Tectonics 2026 Artist Profile

Naomi Pinnock’s music has been performed internationally by groups such as the SWR Symphony Orchestra, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, WDR Symphony Orchestra, Luxembourg Philharmonic Orchestra, Ensemble Adapter, Quatuor Bozzini, Arditti Quartet, KNM Berlin, EXAUDI, London Sinfonietta, Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart and Schola Heidelberg. Her works have featured at festivals including Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Tectonics Glasgow, Klangspuren Schwaz, ACHT BRÜCKEN, Ultraschall Berlin, Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik, ECLAT Festival Stuttgart, Rainy Days Festival Luxembourg, Festival Musica Strasbourg, Warsaw Autumn and the Donaueschinger Musiktage.

She studied composition in London with Harrison Birtwistle and Brian Elias and in Karlsruhe with Wolfgang Rihm.

In 2015-16 she received a scholarship from the Berlin Senate Department of Culture for a six-month residency at the Cité internationale des Arts in Paris and in 2017 a PRS Foundation Composers’ Fund Award.

In 2020 her first portrait CD – Lines and Spaces – was released on WERGO. Her work - I am, I am - written for soprano Juliet Fraser and the Sonar Quartett, received the 2020 Royal Philharmonic Society Award for Chamber-Scale Composition.

She is the recipient of a 2022 Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung Composer Prize.

She currently lives in Biel/Bienne in Switzerland.

I put lines down and wipe them away
for orchestra

Commissioned by the Donaueschinger Musiktage/ SWR with support from the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia

“I draw. That’s really what I do — I put lines down and wipe them away”
Amy Sillman

In the process of composing, I often collect images, quotes and words and tape them up in a mostly random order on the wall behind my desk. In this instance they were mostly Amy Sillman, Robert Morris, Anne Carson and me.

The mingling of these makers’ ideas with my own becomes a kind of conversation in the process of creating. Their ideas and mine converge, splay out and continue off in tangents in my composition. I don’t always know why I pick out certain lines, words or images, but there is often a thread of similarity that joins them.

Handwriting, drawing, the hand-brain connection are some of the things that they seem to have in common. Anne Carson, writing in the London Review of Books tells of how, due to progressive Parkinson’s disease, she is losing her ability to write with her hand, how our style of handwriting is controlled by our brains: “Your handwriting is your brain and your brain is you”.

From 1973, artist Robert Morris began to make an ongoing series called “Blind Time Drawings”. Each work is made without looking and, with an assignment of how to proceed set out, the aim is to attempt to complete this task in a given timeframe. Often the assignment is to repeat a gesture over and over. Failure is baked in: it is impossible to perfectly recreate the same gesture. And this process, this failure, is as much part of the work as the final drawing itself.

I am drawn to the impossibility of repetition. Human error. Slight shifts of instrumentation or lengths of notes. I’m looking to create a patchwork of similar materials, oscillating or overlayed, aided by swells of chords, moving in and out, creating a shifting wash of colour. Things appear, disappear and reappear; scratching, brushing sounds bump up against glassy chords; dusty erosion wears away layers.

Amy Sillman works in layers. Underneath a final painting are possibly dozens of other potential paintings, layers that have been covered, paths that have not been chosen, a visceral searching for emergent shapes. In the strokes, spills, scrapes and stains, the body leads the mind.

The scribbles, drawings and messages on my wall are like guideposts. They are stones to touch for the sometimes blind journey of making. In her essay AbEx and Disco Balls, Sillman writes “as we pass into a time when pencil smudges themselves are an increasingly exoticized thing of the past, the world is still tactile and material. To touch it is to know it.”