Benjamin Tassie: The Composers’ Fund
Landscape Instruments
Benjamin Tassie is a composer of electronic and acoustic music. Often combining baroque or Renaissance instrumentation with analogue synthesisers, Benjamin is interested in how historical instruments, forms, repertoire, and tuning systems can be recontextualised to speak to our contemporary experiences. Recent projects include Solo for Computer and Tape, a filmed installation for The National Gallery in London, Accrete, new music inspired by a Medieval bell tower site in the City of London, and British Baroque, a solo performance for Tate Britain.
With support from the PRS Foundation’s Composers’ Fund, Benjamin will create a new album of music to be released on the Birmingham Record Company label. Collaborating with instrument designer Sam Underwood, he will design and build three water-powered historical instruments: a spinet/clavicymbalum, rebec/hurdy-gurdy, and pipe organ/hydraulis. These instruments will be installed in the historic rivers Rivelin and Loxley in the west of Sheffield, so that the water’s flow powers the generation of musical sound. Filmed and recorded in-situ, the recording will blur the boundaries between field recording and mechanical, historical instrumental-music, engaging with ideas of nature, history, and our relationship to both.