Collaborating with your partner, Nazim Cinar, on a Turkish series sounds fascinating. What unique challenges or rewards have you experienced in merging your musical styles?

My partner, Nazım, comes from a different school of ‘musical thought’ and leans into his cultural heritage. He’s an incredibly versatile composer and knows his way around my classical/orchestral background more than well enough to get by without me. Our shared obsession with film scores as a medium over the past century also casts a wide net in terms of our mutual influences.

I think our blend prompts me to pull apart the way I mentally construct music and release myself from habits or approaches that might actually stifle my creativity. There’s a lot of freedom and spontaneity in his tradition: a lot of rhythmic excitement and irregularity, and a lot of linear thinking. So, I’ve unboxed myself a bit from thinking too harmonically and embraced some musical arcs and language that weren’t apparent to me before. Aligning terminology and distinct musical concepts (and incorporating things like the microtonal ‘comma’) can be challenging, but solutions are soon found once we actually use our ears.

Nazım’s heritage is a mix of ethnic minorities from Anatolia (Turkey), so there’s a deep folk tradition—and preservation of that clandestine history—that seeps through in music from his part of the world, whether in a modern original composition or an arrangement. I’ve enjoyed digging deeper into those ‘lost voices’ and trying to honor them.

The series you mentioned centers on the epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient Mesopotamian hero, so the story is rooted in that region. It will likely be picked up for worldwide distribution. So, the intended audience is very much global. The mix of his geographic and cultural authenticity, along with our shared love of orchestral/symphonic writing (where my expertise is more slanted), hopefully pushes it outwards on all sides.

Your choral work is being performed at the Beijing Music Festival in October under the baton of Tan Dun. What does this milestone mean to you, and can you share more about the piece’s significance and its journey to this prestigious event?

The work is called The Way We Go and is a setting of a poem by the contemporary poet Katharine Towers. It’s a cappella and performed without a conductor, though Tan Dun is a central figure in the festival. This will be the first time one of my works is performed in East Asia, and I’m honored to have it performed in both Beijing and Shanghai.

I’m South African, and Cape Town Opera Company is touring with a program of South African choral music titled HORIZONS, featuring works by composers like Michael Moerane and Mzilikazi Khumalo. I feel lucky to contribute to my country’s cultural footprint. The Beijing performance is at the Temple of Heaven, which promises incredible acoustics.

The work, scored for TTBB (male voices), was originally commissioned by the Swedish choir Linköping Studentsångare, who sought female composers and poets for their male-voiced choir. I thought this was an insightful reversal of the ‘male writers writing female characters’ trope.

The idea for the piece dates back to when I had just returned to London for my master’s at the Royal College of Music. The London Underground had an initiative called “Poems on the Underground,” where poetry was displayed in train cars. One morning, I saw this poem, which begins: “the way we go about our lives, trying out each empty room, like houses we might own…” It beautifully captures the universal pursuit of a full life, until nature inevitably calls us home: “… we’re gone, leaving the doors open, all the lights burning.”

That moment struck me deeply, perhaps because of the life changes I was going through. I promised myself I’d set it to music someday, and a decade later, with Katharine Towers’ blessing, I did!

Composing for ballet has played a significant role in shaping your music for film. In what ways does ballet music influence your approach to scoring films, and are there any specific techniques that carry over between the two disciplines?

My background is classical, and I still write concert hall works, however I fell into composing for ballet serendipitously.

I’m a fan of Prokofiev’s old film scores, especially Battle on the Ice from Alexander Nevsky. For me, a good score needs a strong sense of tempo and pacing, which is also crucial for choreography. Structurally, film and ballet composing are similar, though ballet music usually comes first.

A short piece of film music led to my first ballet commission. I had rescored a clip from Rififi (1956), blending noir and modern classical. Choreographer Morgann Runacre-Temple found it online and asked if I could write something similar but longer and suitable for staging.

That piece became Give My Love to the Sunrise, a short ballet for the English National Ballet based on The Lady from Shanghai. We had two phenomenal soloist principal dancers, and the performances were electric.

At one of the shows, the ENB’s music director, Gavin Sutherland, approached me about composing for an upcoming work, and of course, I said yes. That piece, Unsilenced, was part of the “She Said” bill, featuring ballets choreographed by women.

Writing for ballet has shaped my approach to film scores as cohesive works with internal logic, rather than as individual cues. It’s also made me more creative with rhythm and meter—dancers love an erratic pulse!

You are working on a new documentary with Louise Hogarth, which is your second film with her. How has her approach to filmmaking influenced your approach to scoring? 

Louise Hogarth always comes up with interesting takes on what might otherwise be overdone topics. The first feature documentary I scored of Louise’s, Elephant Refugees (Prime Video), is an elephant-themed nature film, showcasing stunning visuals. It also offers a beautiful personal account of a family in Botswana living in the Kalahari Desert along an ancient migration pathway for elephants. The elephants move through in search of water, but due to severe regional drought, they turn to the family for help finding it. The influx keeps coming because Botswana is the only country in Southern Africa with a poaching ban, and somehow, the elephants figure this out and head there.

It was a great opportunity to draw on my South African upbringing and weave that into my music. Her film challenged me to seek out a sensitive ‘close-up’ approach to scoring a nature documentary, despite the temptation to go for sweeping vistas. I mean, it’s about elephants, right? But did you know they make almost no sound when they walk due to their thick cushioned feet? (With the exception of the occasional stampede!) Jerome Flynn (Ser Bronn from Game of Thrones), who did the narration, has a beautiful, deep, soothing voice that completed the sonic picture.

In a continuation of that taste for the unconventional, her next project is a controversial expose on medical conspiracies. I want to add this caveat straight away: I am a physics, medicine, and ‘scientific burden of proof’ nerd (from a family of doctors and surgeons), so I’m not going to comment on the film’s findings content-wise (and she knows it!). But musically, it’s a chance to explore a grittier, more textural side of my writing, coupled with my intuitive lyrical style, which she also encourages. God love a director who wants motifs!

Working with her and her films definitely brings out fresh sides of my compositional personality while giving me the space to maintain ‘my’ voice.

On your current project, you immersed yourself in Istanbul. How does working in different cultural contexts impact your orchestration style?

The film premiering at Sundance is called “Cold White” (Soğuk Beyaz), an intimate cultural commentary on social perceptions in a conservative society, directed by a brilliant young filmmaker with a captivating storytelling style. I’ve just orchestrated Nazım’s original score, which we developed together in Istanbul. My orchestration approach prioritizes realizing the composer’s voice and the film’s musical world, though naturally my style will subtly influence the end result.

His score embodies a folk/traditional style that is very textural, and at times almost improvisatory. It uses many traditional instruments to realize this. These instruments aren’t always sonically prominent, so I prioritize giving them space to breathe within the orchestral texture. 
I aim to orchestrate with intention, weaving counter melodies and moving parts in denser cues to reflect the folk style’s linear monophony and polyphony

At times I substitute standard orchestral instruments with similar timbral qualities to traditional ones, like the Oboe resembling the Anatolian Zurna. This keeps the palette anchored in the same world, while saving the “magic” and purity of the traditional instruments for key moments.

The score includes vocal elements in indigenous Anatolian dialects, featuring Nazım’s mom singing a haunting Kurdish mourning song. At his request, I also sing in Zaza, a language spoken by a tiny ethnic minority in Turkey, albeit learning the words phonetically and reinterpreting traditional vocal styles.

Each opportunity to explore timbres and textures enriches my own work as a composer, providing a mental bank of solutions from orchestration projects that become colors in my writing. There’s always a new shade to concoct!

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