Short Biography
Benjamin Tassie (b.1987) is a composer, sound-artist, and researcher. His work investigates the ways in which historical musical instruments, tuning systems, and performance practices can be recontextualised to speak to our contemporary experiences. Drawing on elements of instrument design, electronics, installation, and long-form microtonal and mixed media work, Tassie’s music has been commissioned and performed by organisations and ensembles including The National Galley, Tate Britain, Nordic Affect, Zubin Kanga, Liam Byrne, and the Ligeti Quartet. Awards include the prestigious PRS Foundation and Jerwood Arts Composers’ Fund award and an Ivor Novello Award nomination for ‘Best Sound-art’. He is Lecturer in Composition at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, Programme Manager at Music in the Round, and presenter of the weekly radio show Future Classical on Resonance FM.
Long Biography
Benjamin Tassie (b.1987) is a composer, sound-artist, and researcher. Writing for concert performance, installation, and digital media, his work investigates the ways in which historical musical instruments, tuning systems, and performance practices can be recontextualised to speak to our contemporary experiences.
Recent works include Earth of the Slumbering and Liquid Trees (2021-23), a large-scale concert work that used novel studio and performance technologies (including the ROLI Seaboard Rise) to digitally transform some of the world’s most significant historical organs. Commissioned by Zubin Kanga as part of Royal Holloway’s ‘Cyborg Soloists’ research project, the piece was premiered at The National Gallery (London) in January 2024 with a repeat performance at Het Orgelpark (Amsterdam) in 2025. It is released as a limited edition CD on Flung recordings in October 2025.
In 2023, Tassie released A Ladder is Not the Only Kind of Time, an album, film, and interactive smartphone app of new music for water-powered historical musical instruments and live instrumentalists. Recorded in Sheffield’s historic Rivelin Valley, the album was released on CD by the Birmingham Record Company, an imprint of NMC Recordings. It was shortlisted for an Ivor Novello Award 2024 for ‘Best Sound-art’ and was selected as one of New Scientist’s ‘Best Science-Inflected Albums of 2023’. The album was described by BBC Radio 3’s Kate Molleson as “a very subtle and time slowing album” and by The Quietus as “a series of texturally rich drift states”.
In 2021, Tassie 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, Tassie’s year-long residency with the architecture practice Mary Duggan Architects culminated with 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 bell tower as a reel-to-reel tape installation for the London Festival of Architecture 2021.
Other notable commissions include Solo for Computer and Tape, a filmed sound-installation commissioned by The National Gallery (London), British Baroque: Power and Illusion, a new concert performance for historical musical instruments and live electronics commissioned 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, Tassie has composed music for viola da gamba player Liam Byrne and dance company Rambert (Body, 2018), arranged pop songs by Björk, Radiohead, and others for period orchestra The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and composed a site-specific choir work for performance in a disused factory in East London in collaboration with Musarc and the poet Annie Freud (Silvertown, 2017).
Upcoming commissions include new music for three microtonal bass viols (Earth of Shine and Dark Mottling, due for completion in 2026), new music for sampler-harpsichord and percussion for GBSR Duo (2026), and a large-scale multi-media work exploring Imogen Holst’s interest in Medieval music and the disappearing landscapes of the East of England (Britten Pears Arts, UKRI, 2029).
Alongside his compositional practice, Tassie is Lecturer in Composition at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire where he leads a number of modules at Undergraduate and Postgraduate levels, as well as teaching composition. He is Programme Manager at the Sheffield-based chamber music series Music in the Round and is host of the weekly radio show Future Classical on Resonance FM in which he interviews composers about their work. Guests have included George Benjamin, John Luther Adams, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Cassandra Miller, Ellen Fullman, Annea Lockwood, Sarah Davachi, Jürg Frey, and Rebecca Saunders.
Awards include a nomination for an Ivor Novello Award 2024 (Best Sound Art), the prestigious 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 (2015), an Arts Foundation Fellowship nomination, and the Sound and Music Composer-Curator award.
Tassie 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 (with Distinction) 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.
