Rebecca Dale isn’t a composer who enjoys self-promotion. She prefers the freedom of solitude, and I get the sense she’d much rather write music without dealing with the baggage of having to defend or promote it.

Still, Dale manages to straddle the academic and the accessible with tremendous aplomb and she has acquired a dedicated audience of listeners around the world. She is a remarkably quick thinker, and she reflects profoundly on issues spanning feminism, psychology and musicology, something that is necessary for one side of her work – the rapid deadlines of the TV and film music industry.

But Dale is best known for her Materna Requiem (2018), which was written to process the death of her mother. She made history in 2018 as the first female composer to sign to Decca Classics, and her debut album, ‘Requiem for my Mother’, combined the Requiem with a choral symphony, When Music Sounds, performed by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and Kantos Chamber Choir. ‘I felt pretty undeserving of the whole thing,’ Dale tells me. ‘I just felt very lucky, and I still am really grateful that it gave me that platform.’

This recording came about after Decca heard another recording of Dale’s music and asked her if she had anything else. ‘It was part of my grieving process to write the Requiem and I never expected it to be recorded. I didn’t write it for it to be performed, which sounds mad – the idea of writing a whole Requiem. I wrote it purely out of the exigencies of connecting to all that stuff and honouring my mother, who loved sweeping melody – the kind of thing I’d felt I wasn’t “supposed” to write. Suddenly, when you lose someone, that doesn’t matter anymore.’

In his Gramophone review of this Decca album (10/18), Pwyll ap Siôn spoke about its ability to ‘build bridges’ through its ‘highly accessible language’. Ap Siôn draws comparisons with music by Eric Whitacre, Paul Mealor and Patrick Hawes and their ‘consonant choral style’, though Dale appears not to sit in any particular camp of composers and is quite happy doing her own thing.

This hasn’t come without criticism for her musical style, which Dale says was something that initially turned her off composing altogether. It’s not the first time a composer has recalled being berated while young for writing melody. ‘I was told that I needed to find different modes of expression,’ Dale says. ‘It didn’t stop me being moved by that kind of music, but it made me feel bad about the kind of things I naturally gravitated towards writing; so I thought that composing wasn’t for me. Because I was quite academic, I thought “OK, I’ll go and do a different degree” – though I spent a lot of time doing music rather than my actual degree.’

After studying Politics, Philosophy and Economics at the University of Oxford and a brief stint in media research, Dale had what she describes as a ‘what am I doing with my life’ moment. She moved into the world of film and TV music, undertaking a Masters at the National Film and Television School.

But concert music has always been a big part of Dale’s life, despite ongoing work composing for film. Playing the violin and piano as a child led to an interest in and love for the orchestra, which is ultimately where she feels best able to express her creativity. Her symphonic suite When Music Sounds was written in 2013, a single from which – ‘I’ll Sing’, performed by The Cantus Ensemble, The Studio Orchestra and Jeff Atmajian – was released in 2017 and shot to the top of the classical charts. Its sound world is at first intimate, with a strings-only texture before the choir enters, echoing the soaring string melodies.

Dale’s affinity for choral writing has led to a number of commissions and collaborations with acclaimed vocal ensembles. Winter, the title track for a Voces8 album (12/16), was described by Gramophone’s Malcolm Riley as being the ‘finest of all’ of the works on the recording. Another commission came from the Church of England and Classic FM in 2021 for a new setting of In the Bleak Midwinter for St Martin’s Voices. Sansara, Kantos and Sonoro have also recorded choral works by Dale.

Dale’s second album, this time on Signum, focuses on her works for choir and orchestra, as well as for the cello. The cellist Guy Johnston, the Philharmonia and Tenebrae perform Dale’s Concerto, Night Seasons (2022), which was written after emerging from the pandemic and following the loss of the composer’s father. Another great British cellist, Steven Isserlis, appears in the album’s other work, There Will Come, commissioned by the Philharmonia as part of their Human/Nature series. In her album notes, Dale describes the period when she was writing this concerto as ‘one of the darkest of my life’, and in this music she explores the extremes of what the cello can do. The album moves into a harmonically progressive style and is at times emotionally turbulent. Whereas Dale’s Requiem looked back at a style of music her mother loved, Night Seasons looks in all directions – to Dale’s harmonic obsessions, depths of colour and orchestral risk-taking, especially apparent in the concerto’s final movement.

When I ask Dale about the pressure she felt to stray from writing music in the style she enjoys, she refers to an article by the composer Sarah Kirkland Snider for New Music USA about gendered language in composition and criticism of music that is ‘emotional’ or ‘feminine’. Snider says: ‘Dismissing emotional immediacy as effeminate, lightweight, insubstantial – girlifying it … perpetuates tired, sexist clichés and messily condemns a long-embattled-and-recently-advanced aesthetic freedom in new music.’

Dale felt a certain ‘relief’ in reading this article: ‘I feel protective of young girls’ and women’s experiences and that they don’t get shamed out of being able to express the things that they enjoy. My interests are in music that moves me in some way – sometimes that music can involve pastiche elements, and sometimes it’s really fun to write.’

When recording her own music Dale says she is quite specific about the sound she is aiming for and sees the mix as part of the composing process, so likes to be hands-on in recording sessions, assisting with the producing for much of her work. On a Gramophone podcast last year, she spoke of the experience of recording and collaborating: ‘there’s no greater privilege than being in a room with great musicians’. Of recent commissions and projects, writing for solo musicians takes centre stage. Percussionist Alexej Gerassimez recently premiered a work for percussion and choir at the Tonhalle Düsseldorf, and a newly recorded commission with cellist Raphaela Gromes and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester will be released later in 2025.

Looking ahead, Dale believes that getting older brings a certain freedom in not having to prove herself in the same way as she did in her twenties. Yet she maintains a poignant relationship with her earlier music: ‘it’s a representation of where you are at that time. What you write is always a frozen place in time, with the capacity to time travel. That’s the amazing thing about music.’

Recommended recordings

Night Seasons

Steven Isserlis, Guy Johnston vcs; Tenebrae; Philharmonia Orchestra / Michael Collins, Nigel Short (Signum)

This second album of Dale’s music explores her writing for choir, orchestra and the cello. Including her cello concerto Night Seasons it embraces some of her darker, more epic and cinematic writing.

Winter

Voces8 (Decca)

This specially commissioned title track for Voces8’s album ‘Winter’ sets words by Tamsin Collinson. The sound-world is stark, intimate and cinematic and showcases Dale’s affinity for composing for the voice.

Requiem for my Mother

Louise Alder, Nazan Fikret sops; Trystan ten; Hannah Dienes-Williams, Edward Hyde trebs; Kantos Chamber Choir; The Cantus Ensemble; Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra / Clark Rundell; The Studio Orchestra / Jeff Atmajian (Decca)

Rebecca Dale’s Materna Requiem homes in on the musical style that was loved by her late mother, and composing it was part of the process of Dale’s connecting with her mother’s death from cancer.