Rufus Isabel Elliot (it/its) is a composer, musician and member of the LSO Jerwood Composer+ scheme 2023/24. As part of the scheme, it presents an evening of contemporary chamber music, including brand new work of its own, on Saturday 13 January at LSO St Luke’s – holding, breathing, beating.
I’m enjoying how much creative energy the project is already bringing me, as I anticipate bringing together works and ideas I’m excited about alongside composing new works for such amazing players.
– Rufus Isabel Elliot on the LSO Jerwood Composer+ Scheme
Quickfire Questions
What inspires your music the most?
Often poetry, and also the place I’m in.
How would you describe your creative practice?
I’m often bringing together a constellation of words and music and images to find some kind of imagined world. Someone recently described my work as bridging sensuality with desolation.
In three words, what can people expect from your event in January?
Emotion, refraction, physicality.
What do you want people to feel from your event?
I hope that the audience can experience their own imaginative journey, entering a mysterious and reflective world.
What’s your favourite concert you have been to recently?
I heard David Fennessy’s Conquest of the Useless played in a wonderful performance by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra at City Halls in Glasgow. There was a huge scope of musicality, and a grandness matched by vulnerability in Dave’s writing and performance.
You’re going to a desert island and can only take one film, one book and one piece of music. What do you take?
James Joyce said Finnegans Wake took him 16 years to write, and should take as long to read. So thinking strategically … I would choose Ursula K Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, which you can disappear to for an afternoon. The Georgian film And Then We Danced is a beautiful film about first [queer] love and traditional dance (and a workaround for bringing some more music). And maybe Ludwig van Beethoven’s String Quartet No 15, for grieving on my lonely island.
Listen To
Biography
Rufus Isabel Elliot (it/its) is a composer and musician originally from Tower Hamlets, living now in North West Scotland. Rufus has written funerary music for doomed spaceships and orchestral music about rotting seaweed. It cares about honesty and openness. Its work is concerned with testimony, the conditions in which one speaks out, and how those stories are passed on.
Its music is ‘fluid and ambitious’ (The Wire), ‘stunningly intimate’ (The Quietus), and ‘achingly fragile’ (The Scotsman).
So far this year, Rufus has enjoyed working on a new work for Tectonics Festival, and a new collaborative work with artists Miek Zwamborn and Rutger Emmelkamp of Knockvologan Studies, Isle of Mull.
