Short Biography
Dr Benjamin Tassie (b.1987) is a composer, sound-artist, and researcher. His work interrogates the latent possibilities of historical instruments, tuning systems, and performance practices, asking how these inherited materials might be reactivated to articulate the complexities of contemporary experience. Incorporating instrument design, custom electronics, installation, and long-form microtonal structures, Tassie’s music reconfigures the acoustical and conceptual frameworks of Early Music, situating this practice within present-day aesthetic, social, and perceptual contexts. His work has been commissioned and presented by leading cultural institutions, ensembles, and soloists including The National Galley, Tate Britain, Het Orgelpark (Amsterdam), the Royal Academy of Arts, Historic Royal Palaces, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, 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 and presenter of the weekly radio show Future Classical on Resonance FM.
Long Biography
Dr Benjamin Tassie (b.1987) is a composer, sound-artist, and researcher. His work interrogates the latent possibilities of historical instruments, tuning systems, and performance practices, asking how these inherited materials might be reactivated to articulate the complexities of contemporary experience. Incorporating instrument design, custom electronics, installation, and long-form microtonal structures, Tassie’s music reconfigures the acoustical and conceptual frameworks of Early Music, situating this practice within present-day aesthetic, social, and perceptual contexts.
Current projects extend this enquiry into the technological, historical, and embodied conditions of listening. Earth of Shine and Dark Mottling (2025–2026) is a concert work, immersive binaural and Dolby Atmos recording, and 360° virtual reality film for three spectrally retuned bass viols. Developed in collaboration with violist Liam Byrne and artist and creative technologist Sophie Hedderwick, the project approaches studio recording and 360° cinematography as tools for mediating microtonal tuning, gesture, and acoustic resonance. In 2026, Tassie will also complete O Suns—O Grass of Graves, a new concert work for saxophonist David Zucchi, to be premiered at the Crucible Playhouse, Sheffield. Centred on the saxophone’s unstable multiphonics and their extension through live electronic processing, the work investigates the threshold between pitch, air, and timbre.
Past works have similarly reimagined historical sound-worlds through technological and conceptual transformation. Earth of the Slumbering and Liquid Trees (2021–23) used bespoke studio processes and performance interfaces – including the ROLI Seaboard Rise keyboard – to digitally reconfigure some of the world’s most significant historical organs. Commissioned by Zubin Kanga for Royal Holloway’s Cyborg Soloists project, it was premiered at The National Gallery, London (2024), performed at Het Orgelpark, Amsterdam (2025), and released on Flung Recordings. In 2023, Tassie released A Ladder is Not the Only Kind of Time – his critically acclaimed album, film, and geolocated audio artwork for water-powered historical instruments and live performers. Recorded in Sheffield’s Rivelin Valley and released by Birmingham Record Company (NMC Recordings), the work was shortlisted for the 2024 Ivor Novello Award for Best Sound Art and named 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 write new music for Baroque strings and harpsichord: premiered and recorded in Reykjavík, it was later played at dawn through a single loudspeaker installed at Stanage Edge in the Peak District, engaging with ideas of modernity, time, and our shifting relationship to landscape. The same year, his residency with Mary Duggan Architects culminated in Accrete, a studio composition for multi-tracked medieval rebec and two sopranos that sonified a 12th-century church site in the City of London. The work was presented as a reel-to-reel tape installation in the building’s bell tower for the London Festival of Architecture. Other notable commissions include Solo for Computer and Tape for The National Gallery (London), British Baroque: Power and Illusion for Tate Britain, and Victoria: Woman and Crown for Kensington Palace, alongside collaborations with Liam Byrne and Rambert (Body, 2018), arrangements of songs by Björk, Radiohead, and others for the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and the site-specific choral work Silvertown (2017), created with Musarc and poet Annie Freud for performance in a disused East London factory.
From 2027, Tassie will embark on a major new body of work: a collection of site-specific installations, performances, and multimedia artworks that examine the intertwined histories of England’s East coast and the Aldeburgh Festival, tracing how place, memory, and cultural legacy continue to shape contemporary sonic practice.
Alongside his compositional practice, Tassie is Lecturer in Composition at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire where he is also Research and Innovation Associate on the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship project, ‘Sonic heritage and environmental change on England’s East Coast, 1718-present.’ He 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.
