Joanna Marsh
A move to Dubai in 2007 saw British-born Joanna Marsh found both the Dubai Opera Festival Chorus and Choirfest Middle East, while establishing herself as a much-admired composer of choral music and song. The United Strings of Europe and Gandini Juggling premiere her Another Eden at Kings Place on 28 October.
I had quite a good background for writing choral music. I was an organist and I’ve worked with choirs, so it’s comfortable and familiar. But I like it because when I find a text that I want to set, I really enjoy the feeling of the theatricality of that. I think of texts much more as something that’s to be expressed.
Judith Bingham became a very important mentor for me. We had a strong friendship and I’d send her my works over many years. She was amazing, because she challenged me, personally. She kept saying, ‘Jo, you need to take yourself seriously.’ I had that thing of laughing easily at my own stuff, which gives the appearance of not taking yourself seriously, which is not true. When you’re creating something, ideas don’t just present themselves. People used to say Mozart knew exactly what he was doing and had the whole thing worked out. Rubbish! What he probably had was a sense of what it would be. I have quite a strong sense of what I can achieve with a piece and what I think it’s going to do. One always hopes for those moments when it turns into something more than you anticipated.
I enjoy taking something which has a resonance of the past and adding reflections of the present. For Another Eden I’m looking at creating something that has an element of ground bass in it. The piece is reflective of our concern about what is happening to our world… Another Eden is what we want to see; we’re looking at this perfection that we’ve lost and we want that back.
I would never have learned Arabic if I’d stayed in the UK.
I love the language, and I love the culture. I have an opera which hasn’t had a performance – My Beautiful Camel, written for Dubai Opera. It was going to have a preview in New York and then Covid hit. The opera is dual-language, and it was written with a view to interest the local population here in opera. The plan is to translate the whole thing into Arabic.