In this interview, the British composer Orlando Gough discusses the motivation behind his latest project HERD, which consists of 23 singing sheep and is taking place as part of Kirklees Year of Music in Yorkshire from July 11-16. To find out more about the project, click here.
Orlando Gough is a composer (and sometimes lyricist, librettist, music director, MC, recording engineer, cookery writer), who writes operas, choral music, music-theatre, music for dance and theatre, and creates large-scale site-specific work.
He was born in Brighton and, aged 8, gave his first public performance, playing the hymn Holy Holy Holy in a Grade 2 piano version for school prayers, which he describes as ‘an unmitigated disaster.’ Among his early achievements he mentions winning a school piano competition with a piece by Peter Maxwell Davies (‘the judges have no idea what it’s meant to sound like’), performing Terry Riley’s Keyboard Studies (‘to a mystified audience in Oxford’) and cooking for Oxford Rowing Crew in the run-up to the Boat Race (‘Oxford wins seven fo the eight races. You could argue that this is a coincidence.’)
However, he also went on to become a well-known composer, writing a string of operas, many of which were written to be performed in unusual locations. Amongst his biggest works is XX Scharnhorst, inspired by the Battle of North Cape where the German battleship Scharnhorst was sunk by Royal Navy Warships. It was premiered on HMS Belfast on 8 September 2012.
To read more about Orlando Gough’s work, click here.