Judith Bingham and Leeds Festival Chorus

"There are no great women composers, never have been, and probably never will be" - Sir Thomas Beecham

I’ve never had the novelty of performing a new piece before in my two years of proper choral singing. There were many reasons I was keen to join the Leeds Festival Chorus but this was the main one: Judith Bingham’s Shakespeare Requiem. It’s brilliant. For their 150th anniversary the LFC commissioned the piece - they’ve previously had Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast, Vaughan Williams’s A Sea Symphony and Elgar’s Caractacus - impressive stuff.

Bingham sung with the BBC Singer for a good 13 years and she is now a professional composer. When visiting for one of our Wednesday rehearsals she had a warm presence and gave some pretty useful pointers about singing the Shakespeare Requiem: add drama here, consider the text there etc.

Given that I wouldn’t have the chance to do so many more times, if ever, I decided to seize the opportunity to speak to Bingham afterwards. I gleaned a lot from her especially with regards to the music press, her writing methods and her job as a full-time composer.

Bingham insists that the music press aren’t interested in contemporary music. Her contact with journalists is also slightly unsettling. A handful of writers email her now and then asking her ‘what she’s up to’. She believes this is done with the aim that the journo/vulture is then able to step in and relate how Bingham had imparted such and such to her in the chance of her happening to drop dead one morning. They want a piece of her to claim when she dies. Admittedly this is a pretty cynical view of music journalists and it could be a case of their intention to ‘keep their contact warm’.

Bingham repeatedly threw up her arms about the sheer vagueness of her job. Perhaps it’s the ineffability of music in general, but she fully acknowledged her inability to effectively put into words her method of composition and musical career in general. I wondered whether being a full-time composer runs the risk of running out of steam, or of churning out the same stuff and duplicated your own signature style. But she trusts and relies on her creativity sufficiently enough for it to keep flowing. She has a fantastic description of her manner of composition: “I write English music with a French accent”. Her harmonies are strong but that doesn’t mean there's no room for beautiful, flowing melodies – even the basses get some pretty lyrical passages. Unlike the scattered and sporadic technique I expect of a lot of composers, she writes in a strict and very linear method, from the start to the finish of the piece.

A composer’s composition inevitably becomes public property once it’s published. The moments a conductor gets his or her hands on a new piece then it’s vital for the composer to take his or her hands off, it has to flow for interpretation. The premiere concert went well (Leeds Town Hall, 29th November 2008) and I’m constantly wondering what place the Shakespeare Requiem will have in history. Her publishers, according to Bingham, are key to this, and she has to rely on them to an uncomfortable extent: "it’s like giving your baby away”. We will have them to thank or blame.