Music that Changed Me

Singer-songwriter

Singer-songwriter Laura Mvula

Singer, songwriter and composer

Laura Mvula studied composition at Birmingham Conservatoire, before joining the a cappella group Black Voices, teaching, directing community choirs and writing her own music. After signing to Sony in 2012, she released two acclaimed albums: Sing to the Moon and The Dreaming Room. Mvula’s choral work Love Like A Lion was premiered by the BBC Singers in 2018, and Sing to the Moon will be performed at the Last Night of the Proms.

My father was a big jazz and soul man, and he played music at home all the time. On Sundays we went to an independent free church which played Christian rock, and then also to a Caribbean Methodist church where I heard reggae-influenced gospel. I moved to a school that was part of Birmingham Music Service’s programme, and I then asked to have violin lessons. I got bored about a year in and fought to drop them, but my parents refused. My dad said, ‘It’s a discipline before it becomes a pleasure’. That stuck with me. I discovered I liked improvising on the piano, I played with my brother and sister in a string trio, and I was captivated by my aunt, who sang in the a cappella group Black Voices.

At my school, there was a gifted violinist who mesmerised me. Classical music had been so alien – I was listening to Eternal and the Spice Girls. She inspired me and I desperately wanted to play in an orchestra, so I auditioned for Birmingham Music Service’s string sinfonia. I remember the first rehearsal – I had never experienced anything like it, playing with musicians who were equally passionate and all of a certain standard. I had been doing private practice on JS BACH’S Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 and I had no idea what it would be like to play together. It was almost a spiritual experience, and it was a very important foundation.

I graduated through the training ensembles and by the time I got to the CBSO Youth Orchestra, we were playing big repertoire. Sakari Oramo conducted us in ELGAR’S Introduction and Allegro, and everybody wanted to be on top form for the superstar conductor. I was in the first violins. You had to sound as one but at the same time play like a soloist. I still listen to this piece a lot today. Elgar’s harmony and line speak to me, and I think it’s because they have a hymnal sensitivity – it’s choral even though it’s instrumental. I love string orchestras: they got into my bones.

POULENC’S Trio for Oboe, Bassoon and Piano changed my listening habits. I had this idea in sixth form that I had to be a concert pianist or play in an orchestra, but my A-level teacher saw something else in me and gave me hordes of scores and CDS from his library. I came across this trio and at first I thought, what is this? My teenage ears wanted to feel something immediately in a specific way. Here was music in the neo-classical style, with these piercing yet so beautiful voices. Poulenc was saying something so undeniable but in a way that was unique to him. As a wannabe songwriter, that captured my imagination.

One piece on my A-level listening module was TIPPETT’S Concerto for Double String Orchestra, and I didn’t really get it. A piano teacher had told me that I played French music very well, so I thought Debussy and Ravel would be my thing. Tippett converted me. This is lush in an entirely different way, and it has energy and rhythm. There are a couple of bars that sound like hip-hop – someone could sample them and make a whole beat out of it. This piece is like sunrise to me. I could listen to it every morning for breakfast.

For its simplicity and parallel harmony, DEBUSSY’S Sarabande was recommended to me while I was studying composition at Birmingham Conservatoire. I went through a phase when I thought that if I could just learn to sing like Whitney Houston or Mariah Carey, it would all be fine. It took me a minute to grasp that less is more, and to learn to tell stories through phrasing and space. The Sarabande is my very private meditative listening space. And it makes me think of the way that Miles Davis played, in particular on some of the tunes from Kind of Blue.