If you look on YouTube, there’s a clip of Benjamin Northey conducting marble, bark, silver, an absorbing orchestral work by Jessie Leov. Northey is having a hell of a time. Instead of waving a baton, he’s holding up fingers one at a time, his face deadly focused as he fights to hold everyone together.
Asked just how difficult her music is, Leov, who is this year’s NZSO National Youth Orchestra composer-in-residence, admits, “That piece was experimental.
“It was part of my masters portfolio and uses a graphic notation. It was a bit difficult to translate that into performance, and it’s not necessarily something I see myself continuing.”
Conductor Tianyi Lu and the players of the NYO will be relieved to hear that. It’s they who’ll be playing Leov’s latest work, Speculations on a Rainbow, in Wellington on July 5 and the following day in Palmerston North.
Leov’s new piece is a response to Judy Millar’s painting The Rainbow Loop. The picture is a maelstrom of black, white and yellow, using minimal materials to evoke drama and movement, as if Keith Haring were trapped in a Gordian knot.
“Some of the keywords I had when I was composing were ‘motion’ and ‘travel’,” Leov says. “For me, it was the idea of continuity and flow and disruption, this feeling of a shifting canvas; stability and turbulence – opposing ideas.”
Speculations … has already taken on a life of its own. The work is one of four accepted by the 2024 Edward T Cone Composition Institute. It’s a big deal and means she’ll soon head to the US, where the piece will be rehearsed by the New Jersey Symphony.
It isn’t Leov’s first taste of acclaim. She won the 2022 Compose Aotearoa award for her choral piece Lady of the River, taking the prize ahead of John Elmsly, one of our most important composers, in the process.
“[Winning] was exciting,” Leov says. “It’s validating when you have that kind of recognition. There was valuable feedback from the judges, and choral music is one of my passions.”
Leov is a member of the Sitting Room Singers and has sung barbershop for years. She’s also a singer-songwriter, performs in a pop music duo and is halfway through a major collaboration with sonic artist Garling Wu.
Does she ever worry she’s spreading herself too thinly?
“It’s all part of living a creative life,” Leov says. “There are so many facets of music I want to be involved in, and there’s a lot I want to do in the future all over the spectrum of music. It’s what I love doing.”
NYO Victory, featuring music by Khachaturian, Prokofiev and Jessie Leov, plays in Wellington on July 5 and Palmerston North on July 6.
