A composing retreat week in Languedoc: June 2025

It’s complicated, my aunt died 3 years ago and left her humble cottage in the hills of Languedoc near Lodève, to her best friend. I, singing at her life celebration in Hampstead was generously invited to return to the stone cottage when free. This is the 4th trip since sitting with my aunt in a coma three years ago. She rotated her hands balletically in her state-of-the art hospital bed only to die two days after my visit. Now her ashes watch from a meadow over-looking the property. It is too shocking to admit how many years have gone by since our first visit when we drove through France in our student mini via the Dordogne.

View from the terrace

The view from the terrace over the verdant sandstone hills toward the limestone cliffs is stunning. No better way to appreciate the enormity of the limestone geology of the area than visit the Cirque de Navacelles. Even if your husband winces as you circumnavigate every turn, it is still worth it for the giddy view and cold Weiss beer in the café. 

Cirque de Navacelles

I am composing every morning, a glorious Gloria. Choral music just slips off my soul, no effort, no fuss. And I read Austerlitz by W.G Seabald, deliciously enigmatic and evocative like a Northern limbed Proust, full of reflectiveness and implausible connections sparked by an artistically chaotic and factual mind. 

 

For the experience of death, said Evan, diminishes us, just as a piece of linen shrinks when you first wash it.

Austerlitz: W.G Sebald

Day two of our composing retreat and I am on a roll especially on a soul felt movement for soprano. Diana, my dead aunt in ash form watches from a field above the glorious terrace with its stunning view. Late afternoon I swim is the silky waters of Lac de Salagou, my skin feels soft. Then after giant prawns in garlic I partake of an online dream group organised by the Cambridge Jungian Circle where the goddess in one person’s dream is very much present.

Lac De Salagou

Day 3 is more enigmatic and frankly a mistake. Up the limestone cliff behind Diana’s cottage lies Lerab Lynge, a Tiebetan Buddist temple and the promise of a meditation day. But it’s boring because rather than mostly meditate, the majority of the time is taken up with two men answering narcissistic questions on meditation! 

Inside the temple

A naughty white Magnum from the gift shop overlooking the temple slightly picks me up but my heart is now siding with the locally exterminated Cathars circa 12/13^th century and their gnostic view of spirituality which puts one’s own experience at the centre of spiritual engagement. I mean am I really prepared to accept arbitrary explanations of how many minutes of meditation work? I am left too tired by the non - experience to compose today so return to my blog and Sebald who coincidently talks in depth about many grand buildings that I know: Antwerp Station, Palais de Justice in Brussels and Liverpool Street Station in London which was built over the site of Bedlam. Sebald , suggests that big buildings express the insecurity of their organisations. This observation is Interesting in relation to  all the cathedrals being built when the Cathars, whose beliefs were a threat, were exterminated.

Lerab Lyng, Languedoc

Day 4: The Cathars and Knights Templars were a big presence in Languedoc before being exterminated. Did you know that Wagner visited Rennes Le Chateau near Beziers and Carcassonne just before he started composing Parsifal? Some believe the Holy Grail is buried in Rennes Le Chateau. On a personal note, curiously here is Richard Leigh who Michael and I used to serve in the Belsize Park Deli where we worked part time when we had just left the Royal College of Music. Leigh was part of the cohort of three men who wrote the book Holy Grail, Holy Blood, the precursor to the Da Vinci Code. Curious coincidence that Leigh appeared most days to always order a corn beef and corn salad sandwich. Anyway, I am re-reading Holy Grail, Holy Blood in the context of this area.

Richard Leigh

 

Today’s work on Gloria went very well, I will have a good 15 minutes of the work mostly completed by the time I return to UK. It is interesting composing for string orchestra which I have now segmented like Vaughan Williams in to the main orchestra and a string quartet. This will be my last setting of a Christian religious text for a while as we are moving out of the Lady Chapel in Ely to West Road Concert Hall in Cambridge next year and the following year to Cadogan Hall in London, very grand but necessary to build my product. Also, I want to develop a more Universal choral work for Cadogan Hall and I began this integration this year by infusing my Magnificat with two poems by Rumi. This afternoon there was thunder in the mountains, very exciting as we walked up to Diana’s field.

Day 5

Light rain and an exploration of the village Les Plans. I discover an enticing path down to the valley below, probably constructed when the castle was built in the 12^th/13^th century. There is an overwhelming scent of honeysuckle and softly caressing intermittent rain.

The path downwards

 Hidden corners

Here the structure under my aunt’s cottage, the foundations of the castle.

The Kitchen with my aunt’s hat still in place

Day 6 and the composing retreat is nearly at an end but I wake up early and after a power walk, I decide to compose an entirely new opening movement for the Gloria as well as re-ordering my musical material. I now have over 20 minutes of rough  score for a 45 minute work , not bad going for a 6 day retreat. Then I recap the opera I was working on last year and realise that it was going nowhere! Final two swims in Lac De Salagou. I love it here. 

Lac De Salagou

Back home to Norfolk with Tristan

The Position of Women in Music in the UK 1900-2025.

 

“Hi Susie I am preparing a Talk on UK the Position of Women in Music 1900-2025. Most is based on statistical research, but I thought a few observations by individual women in the profession, today, might be interesting additions. Do you, or have you ever experienced (or know of others who have experienced...) discrimination or professional difficulties on account of gender? Any thoughts would be appreciated. I will not be referencing contributors by name.   I hope you don't mind me asking? 

 

My response

 

I have a few instants in my career where I feel that I was definitely held back because I was a woman. When I started at the Royal College of Music I went in as a joint first study composer and singer but near the end of my studies I was hauled into the principal's office and he said that I would have to make a decision between composing and singing and that in his opinion I would be better off becoming a singer because he didn't believe that a woman could make a career as a composer at that time. This was in the early 1980's. So, this led me to pursue a career as an opera singer even though I really wanted to be a composer. It's not such a terrible story, in the sense that I had a great singing career and I also did a lot of composing out on my job's abroad. So, in many respects it was the perfect combination for a composer. 

 

When I made my career shift 11 years ago to full-time composer, I sang my Swan Songs at Luxembourg and Lyon operas and sold out my small pension from the Royal Opera House to fund an MPhil in composition at Cambridge University. So, I went in as a mature composer and I was delighted to find that the faculty, although still dominated by male composers was very empowering. I subsequently went on to get a scholarship to study for a PhD in composition at the Royal Birmingham conservatoire and again I felt well supported by my male supervisors and I was also lucky to have Errollyn Wallen as one of my supervisors. 

 

Going back to Cambridge. I entered the conducting competition and this is perhaps is the most egregious experience of sexism I had in 2014. I prepared my work well for the competition and made it into the semi-finals where the adjudicator said two things which were highly disturbing: 

 

The first was "you conduct quite well for a ....." and then he stopped. 

 

The other was" I don't like it that you are so tall as a conductor " 

 

Both these comments struck me as highly sexist and discouraging. Even my fabulous conducting coach, a top international conductor who took the greatest care to teach me all the techniques of conducting so that I am now pretty good, finished by saying "of course you won't get anywhere because you're a woman and nobody will respect you. " The comment left me with a feeling of doom as I entered my first rehearsal. But I learned from another conductor a new way of working with orchestras which is less dominating and more as a colleague and this has served me well.

 

 

So, these are examples of things that really were very discouraging to me as a woman composer and conductor. Now, I generally feel well supported. However, I have noticed that in terms of getting on in the serious world of contemporary composition there still seems to be a bias towards young male composers and if women get a chance, it is often younger women in a marginalized form of composition such as song writing or soundscape design. This bias was particularly reflected in choices at the recent Ivor awards last autumn. I sense for example that at Cambridge where I composed quite muscular music that it was deemed too strong meat coming out of a woman and I noticed that the women composers that we're championed at the Cambridge Faculty tended to compose softer not such challenging music. I've also noticed that women composers in general put on a persona of great pleasantness which seems in stark contrast to a male composer such as Thomas Ades for example who speaks more definitively. So, I feel still under duress to have to be an overly pleasant person when really, I just want to be a composer. As far as my life as a composer now, I think in many respects it is very similar to many of my male colleagues of course Michael my husband being one of them. It's tough being a composer. But I am very happy to say that I am making headway. I have two publishers: Composers Edition and I've just been taken on by Universal Edition. I've managed through my own effort particularly to put on big choral works but I've also had some modest commissions and I'm making quite a big breakthrough at the moment in terms of opera composing but I can't say any more about that yet. 

 

Last week I was in Barcelona at the Opera Europa conference and I was talking to a top agent who has taken an interest in my career and he said "this really now is your time to shine " well, I hope it is. But I still feel I would like as a mature woman composer to be able to present myself as a real person dressed simply in a pair of jeans and a sweater, that I wouldn't have to feel under duress to glamorise myself. I feel in contrast that a male composer can still be very much himself like Mark Anthony Turnage.