The score is available for free download until 31 August 2025.

On the way to forging a career principally as a composer, Alice Beckwith has immersed herself in performing, teaching, examining, and has usefully engaged with the music industry in ways that will inform the wider aspects of her promotion, sponsorship and publishing. Her childhood in West Yorkshire nurtured a love of music from an early age.

‘My sister and I were home-educated in Bradford until we were 11, and my parents encouraged us to be socialised through music and ballet. We’d go to lunchtime concerts every week at the Studio Theatre, at St George’s Hall and also see the Birmingham Royal Ballet. But I feel that home is actually Halifax, which is where we moved for school.’

Lessons at the Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM) junior department in oboe and piano laid the foundations for ongoing orchestral playing and chamber music as well as piano accompanying and teaching. An interest in composition was encouraged, but it was a strong academic leaning that led Beckwith to read Music at Lincoln College, Oxford. There she found time for instrumental playing, especially contemporary music, which sparked a year of postgraduate study at the Royal Academy of Music. But it was after that year that her first forays into the music industry began to furnish her with tools and experience that are useful to her now as she develops a composing career.

Working as a promotions intern for Sally Groves, then creative director at music publisher Schott & Co, Beckwith learnt how the relationship between composer and publisher works. ‘They were very good to me, sending me out to concerts to represent Schott and to meet their artists.’ Next stop in her commercial grounding was a fundraising stint at English National Opera which provided an insight into patrons and their support of the arts. Moving back up north, Beckwith worked at the Ulverston International Music Festival as assistant to creative director Anthony Hewitt.

Since the pandemic, singing has become a regular endeavour for Beckwith. She performs with the St Endellion Easter Festival Chorus, and rehearses weekly with the Hallé Choir in Manchester. Gaining a deeper understanding of writing for choir through her choral singing has also highlighted the contrast between a piano rehearsal score and the music coming alive with full orchestral colour. ‘Rehearsing Ryan Wigglesworth’s Magnificat, I suddenly understood the orchestration and why he had written what he had written.’

Recently, Beckwith was selected by a new online organisation formed to help composers forge links with potential sponsors and supporters. Music Patron is the brainchild of composer, financier and philanthropist Anthony Bolton, to provide 21st-century patronage on a subscription basis. The platform currently hosts 28 composers of diverse styles. Sharing insights into her creative life as a composer, Beckwith finds this growing network of patrons lending financial support as well as attending her performances.

In 2023 Beckwith was one of six musicians invited to take part in the Cheltenham Music Festival Composer Academy. She was mentored by conductor George Parris and composer Daniel Kidane, and set poetry for The Carice Singers. What did she gain from that scheme? ‘It offered an immersive week writing an eight-part choral piece. We each had two workshop sessions, further rehearsal, and two concert performances of our works. So much thought went into the planning, and learning from George and Dan was a great experience. The ensemble were really proactive and helpful in suggesting revisions.’

The three choral songs draw on texts from the Psalms, W B Yeats and Walter de la Mare. There is expressive phrasing in her music, effective use of homophonic and layered textures, rich tonal harmonies vying with dissonance, and all within an identifiably cogent language. How is it formed?

‘Can I define my musical language? Probably not. But storytelling, colour and timbre are my central palette. And that operates as a useful guide when I am setting a melody or starting to write for voice. A sense of mood and feeling is something that I seek to communicate, and that comes from the musical colour itself.’ Influences hark back to her early experiences of ballet music, and include Beethoven symphonies and quartets, and Lieder (while at Oxford, the city’s Lieder Festival developed her love of Schubert and Schumann and song-writing in general).

Recent scores reveal that response to poetry and a sensitivity to writing for chamber ensembles. The Golden Thread (2022) is a cantata for mezzo soprano and mixed ensemble themed around the Green Man and the Erl King (and using half a dozen different sources) commissioned by the Green Man Art Gallery, Buxton; it received a first London performance at the 2023 Tête à Tête Opera Festival. The large ensemble’s scoring lends a transparency to the blend of instruments and allows the music to be agile. The harp adds colour and binds the textures together. There are spoken lines of poetry that introduce each new movement, especially drawing on the text from Ecclesiastes. The vocal line is expressive and lyrical. Setting separate short texts can lead to a fragmented whole, yet the form of this cantata seems well bound together.

‘I used Angela Carter’s retelling of the Erl King, which is grim but fantastic. It’s dramatic and dark, but there’s also hope and renewal. I felt that I could present it from a female point of view, a young woman’s encounter in the woods. The title references words from the Queen’s Christmas broadcast of 1981 when she reminded us, “the golden thread of courage has no end”. ’

Alice Beckwith’s New Music piece, Tomorrow, at dawn, scored for eight-part choir, sets a poem by Victor Hugo. ‘Last autumn in France I saw this poem inscribed beneath a bust of the poet. It’s written in memory of his daughter who drowned in the Seine, and tells of him going to visit her grave to lay flowers. This exquisite text was my starting point. Simultaneously, we were singing Lili Boulanger’s setting of Psalm 130 in the Hallé Choir. I found it interesting to see how she structured her music and used the voices in different groups.’

It’s an evocative text. The word-setting is vivid throughout, often with a single melodic line clearly defining the words with a subdued harmonic accompaniment. Key and texture change at decisive moments in the poem and the harmonic language intensifies to the end. How important to her music is a sense of key?

‘I do find myself quite unwilling to negotiate a different note sometimes. It’s the colour of it, I think – I don’t want a G sharp, I want an A flat. Certain notes function as different jumping off points in my creative process.’

Plans for the future indicate Beckwith’s musical goals as well as her keenness to reach wider audiences and communities. ‘In a nutshell, the last few years have been an absolute blur, with teaching, running a concert series and a number of commissions. Now is the time for me to take stock and redirect my focus. There’s an element of learning to trust myself as an artist. I want to write an oboe quartet, explore opera for children, and an orchestral piece is on the horizon too. I do feel that the connection between music and the general public, particularly in terms of classical and contemporary music, risks them moving further and further apart. So outreach to engage with all strata of the community – adults and children – is hugely important.’ 

Download the score

The score for Tomorrow, at dawn, commissioned by Choir & Organ in partnership with The Choir of Trinity College Cambridge, is available to download and perform until 31 August 2025.

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