Innovation

Anna Meredith MBE

Where did you hear Anna Meredith’s music first? It might have been at the BBC Proms, where her music has been played several times, including commissions for both the First (Five Telegrams, 2018) and Last Nights (froms, 2008). It might have been in the cinema, where her string quartet Songs for the M8 (2005) was used in the soundtrack to the 2018 Oscar-winning film The Favourite, or on TV, where her music is used in the recent Netflix series Living With Yourself. It might have been in a club, or at a summer rock festival, performing tracks from her two highly acclaimed dance-pop albums, Varmints (2016) and Fibs (2019). It might even have been in a lift – specifically, the lifts at the Arndale shopping centre in Manchester, for which she created a sound installation for the 2017 Manchester International Festival.

For all the new music talk of crossover, few composers inhabit multiple musical worlds as naturally as Meredith. Born in 1978, she studied at York University and then the Royal College of Music, where she became a junior fellow in 2003. She came to national prominence with froms, her first Proms commission. That piece involved a live satellite link between five simultaneous orchestras, and ever since Meredith has stretched musical convention: not in an aggressive, avant-garde fashion, but more to ask whether we could do something different, something more, please? For her PRS New Music 20x12 Commission for the National Youth Orchestra HandsFree she dispensed with instruments altogether, creating instead an 80-piece body percussion symphony. Even her band is off-kilter, an uncannily funky quartet of drums, cello, keyboard and tuba. (Tuba bass drops? Yes.)

Meredith has been Composer in Residence with the Scottish Symphony Orchestra, a mentor to drum and bass artist Goldie (for the BBC TV show Classic Goldie), and winner of the Pitchfork Best New Music award (for Varmints). She was made an MBE in 2019.

Tim Rutherford-Johnson