George Benjamin was once the boy wonder of British classical music. A composer at nine, he became star pupil to Olivier Messiaen in his teens, the youngest ever composer to see his music performed at the Proms while still a student. And then, for a long time, nothing. After a brief stint at Pierre Boulez’s IRCAM institute in the mid-‘80s and a single work for electronics and chamber orchestra, “Antara,” transforming the sounds of the panpipes he heard in the square outside the Pompidou Centre in Paris, he wrote barely 30 minutes of music in the following five years—and only another couple of hours during the decade that followed.
Degrees of Invention
An interview with George Benjamin
