Interview,
Dalia Stasevska on her Mixtape
I met up with Dalia in London last month (the day before her appearance at the BBC Proms in works by Julius Eastman, Mahler and Sibelius) to find out more about her mission to bring orchestral music to new audiences and respond to the ways in which people listen to music today, how her relationships with some of the featured composers came about, the role of the natural world in several pieces on the Mixtape, and why she believes that 'we’re living through a golden age of artistic possibilities right now'...
Why did you decide to style the project as a mixtape rather than a conventional album?
It’s inspired by a few things. I always loved the way that people used to put different music and styles together on cassettes for their friends and family - and there’s also an influence from rap music, where artists will often insert small passages into a track and rework it into something completely different.
It was also created in response to how we listen to music nowadays, because in the last ten years things have changed so dramatically. I know that people are listening to classical music more than ever, and that’s not because of traditional concerts or albums: it’s because of playlists! I’ve been in so many situations where I tell someone what I do for a living and they say that they never listen to classical music…But when I ask them to show me the playlists on their phone, I always spot something that makes me say ‘You see? You are listening to classical music!’.
That really got me thinking: how can I be more visible for these people and show them what we do? Classical music is such a great tradition, and I’m proud to be a part of that tradition: my first love will always be the symphony orchestra, which I think is the greatest instrument ever created! But to share it with as many people as possible, we have to think outside the box: how do we get these millions of people who are listening to what we do to the concert-halls? Nobody has cracked that yet, and this Mixtape is my first attempt to do so…
When I make an album I want to bring something new to the table. I love conducting Sibelius in concert, for example, but does anyone really need a recording of his complete symphonies from me? I don’t think so. Not when there are so many amazing composers and artists who are pushing the symphony orchestra in new directions: the doors are open like never before.
Has contemporary orchestral music always been a passion of yours?
Absolutely. The composers on this Mixtape work in various different mediums and come from all sorts of backgrounds, and they still get inspired by the symphony orchestra – isn’t that wonderful? And I want to be someone who facilitates and celebrates that. One of my favourite conductors and composers is Leonard Bernstein, and what he did inspires me so much: those massively popular televised lectures which he gave focused almost entirely on living composers. That’s why I did these podcasts with Gramophone for each of the tracks: I wanted to put a voice to these composers and show that they’re not just a name in a concert-programme or a booklet-note. They’re exciting, interesting people, and listeners deserve to hear their stories.
Or take Serge Koussevitzky and all the incredible symphonic music he commissioned in Boston: I want to be the Koussevitzky of my generation, seeking out those amazing lifelong collaborations that people will still be talking about in 100 years’ time. Don’t just look back at the past and wish you were there – No! Do what you can here and now!
Were all of the featured composers people you'd worked with before, or did you make some new discoveries and friendships in the process?
At a certain point of course everyone was unknown to me! I didn’t know anything about Noriko Koide until we did a tour to Japan with the BBC in 2023, which included her BBC commission Swaddling Silk and Gossamer Rain; I grew to really love that piece, and by the end of the tour I knew I wanted to include it on the Mixtape.
But most of the composers here are people whose careers I’ve been following for a while. For example, I’d wanted to conduct something by Caroline Shaw for a long time, but because she tends to write mostly chamber music it took a few years for me to find something. When the Los Angeles Philharmonic commissioned The Observatory for Hollywood Bowl I heard it online and thought ‘I have to conduct this piece!’. With Anna Meredith, I went to a concert she gave with her band (with six or seven members), and when they played Nautilus I said ‘This piece has to be orchestrated!’ - so I went backstage after the gig and asked her to arrange it for symphony orchestra, and she agreed…
One of the most haunting tracks on the album is 'They Being Dead Speaketh' from the late Jóhann Jóhannsson's The Miners' Hymns - did you ever work directly with him?
I would have loved to collaborate with Jóhann, but sadly he died very soon after I discovered his music. That happened through the movie Sicario: I remember nothing about the film itself, just Jóhann’s music and the effect it had on me! I got totally obsessed, listening to everything I could get my hands on and playing The Miners’ Hymns on a loop. The album came out in 2011, and a few years later I wanted to conduct it in a concert: I discovered that there was an orchestral version that hadn’t been recorded, so this is the premiere recording of that arrangement. Jóhann was no longer alive by that point, but it was lovely to work with his collaborator Guðni Franzson (Hildur Guðnadóttir’s father): Guðni helped me with the recording process, listening to the first takes and advising on the balance.
Which piece on the album would you say goes the furthest in terms of pushing the boundaries of 'classical' music?
I don’t even talk about ‘classical music’ any more: I just talk about ‘great music’! But SØS Gunver Ryberg’s COEXISTENCE is a proper statement piece, really out of the box. That part of the story started with an amazing Finnish electronic musician called Mika Vainio [1963 - 2017], whose music I first heard about eight years ago at a rock festival. I was knocked sideways by the way this guy composes: I heard so much drama in his work, underpinned by a real sense of symphonic form and scale. I’ve always been a huge fan of electronic music and I dreamed of collaborating with him one day, but he died in an accident when he was just 53 and didn’t leave any symphonic music behind…
I got talking about this with my husband Lauri Porra (who’s played a huge role in the curation of the Mixtape) and asked him if he knew of anyone else writing on similar lines…He suggested the Danish sound artist SØS Gunver Ryberg, who is one of the most highly respected female artists in the field of electronic music (which is mostly dominated by men). Lauri played me her piece Doing Our Best is No Longer Good Enough – she always has a very strong message in her music - and a soon as I heard it I thought ‘This is it!’.
There’s something deeply emotional about how she writes, and the way she uses sound is so interesting and intelligent. I knew immediately that she would understand the symphony orchestra: it takes a brilliant mind to combine organic and non-organic material so that it sounds seamless, but something told me she was the one to do it! I contacted her and discovered that she wrote COEXISTENCE for the Aarhus Symphony Orchestra: they performed it live with the orchestra playing and her doing live electronics, so I suggested we take it even further…
I gave her free rein to go wild on the electronics and mold those two worlds together, and I think the result is the most dramatic work on the whole Mixtape album. It’s very difficult to playlist in a way, because where do you put something like that?! Regardless, it’s phenomenal music: she’s concentrating more on sound and effects rather than harmonies or melodies, but the piece has a really strong sense of drama. As the title suggests, it’s about the big questions: what’s going on in this world, where are we heading, and how are we going to deal with all the fires breaking out around us…?
It really put me in mind of my Friday nights as a teenager: rehearsing contemporary music with our local youth orchestra before heading out clubbing!
Exactly: she plays electronics at Berghain, the world’s most famous techno club, and yet there are moments where she reminds me of Ligeti. That’s why I’m so thrilled to have included this piece – it’s about the future of the symphony orchestra and how different worlds can coexist. We need to be more audacious about bringing things together: I take a lot of inspiration from museums that push the boundaries with new types of exhibitions that juxtapose objects from completely different cultures. Audiences are often a lot more open to this kind of thing than people in the business give them credit for, and taking risks often pays us back 1000 times more than just doing the same thing over and over again.
Several of the pieces on the album draw inspiration from nature: was that a theme you had in mind when you started putting the programme together, or was it down to serendipity?
As a Finnish person, the natural world is like a sacred space for me: going into a forest and listening to the birds is an almost religious experience, so maybe that influenced my choices to some extent. But there’s something even broader than that going on: I feel that all the composers on the Mixtape are very alert about their surroundings in one way or another.
My husband Lauri wrote a suite called Cabins and Hideouts, which is essentially a musical diary about a summer day in our cottage in Finland: every movement is about a period of time, starting with dawn and ending with dusk. Utu is inspired by a really interesting phenomenon which happens with the mist on Finnish lakes around the time of the summer solstice, where the surface of the lake gets hotter than the air and creates this beautiful white mist. At the same time you have a sort of Blue Hour where the sun doesn’t really set, and it’s magical – usually it’s also completely silent, because the birds only start to sing once the mist lifts.
Part of the reason I chose Utu for the Mixtape is because of the way it’s written, using natural harmonics. That technique is used a lot by virtuoso violinists, but I’d never heard an entire string section play a whole melody built from them: natural harmonics are never really in tune, which gives a nice eerie feeling to the piece. That was exactly what I was looking for: compositions which explore new sounds on old instruments.
Do you think there's still a misconception that new 'classical' music is designed to appeal to the head rather than the heart, or is that mindset falling away?
At the end of the day, I want music to touch me - and every single track on the Mixtape was chosen because it does just that. I do understand why there is still a perception that contemporary music is just technically-skilled, intelligently-executed pieces which keep emotion at arm’s length, because there was certainly an era when that was largely the case.
But paradoxically, the story behind why that happened is something which moves me a lot: art is of course a mirror of society in a way, and in the aftermath of two horrific world wars music became broken because the world itself was broken too. Everybody was in survival mode: so many countries had to build themselves back from scratch and work through generations of trauma, which resulted in music that was often raw, cacophonous or emotionally-distant.
That kind of modernism was a punk movement in its way, and now we’re back at the core: we want art because we want to be moved, we want to feel empathy with each other, we want to use music to share stories which haven’t been told until comparatively recently. For example, one of the composers that I love to champion is Outi Tarkiainen, who writes pieces about things like the experience of carrying a child and giving birth. Can you imagine that anybody would have taken her seriously twenty or even ten years ago? That’s why I say that we’re going in the right direction, where we can celebrate the diversity of voices and experiences: it’s all positive, and we all benefit from it. I think we’re living through a golden age of possibilities right now: who else is going to be on board?
BBC Symphony Orchestra, Dalia Stasevska
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