Sarah Angliss on winning this year’s Ivors Visionary Award

Sarah Angliss is in a buoyant mood when we talk, and with good reason: the previous night she received the Visionary Award at The Ivors Composers Awards. The award citation was full of praise, calling her ‘no ordinary musician’ and a ‘startling and multifaceted creative technologist and composer’, and praising her ‘strikingly original sound world that reveals a unique and exceptional compositional voice’.

‘I was completely bowled over when I found out about the Award,’ says Angliss. ‘I’m very grateful to the Academy and to the judges for taking the time to listen to my music, and I also thanked all the venues that have suffered so much over the last 18 months but have continued their creative programming.’

The award came as deserved recognition of Angliss’s work after a particularly trying period: she was unlucky enough to catch Covid-19 not once but twice, each time needing over eight months to recover – ‘it feels like having the worst hangover ever, but for weeks and weeks’. That, combined with the almost complete cessation of musical activity during the various lockdowns meant that she took on an unlikely project to keep her creative hand in. ‘I’ve actually been spending the last few months working on the soundtrack for a new Aardman animated series, Lloyd of the Flies, which has been the perfect Covid-resilient job – not only have I been able to do it at home as and when I could, but it has been an absolute joy to work on my first animation.’

By her own admission, Angliss’s career trajectory has been as unconventional and anti-establishment as her music. ‘Ever since I was a child I loved building and making things – I asked for a Meccano set for one Christmas, which was unusual for a girl in the 1970s! I remember getting my first tape recorder and messing around with sounds – making tapes then cutting them up or talking over the music. The real epiphany for me was hearing a BBC Radio broadcast of a short story by Ray Bradbury, with an electroacoustic soundtrack created by Malcolm Clarke from the Radiophonic Workshop. My dad recorded the programme and I just listened to it over and over again.’

While at school she attended Trinity College of Music on Saturdays for composition lessons, but found that traditional musical establishments had a very narrow view of what that involved. ‘They simply had no time for anything to do with electronics, and so I decided that if I wanted to be taken seriously I would have to study it properly, and went and did a degree in electroacoustic engineering and a later one in robotics. I spent something like 15 years in the wilderness finding my own way until I was confident enough to do my own thing.’

Angliss’s thing at the moment is putting the finishing touches on her first foray into opera, which is due to be premiered at the 2023 Aldeburgh Festival. Scored for live singers and electroacoustics, Giant tells the tragic story of the Irishman Charles Byrne – reputed to have been over 8 feet tall – who exhibited himself in London between 1781 and his death in 1783. ‘To be honest, I’m astonished that it’s still on the programme for Aldeburgh! – before Covid hit it was originally scheduled for the summer of 2021, and I’ve been so thankful for the continued support of Roger Wright and everyone at Britten-Pears Arts.

‘Obviously, to have had to postpone the whole project for two years was incredibly frustrating, but the delay has allowed us to work in more depth on lots of aspects of the production. I’ve been really lucky to get (choreographer and director) Sarah Fahie on board as director, who’s worked at the Royal Opera House and English National Opera. We worked on preparing the story of Giant using what we called the ‘school play’ method: we acted out every action in a really simple yet really physical way, paring it all back until we had the real essence of the story and knew not only what things absolutely had to be included, but how much time and visual emphasis particular moments needed. We found that some things that we thought were crucial to the story could actually be conveyed very simply and quickly, while other things that seemed not as important turned out to need much more time and focus in order to be fully understood by the audience.’

Giant focuses on the relationship between Byrne and the surgeon John Hunter, who befriended Byrne and aided his entry into London society, but who after Byrne’s death schemed – against Byrne’s express wishes – to steal his corpse for display in his own private museum: ‘Byrne knew what Hunter was up to, and being Catholic had a real existential fear of not being whole after his death – so he paid an undertaker to seal his body in a lead coffin for his friends to drop into the sea at Margate. However, Hunter bribed the undertaker even more handsomely to put heavy rocks inside and to pass the body to him instead.’

Angliss argues that there is much in Byrne’s story that still resonates in today’s world. ‘The biggest issue is with his skeleton, which is still in the Hunterian Museum in London. As it happens, the museum is closed until 2023 for refurbishment, and there’s a huge debate about whether Byrne’s body should go back on display given the circumstances in which it was acquired – like so many other artefacts recently it has become a contested object. Byrne’s tale also brings up the issue of disrespect for the anatomy of a disabled person, which, disgracefully, is still a huge problem even today – not to mention the total injustice of the way in which Hunter betrayed Byrne.

‘But we can’t just paint Hunter as an archetypal villain: yes, he collected bizarre specimens in an almost fetishistic way, but he was one of the most respected surgeons of his day and made many medical advances with his research. He was clearly also a complicated character: the opening scene of the opera shows him performing an autopsy on a child, but with real care and tenderness, telling the body how its death was not in vain but would increase medical knowledge – and then later on it’s revealed that the child was Hunter’s own. The relationship between him and Byrne was fascinating, and it’s been an amazing journey exploring their two personalities.’

You can find out more about Sarah Angliss at her website.