Luke Styles' Voices of Power

British-Australian composer Luke Styles will present the premiere of Voices of Power, an oratorio for contralto soloist, choir and orchestra, at Hereford Cathedral on Thursday (28 July) as part of this year’s Three Choirs Festival. Styles’ second major premiere this year, Voices of Power examines the nature of power through seven powerful women across history.

I caught up with Styles in the week before the premiere to reveal some of the ingenious composition choices he has made throughout this impactful new work. Styles also talks about his experience of working with contralto Hilary Summers and poet and author Jessica Walker as well as discussing the lessons we can learn from Voices of Power.

How did you get started as a composer?

I studied at the Royal Academy of Music and then in Vienna and Germany with Wolfgang Rihm before coming back to the UK to do my final studies with George Benjamin. After that I started working as a composer pretty much full time.

There were three major residencies that had marked out my early career, one at Aldeburgh doing the Jerwood Opera Writing Programme, then three years as Glyndebourne’s first young composer in residence where I really learned about how an opera house works, what it means to develop and write operas, as well as working with the chorus and with the chamber groupings of the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

Then I did a residency for a year at the Foundling Museum in London engaging with their Handel collection and writing a promenade piece for La Nuova Musica and some primary school kids that engaged with the museum. This year I was the British Council's musician in residence for Brazil, which was quite exciting, but I’ve mostly been working on commissions. Opera has made up a big part of my career and more recently I’ve completed some larger orchestral works.

Your new work Voices of Power will premiere on Thursday (28 July) at Three Choirs Festival in Hereford Cathedral. What are you most excited about for this premiere?

I’m excited about the setting and prestige of the Three Choirs Festival and working with such great soloists and musicians is really thrilling as well. I'm probably most excited to hear the three musical elements that make the piece up together and hear Hilary Summers' voice with the orchestra and the chorus. I’m also excited to premiere something that is on quite a large scale - 40 minutes allows you to go into a certain amount of depth that you don't get with a short orchestral piece.

You wrote this work specifically for contralto Hilary Summers (pictured below). Does your composition process differ when you have a specific person in mind?

I think so. Hilary's voice is one that I've admired since I heard her singing concerts while I was a student and an usher at Wigmore Hall. Hilary and I started this project with a discussion about what she was interested in as a singer, what I was interested in as a composer and finding those points of connection. Naturally what ended up being composed was tailored to the areas we have in common and plays to Hilary’s strengths.

 Hilary Summers © Claire Newman Williams

Hilary mentioned she really loves to sing with the Viola and the horn, so the Eleanor Roosevelt section of Voices of Power is a duo between the viola and Hilary. She also talked about singing at the very top and bottom of her range, so I've exploited that and included some big three-octave leaps which I wouldn’t have written for a singer unless they specifically requested it.

Could you tell us a bit more about the creative process which led you to create Voices of Power?

The message of Voices of Power is that the aspects of power that we commonly understand as powerful have really been shaped by the male perspective. Women throughout history who we see as powerful, like the ones in the Voices of Power, are seen so because of their adoption of male perceptions of power and that's what Jess and I were really exploring in this work.

The more compassionate, collaborative, long-term aspects of power and are very much the ones we need going forward in the world. These are not traits that only women possess, there are male examples, but women tend to express them best in leadership positions. A book that librettist Jessica Walker and I referenced quite a lot during this process is Strong Female Lead: Lessons from Women in Power by Arwa Mahdawi which talks about women who made decisions that you wouldn’t associate with those in powerful positions and were really attacked by others in their industry, but in the end proved to be the best decisions for their businesses.

The piece has seven protagonists: Boudica, Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great, Margaret Thatcher, Eleanor Roosevelt, Hillary Clinton and Jacinda Ardern. What was the reasoning behind choosing these women in particular?

We chose these women because of the different aspects of power that we could explore through their voices and each woman has their own section of the piece. Boudicca embodies violence, whereas Elizabeth I is more about longevity and the way she represses other female traits -she doesn't have kids or get married - in order to embody power.

Catherine the Great embodies resistance against her husband Peter and her section takes the form of a letter to her son. Eleanor Roosevelt is a forward-thinking figure. She's not got power as such - her husband has the power - but she exercises power from that position through writing the Universal Declaration on Human Rights.

Hillary’s segment is the speech she never got to make, and it focuses on how she was made to suppress her voice. The premise for the Thatcher section is an elocution lesson and it focuses on her having to change herself to embody power. Thatcher’s power depends on an image that is cultivated to be more masculine with her lower-pitched voice, her hair as a helmet and her handbag as a kind of armour.

In Jacinda Ardern’s section we look at leaders now who are actually getting rid of those expectations and that baggage and are finding a more collaborative, compassionate long-term thinking space.

Also, it's not called Strong Female Voices of Power because we want to use women as the default example. Quite often our default of an example of anything is often male when it's not singled out as being female. In this piece power is power and we can explore it through all female examples.

How have you illustrated these female leaders’ struggle for acceptance Voices of Power?

At the very start of the work, we've got Boudica who's very much an expression of violent power. That music is more hard-edged, more angular and it moves around a lot more - there are bigger leaps, less stepwise motion.

Throughout her section Thatcher is being taught to lower her natural speaking voice to sound more authoritative and so the music descends in pitch to reflect that.

When we get to Jacinda Ardern, she has much longer phrases within the middle register which is traditionally a more comfortable and more reassuring part of the voice and that's a kind of musical correlation to what the text means because she's singing about being compassionate.

The end of Voices of Power focuses on what we need from our leaders if we’re going to survive into the future. What do you feel is needed in the classical music industry to address gender imbalance?

I guess you need opportunities to be open to the widest possible group of people and I think everything starts in education. Having role models from an early age, seeing people who you can envisage yourself as, is important, but I don't think it happens as successfully once you get to a professional level. I think it absolutely has to take place when people are much younger - when they're kids, when they're at school - so that having a representative cross section of community and society on stage, as well as in the audience just becomes normal.

I think the only way to get there and make a long-term change is to address class and economic and access barriers in education. There are lots of good programmes and mechanisms for it now within the profession, but I think we'll just keep putting a Band-Aid over it unless we really make the change earlier in education.

And finally, what’s next for you?

After the Three Choirs premiere, I go to Australia for performances of a piece called Songs and Grooves by a Japanese drumming Ensemble, two synthesisers, saxophone and bass clarinet - quite a different work! Then I'm developing a song cycle around Annette Kellerman who was a long-distance swimmer, a silent film star and a vaudeville star.

Looking ahead to next year I'm writing a big song cycle for Le Balcon in France as well as a piece for a music organisation in Brazil. I’m also developing two new operas which will premiere in 2025 and 26.

Voices of Power will premiere at Hereford Cathedral on Thursday (28 July) as part of this year’s Three Choirs Festival. You can find out more, including tickets here.