Benjamin Tassie

Short Biography

Benjamin Tassie (b.1987) is a composer, sound-artist, and researcher. He is particularly interested in how historical musical instruments, tuning systems, and performance practices can be recontextualised to speak to our contemporary experiences. His music has been commissioned and performed by organisations and ensembles including The National Galley, Tate Britain, Historic Royal Palaces, Nordic Affect, Zubin Kanga, Liam Byrne, and the Ligeti Quartet. Awards include the prestigious PRS Foundation and Jerwood Arts Composers’ Fund award and a shortlist for an Ivor Novello Award 2024 (to be announced 12 November 2024). He holds a PhD from Royal Birmingham Conservatoire where he is now Visiting Lecturer. He is also Resident Researcher at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Programme Manager at Music in the Round, and is presenter of the weekly radio show Future Classical on Resonance FM.

Long Biography

Benjamin Tassie (b.1987) is a composer, sound-artist, and researcher. Creating works for concert performance, installation, and digital media, he is interested in how historical musical instruments, tuning systems, and performance practices can be recontextualised to speak to our contemporary experiences, in particular issues of desacralised modernity and the climate emergency.

Recent works include Earth of the Slumbering and Liquid Trees, a large-scale concert work that used new studio and performance technologies to augment the sound and capabilities of some of the world’s most significant historical organs. Commissioned by the pianist Zubin Kanga as part of Royal Holloway’s ‘Cyborg Soloists’ research project, the piece was premiered at The National Gallery in January 2024. In 2023, Benjamin released A Ladder is Not the Only Kind of Time, an album and film of new music for water-powered musical instruments recorded in Sheffield’s historic Rivelin Valley. Released on the Birmingham Record Company label (an imprint of NMC Recordings), the album was one of New Scientist’s ‘Best Science-Inflected Albums of 2023’ and was described by BBC Radio 3’s Kate Molleson as “a very subtle and time slowing album” and by The Quietus as “lulling compositions… a series of texturally rich drift states”. The project has been shortlisted for an Ivor Novello Award 2024 in the ‘best sound-art category’ (to be announced 12 November 2024).

Place and nature have been recurring interests in Benjamin’s work. In 2021, Benjamin collaborated with the Icelandic Baroque quartet Nordic Affect to compose new music for Baroque strings and harpsichord. Premiered and recorded in Reykjavik, the music was played, at dawn, through a single speaker installed at Stanage Edge in the Peak District. Exploring ideas around modernity, time, and our changing relationship to the landscape, the work was presented at the AEC European Platform for Artistic Research in Music conference at the Royal Academy of Music in 2022. Also in 2021, Benjamin’s year-long residency with the architecture practice Mary Duggan Architects culminated in Accrete, a new studio-composition for multi-tracked Medieval rebec and two sopranos. The sonification of a 12th Century church site in the City of London, Accrete was presented in the building’s tower as a reel-to-reel tape installation for the London Festival of Architecture.

Other notable commissions include Solo for Computer and Tape, a filmed sound-installation commissioned by The National Gallery in London in 2020, British Baroque: Power and Illusion, a new concert performance for historical instruments and electronics commissioned, in 2020, by Tate Britain, and Victoria: Woman and Crown, a multi-channel soundtrack-installation created for Kensington Palace’s 2019 exhibition of the same name. Elsewhere, Benjamin composed music for viola da gamba player Liam Byrne and dance company Rambert (Body, 2018), arranged songs by Björk, Radiohead, and others for period orchestra The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and composed a new choir work with Musarc and poet Annie Freud for performance in a disused factory in East London (Silvertown, 2017).

Upcoming projects include the creation of an ‘augmented harpsichord’ as part of Benjamin’s research residency at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama (2024), and a new work for microtonal-harpsichord and percussion for GBSR Duo (2025).

Outside his work as a composer, Benjamin is Programme Manager at the Sheffield-based chamber music series Music in the Round. He is also host of the weekly radio show Future Classical on Resonance FM in which he interviews composers about their work. Guests have included John Luther Adams, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Cassandra Miller, Andrew Hamilton, Sarah Davachi, Jürg Frey, and Rebecca Saunders. He is also Visiting Lecturer at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire where he leads the Masters module ‘Contemporary Music Concepts and Practices’, the second year undergraduate ‘Composition Studies’ course, and teaches composition.

Awards include the PRS Foundation and Jerwood Arts Composers’ Fund award, an Arts Council England ‘Developing Your Creative Practice’ grant, a Help Musicians UK Bursary, the British Music Collection New Voices Composer Award, an Arts Foundation Fellowship nomination, and the Sound and Music Composer-Curator award.

Benjamin holds a PhD from Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. His project, ‘Renaissance Synthesisers: New Frameworks for Composition and Performance with Early Music Instruments’, was supervised by Professor Joe Cutler, Professor Jamie Savan, and Dr Andrew Hamilton, and was funded by the UKRI Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership. Previously, Benjamin completed a Master’s Degree at the Royal College of Music where he was an RCM Scholar with support from the Angela Nankivell Award, the Ralph Vaughan Williams Trust, and the St. Marylebone Educational Foundation. In 2009, he graduated with First Class Honours from the joint undergraduate degree at King’s College London and the Royal Academy of Music.

Please note: in 2023, in response to Spotify’s announced plans to limit pay-outs to musicians, I removed my music from all streaming platforms. Much of my work is available to listen to for free on this website, or on a PWYC basis on my Bandcamp page.