Often I wonder what this period of new music in the UK might end up being called in the future. We are in a time where new music is becoming cool again – musicians in their late twenties and early thirties making big, bold creations and bringing with them a new and curious audience. There’s Aisha Orazbayeva, 12 Ensemble, Manchester Collective, GBSR Duo, Sean Shibe, Exaudi, Explore Ensemble, Apartment House – and Oliver Leith has collaborated with all of them.

Collaboration is front and centre in Leith’s work. It’s a useful shorthand method, he tells me. His notation styles can be learnt by the individuals he works with frequently, and so he doesn’t have to explain himself so often. But personality is also clearly an important factor in encouraging so many musicians to take up his music. Leith is a gentle, open, funny and piercingly honest human to encounter. ‘I was always quite jealous of people being able to identify certain composers’ music – “Ohh, that’s Beethoven something,” then I’d say: “I love it, but I don’t know what it is.” I think sometimes people are surprised that I don’t know.’

Then there are his influences. Composers I speak to often mention György Kurtág or Bach or Xenakis. Leith mentions his greatest muse: sound. ‘I have obsessions for types of music,’ he explains. ‘I will go down rabbit holes … I’ve been listening to these car horn things they make in India this morning.’ Leith’s instrumentation on his Faber scores gives an insight into the sounds he loves to create. The score for Pearly, Goldy, Woody, Bloody, or, Abundance (2022) for orchestra asks for two flutes, two clarinets and so on; then ‘gun (optional)’ and ‘water fountain (optional)’.

Leith was born in north London in 1990. His parents, photographers of fine art, instilled in him an interest in the visual world from a young age. From there, he began studying music, first on the classical guitar, and then – as the reality of performing and its pressure set in – he moved his focus to sound and composition. ‘We had a family video camera and would film the television screen. I’d play something recorded and then I would film the screen so that I could loop on top of it. I was using the camera as recording software very early on, at about 10 years old.’

Writing for his classmates at school led to a growing obsession with sound and writing music, taking Leith to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, where he studied composition with Richard Baker, Julian Philips and Paul Newland. It’s also at Guildhall, in association with the Royal Opera House, that he eventually became Doctoral Composer-in-Residence in 2019, an appointment that led to his writing his first opera, Last Days (2020-22) – an adaptation of Gus Van Sant’s 2005 film loosely inspired by the final days of grunge icon Kurt Cobain of the band Nirvana.

But prior to Leith’s operatic focus came huge early-life success. Taxa (2013), his first commission for symphony orchestra, was soon followed by a Royal Philharmonic Society Composition Prize in 2014. In the same year he wrote Hand Coloured for mezzo and nine players, which was recorded for NMC. This piece is a ‘re-colouring’ of Zelus Familie from the 14th-century French poem Roman de Fauvel. Leith explains, ‘I was interested by a hand-coloured postcard of Porthcawl in which the grey skies and water had been given an unnatural Mediterranean blue. I thought it was quite a nice idea, to be able to change something completely but keeping the bones’.

The following year, 2015, made way for A Day at the Spa for saxophone quartet, for which Leith won a British Composer Award in 2016. Good day good day bad day bad day came in 2018, commissioned by long-term collaborators the piano and percussion ensemble GBSR Duo. In a programme note, Leith describes the work as ‘a tender look at the simultaneously debilitating and beautiful irrationalities of our everyday lives; how our obsessions and compulsions surface and the rituals, superstitions and routines we all play out to appease our minds’.

Honey Siren (2019) for strings was Leith’s next big success, commissioned by 12 Ensemble. In 2020 it won the Ivors Composer Award in the Large Chamber category and appeared on 12 Ensemble’s album ‘Death and the Maiden’. Its movement titles move from ‘Like thick air’ to ‘Full like drips’ and finally ‘Like slow dancing in honey’, which ends with strong, disturbing siren pitches oscillating in unison.

Other works from this time include Uh Huh, Yeah for The Hermes Experiment’s voice, clarinet, harp and double bass combination. Still frequently performed by the group, it leans into Leith’s unorthodox performance directions, the score even featuring smiley faces, which he indicates ‘means smile, if you can’.

The string quartet The Big House (2021) was written for the Ruisi Quartet, following various commissions for solo instruments throughout the pandemic. In his Gramophone review of the Ruisi’s Pentatone recording (5/23), David Threasher describes it as music ‘whose bigness contains the very seeds of its own decay’ – suggesting the organic matter with which Leith begins and ends his creations.

Leith’s opera Last Days, written with Matt Copson, saw its US premiere in Los Angeles in February this year, conducted by one of Leith’s champions, Thomas Adès. Recently released on Platoon, the opera draws heavily on the composer’s long-term collaborators – and there they are on the recording: an inseparable Leith family of Sean Shibe, GBSR Duo and 12 Ensemble who came together again for the premiere in June of Doom and the Dooms (2024) at the Wigmore Hall.

Leith admits he’s now caught the opera bug, following the all-encompassing impact that Last Days had on his life during the pandemic. Of opera, he says, ‘It’s potentially the best form around, because it’s literally everything at the same time.’ He promises more to come.

In more recent months, the composer has turned to curating concert programmes, including Thrilly Marvel Chants for vocal ensemble Exaudi and events at Bold Tendencies in Peckham, south-east London. I ask if he enjoys advocating for other composers and collaborators as his own profile has grown, but Leith is quick to challenge whether he yet has enough power or success to make a tangible difference. ‘I’ve benefited from older friends, who’ve commissioned me. And I look forward to the day when I can do that for others, because there are great hidden things to be heard.’

This article originally appeared in the September 2024 issue of Gramophone. Whether you want to enjoy Gramophone online, explore our unique Reviews Database or our huge archive of issues stretching back to April 1923, or simply receive the magazine through your door every month, we've got the perfect subscription for you. Find out more at magsubscriptions.com