Eleanor Alberga
Eleanor Alberga was born in Jamaica, and moved to England a er winning a scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Music. Her 2015 Last Night of the Proms commission Arise Athena! set the seal on her reputation as a composer. She is performing and teaching at the Dartington Summer School & Festival from 28 July to 25 August.
My first piece was a portrait of my Labrador dog. I was ten years old when I wrote it. It just sort of happened. I didn’t have any role models for composers, especially as a black woman or, I should say, as a black child, so I wanted to become a pianist. I started learning the piano at five. I fell in love with composing in my 30s. I’ve decided to come out of the closet about my style. It’s quite varied. I write very light, tonal and rhythmic pieces, which draw on my Caribbean heritage and my time with an African dance company. The other extreme goes more towards the avant garde. At the moment I’m working on a Violin Concerto for my husband, Thomas Bowes. It’s more to the avant garde side of my writing.
I had to really take the scissors out when I did a piece for the Proms. It was supposed to be three minutes long, but it wanted to be a ten-minute piece, I think. That was one of the hardest things. I had to cut down the idea and still let it make sense. Since the Proms, a lot more people have heard about me. It took a little while, but there has been much more interest in commissioning. Now there are so many young composers. For Dartington I went through 43 applications, and there were so many really talented people. There are a lot more composers, and there’s a lot less money. That’s the biggest challenge today. Also, if one compares oneself with the day of someone like Bach, there weren’t so many styles around. Today the gamut is from A to Z and beyond for what is considered contemporary, classical concert music.
The first composer I fell in love with was Bartók. I used to wear out a recording of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring when I was a teenager. I went through a phase of really liking minimalist music, and then there are people like Messiaen and Birtwistle. Western classical music is a very strong part of my heritage, as is being a West Indian and Jamaican. There’s a mix of influences that’s constantly there.