Shiva Feshareki: creating space through music

This article was originally published in the May/June 2020 edition of Classical Music.

For most composers the performance venue is an afterthought, but for composer, turntablist and electronic music guru Shiva Feshareki, the performance space itself is an integral consideration that shapes her compositional process. ‘When I’m composing, the first thing that I think about is the design in the space and how the audience members are going to experience it. Are they going to experience this piece on stage? Will they experience it by entering the orchestra and walking around? The sonic experience is the first thing that I think about before I start composing any notational material. It’s a form of sound architecture.’

This ‘sound architecture’ is partially achieved through turning traditional orchestral seating on its head, with geometric staging plans that are as crucial to the work as the score itself.

‘If I’m working with ensembles then I’m placing each musician in a specific position in the space, so the positioning of the performers is the fixed architecture. The musicians become the scaffolding and the sound that they’re creating is the architecture. When I’m working with electronics then it’s also to do with the speaker placement and the speakers become the scaffolding.’

A crucial tool in Feshareki’s arsenal is custom ambisonic software Auditif, developed by artist and sound designer Christian Duka.

‘It enables me to control how the sound is moving in the space using an iPad with touch sensitive technology where you can literally use your fingers to move the sound. There’s nothing quite like it because it’s still being developed. It’s constantly in a state of progression and it means that the electronic sound is 3D and occupies a virtual spherical space.

‘In the past you had multi-channel speaker systems where you could have a six- or 14-channel surround sound which moves around the space from speaker to speaker. It could be going round in circles, but it wouldn’t be going up and down and creating that full sphere of sound.

‘With this software you can move the sound in the space to make it feel as if the sound is in a full spherical formation. You can feel it moving above you, below you and around you, even if there aren’t hundreds of speakers.’

Curating live sound within concert spaces has afforded Feshereki the opportunity to explore a multitude of diverse concert spaces in her career so far, and each venue has its own unique character.

‘My piece GABA-Analog has been performed in many different venues and they’ve all got different challenges. We performed in York Hall in the old boxing ring and then at Printworks, and the two spaces are so different. Printworks is this very big long industrial space, whereas York Hall is completely different, with a wood infrastructure. There’s also been a concert version of it in Musikhuset Aarhus in Denmark, and all of these different contexts gave different dimensions and a different life to the composition.’

Feshareki doesn’t believe that listeners will miss out on any aspect of her work by listening to it on ordinary speakers or headphones, thanks to the software that she uses. ‘That’s what’s amazing about it – it’s totally accessible to anyone with ordinary headphones. It occupies the same stereo space as normal stereo music, but because of this new technology, and also because of the way I compose with it, you can still create a 360-degree spherical sound. It’s really amazing, something I’m exploring a lot and will be doing so more this summer.’

Once Covid-19 becomes a distant nightmare and the music world returns to normal, does Feshareki have any dream venues that she would love to work with? ‘I’ve been thinking that my latest work Opus Infinity would be perfect for the Proms. You’d get the Prommers walking around the performers with seated audience surrounding them, so I’d be able to explore several dimensions of the composition in one performance. That’s a dream venue for that specific piece.

‘I think my aim is to explore space and venue in context, so as long as I’m doing that then I’m always able to write music that can mutate and morph between all these different spaces. We almost think of music as this matter of time because it’s linear. Music notation describes linear duration, and time in history is linear, but it’s also connected to movement in space. The importance of my work is this interconnection.’

Shiva Feshareki will be joined by Sofi Jeannin and the BBC Singers for a choral playlist bringing together the Renaissance and the present day, as part of the BBC Proms (7.30pm on 19 August 2021).

www.shivafeshareki.co.uk