Cevanne Horrocks-Hopayian

Cevanne Horrocks-Hopayian’s multifaceted works ignore the boundaries between art-forms and artistic cultures. An award-winning composer and performer, her ‘stand-out’ gig at the BBC Proms led to her description in the international media as a "21st-century diva" (in the original sense of the word). She writes for and performs with wide-ranging ensembles, acoustic and electronic, eastern and western, leaping from one project to another. On the surface, they seem to contrast sharply — her Ivors-nominated folk-electronica album BRACE (Crewdson & Cevanne, Accidental), seems at once more intimate and surreal than her large-scale orchestral work for the Royal Ballet, Seasons In Our World. But through everything runs a strong sense of line, rhythm, storytelling, and a voice that can only be hers.

Known for her unique ‘Eye Music’ scores, where visual structures create physical parameters for her composition, her works have been double nominated for the British Composer Awards, with her moving piece Muted Lines for saxophonist Trish Clowes winning the Jazz category. When in residence at the Handel & Hendrix Museum, her ‘Eye Music’ scores featured windows carved into the paper, guiding her compositional process to work with whichever notes the aperture revealed. Now, she expands her multi-media techniques with a recent commission to create ritual text and art projections onto the water of the Coventry Canal (Random String, 2021).

She writes extensively for pioneers of new music technology, and in live performance she manipulates her own voice and harp with DIY midi-controllers such as the 'Sonic Bonnet'. Her work for performers with physical disabilities such as Clarence Adoo, and for inclusive ensembles RNS Moves (Royal Northern Sinfonia) and BSO Resound (Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra) celebrates technology as an enabling tool and a means of creative expression for all.

Horrocks-Hopayian has a growing international reputation through work that has won grants, commissions, and fellowships in Europe, North America, the Middle East and China, and radio-play across the world. Her radio drama, DJ Helga’s Pirate Radio Show for Swedish National Radio, was runner-up in the International Prix Marulic in 2015 and featured percussionist Manu Delago. She won a call and travel award from the British Council to create a new work with the Melodia Women’s Choir of NYC, inspired by cultural and political pioneer Zitkala-Sa.

She is in demand as a public speaker in academia and interdisciplinary events, sharing her insights with the University of Cambridge, the Royal Academy of Music, Guildhall School of Music & Drama, Trinity Laban, the international conference for New Interfaces in Music & Electronics (NIME), lecturing in Jordan with the British Council, and Beijing with the LSO, and even online with Atlas Obscura (NYC).

Horrocks-Hopayian has often expressed gratitude for her relationship with the London Symphony Orchestra, after her residency, numerous collaborations and a recent release of her first composition for symphony orchestra, A Dancing Place, on their critically-acclaimed album Panufnik Legacies III. The LSO describe her as ‘one of today’s leading emerging composers’, which seems a fair assessment.