In this interview the contemporary composer Freya Waley-Cohen discusses the influence of magic and witchcraft on her new album ‘Spellbook’.
Freya Waley-Cohen is a British-American London based composer, who has had works premiered at venues and festivals all around the world ranging from the BBC Proms and the Aldeburgh Festival to the Walt Disney Concert Hall. In 2016 she was a Composition Fellow at the Tanglewood Festival.
She grew up in an artistic family. Her mother is the American sculptor Josie Spencer. Her father is English theatre manager and producer Stephen Waley-Cohen, and her sister is the violinist Tamsin Waley-Cohen. Freya herself started playing the violin at the age of three and at eleven she enrolled for a composition course at The Walden School, New Hampshire. She studied Music at Cambridge University and later with Simon Bainbridge and Oliver Knussen at the Royal Academy of Music.
As well as literature and folklore, she takes inspiration from location: her 2014 choral piece Linea was written specifically for performance inside the Princess of Wales Conservatory glass house at Kew Gardens. Permutations, her 2017 piece for six recorded violins, was also written for a specific location, namely a specially constructed building at the Aldeburgh Festival, created with architectural designers Finbarr O’Dempsey and Andrew Skulina. The six violin parts were recorded separately and the sound distributed around the building. She cites Mahler, George Crumb, Hildegard von Bingen and her own teacher, the late composer Oliver Knussen, as influences but also ‘sneaks little bits of R&B, pop, folk, and rock’ into her pieces, as she revealed in an interview with the Cross-Eyed Pianist.
‘Spellbook’ will be released on October 25th. For more information, click here.