis has prompted her to reassess her fearless approach to career development: “I do think I had a focus and a lack of self-awareness of being a woman that is typical of women on the autism spectrum. And I didn’t really look for role models, not that there were many” she quips. And yet, when she was considering her options applying to music college,
“it simply didn’t occur to me that I could earn a living as a composer, even though composing had always been my main focus. So the viola seemed the best bet.”
As a post-grad she applied to three different academies to study composition and was turned down: “But I was a tonal composer which was deeply unfashionable at the time, so that played a part: ‘We’ve never yet taken a composer who finished a piece in A‑minor’, they were quite scornful.” The tight grip of a very narrow range of options for contemporary classical composers is evident in her every word. She goes on: “Another said he didn’t want to change the way I was composing, he didn’t want to force me down that route. That was a gift in a way, just as not studying composition in the first place was the right thing for me, because I was able to learn directly from performing.”
Beamish believes so much of writing music is about confidence, and credits her mother, a violinist, with setting her up with all the tools she needed. She taught her to read and write music at the age of just four, thinking it would be fun, and Beamish says she has been composing for friends and family ever since. “I found one recently, a little note in an envelope for my godmother’s birthday. I was always composing, painting, writing, making recipes, dress making, knitting, making lampshades, every day a new project. Never interested in maintenance, or washing up, but anything creative I got into. In my 30s I went to life classes and learnt to draw.”
Self-belief is only half the challenge, however: “It’s an exciting process to write music down, and give it to the orchestra, to the musicians, and for them to give it to the audience. As a composer you are totally reliant on the musicians, needing those bodies and instruments to take your work to meet its audience.” She muses that it’s similar perhaps only to choreographers and playwrights. And she’s particularly in awe of novelists and artists “because they don’t have deadlines! Even as a child I was always writing for an occasion, I don’t know how anyone does it without a deadline!”
Beamish’s memories of the day she found out she’d received an Award are as strong as if it were last week. She doesn’t know for sure, but she thinks she was tipped off early, because they were afraid she’d go back to Scotland to her family rather than wait to find out if she’d won or not. So they called her at her dad’s, and she couldn’t believe it: “£12,000 was so much.”
It’s always hard to become recognised as a composer when you’re first and foremost seen as a professional viola player, she explains. So one of the main impacts was the confidence it gave her: “It meant I was seen as a composer, and that was important.”
Famously, Beamish had had her precious viola stolen, which focused her resolve on composing full time, along with a move to a farm north of Glasgow to raise their children. “He [Robert Irvine, the celebrated cellist] had this vision for how we would live there, and I would just compose. But what we didn’t know was that there was a sheep dip at the bottom of the garden. They put the sheep in the dip to kill the bugs. It’s a nerve gas, and it affects humans as well, neurologically. And Robert got iller and iller, and I got asthma, and lost a baby and then my baby girl was born at only 4.4lb.” As soon as they finally worked out what was happening, they moved, and have all long made a full recovery, including Irvine.
Beamish was only able to give up playing because she was supported by her husband: “I can’t overemphasise how important that was. I was getting some commissions, but we couldn’t have managed without Robert’s income as Principal Cello in Scottish Opera. Then Robert got ill, and couldn’t work, and that was the point I got the Award, so it was really important.” She pauses momentarily.
I’m still digesting this rollercoaster of events, but Beamish is already laughing again: “I can tell you exactly what we did buy: an old second hand Land Rover! We lived two miles up a dirt road, so that was a necessity. And an Encyclopedia Britannica – Robert had always wanted one. It’s obsolete now, but we can’t get rid of it.” She describes how “Scotland was hugely important for my composing; and was wonderful for the children, who are of course Scottish.” She and Irvine separated in 2008 but still work together. She’s written many pieces for him over the years, and he’s “still very important in my musical life”.
We return to the present, and the role of artists in society. “In the education system now, music just isn’t valued, and it’s not part of the curriculum or seen as critical.” What she says next surprises me: “There is one positive from that, and that’s that we’re all really thinking about what we’re saying with our music, it’s become an existential question for us. Why are we doing this? What is it that stops us getting a job in… what was that awful advert during Covid with the ballet dancer? Cyber? And for me, it’s about needing to communicate, and using my voice. So I ask myself – am I actually saying what I want to say?”
She sees a real shift since the 70s when her compositions were seen as too accessible, toward a real desire to communicate. “Now, you want to write a piece that people are going to really respond to. I’m not saying that we all have to ‘dumb down’, rather the opposite! We have to think a little bit more about how we are communicating: about being clear, making sure you’re being understandable, and of course, interesting and unique, as we all are.”
As we draw the conversation to a close, Beamish’ daughter has just arrived from Sweden where she lives. After 25 years, Beamish started playing the viola again a decade ago, and she’s recording this September. “I’ve commissioned all three of my children to write pieces for me to play,” and the pride in her voice sings down the line.
“Maybe that [Radio 3] essay will be the beginning of a memoir…” she finishes. I very much hope it is, because if there’s one thing that shines through her life and music over the decades since she was the first woman to receive a PHF Award, it’s that Beamish is an exceptional communicator.
Born in 1956, Sally Beamish studied viola at the Royal Northern College of Music before focusing on composition and moving to Scotland, where she lived for a number of years. Her music embraces many influences, particularly jazz and Scottish traditional music, and she has written for numerous soloists including Steven Isserlis, James Crabb, Håkan Hardenberger, Branford Marsalis, and Tabea Zimmermann.
Her string quartet for the Elias String Quartet, Reed Stanzas, received its première at the 2011 BBC Proms and won a Royal Philharmonic Society Award. In 2018, Beamish was awarded the British Composer Award for Inspiration in recognition of her long and distinguished career and she was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s birthday honours in 2020.
Awards for Artists supports individuals at a timely moment in their careers, giving them the freedom to develop their creative ideas and contributing to their personal and professional growth.
Awards for Artists supports individuals at a timely moment in their careers, giving them the freedom to develop their creative ideas and contributing to their personal and professional growth.