TANSY DAVIES

TANSY DAVIES -OUTSTANDING WORKS COLLECTION TANSY DAVIES

In Tansy Davies’ first opera, a cast of office workers find themselves caught on an upper storey of the World Trade Center, on the morning of 11 September. Trapped between floors, they gradually confront their passage from this life to the next.

The title of Between Worlds (winner of a British Composer Award in 2016) might stand as a motto for Davies’ whole creative output, which is populated with thresholds, border crossings, simultaneities and travellers between realms. Her early music straddled the club and the concert hall, turning the rhythms and textures of funk, techno and drum and bass to tightly worked concert pieces such as Neon (2004) and Salt Box (2005). In its juxtaposition of bawdy dance hall and rain-swept night-time scene, the raunchy Grind Show (2007) drew inspiration from Goya’s method of overpainting in his Pilgrimage to St Isidore’s Hermitage.

The central character of Between Worlds is a janitor – a liminal figure himself, whose work usually takes place unseen – and it is telling that he is the one who has visions of a shaman who guides the story towards its inevitable conclusion. The ultimate border-crossers, shamans are recurring presences in Davies’s music, from the soloist of her soprano saxophone concerto Iris (2004), walking between realms of subconscious reality, to the Man in her second opera, The Cave (2018), who encounters echoing visions of his daughter while sheltering inside a prehistoric cave. Over two decades as one of Britain’s foremost composers, Davies has transmuted the gasps and whip cracks, the bump and grind of her early music into visceral contemplations of the natural and supernatural world, exemplified by her characterisation of the piano soloist as a maenad or wild woman in her concerto Nature (2012). Her most recent composition, Star-Way, written for Zubin Kanga and the Prophet Rev 2 analogue synthesizer, brings things full circle, bringing the sounds of electronic dance music into a work that she describes as a ‘guided meditation’ to the stars.