It’s hard to imagine where Ben Nobuto’s music would be without the internet. Since his breakthrough in 2021 with the Manchester Collective commission SERENITY 2.0, Ben has continued to develop a noticeably individual voice in contemporary classical music through his consistently curious engagement with both the internet and online culture.
The most striking aspect of his music is its pace. Whether or not he’s constrained by context — his BentoBeat series on Instagram, for example, limited pieces to a minute, maximum — Ben’s sound to date has been characterised by maximalist saturation. He works on the principle of delivering as much information — words, rhythms, electronic glitches, memes and other bits of online ephemera — in the shortest amount of time, chopped up and glued back together at odd angles to create something buzzy and disorientating.
It’s an approach that’s brought him plaudits. Sol, written for the National Youth Choir’s Fellowship ensemble, won an Ivors Classical Award in 2023, while he took on the coveted First Night commission at the BBC Proms the following year. That piece, Hallelujah Sim, seemed to tie up threads he’d been working with for a while. A fun opener for chorus, electronics and orchestra, it chopped up traditional ‘content’ (sonically, the ever-present ‘Hallelujah’ phrase in choral music), infused it with a glossy, unreal energy and inserted it into a narrative structure borrowed from video games. The worlds Ben builds could easily be self-contained, postmodern collages, but they also involve a gentle probing of 21st-century cultures that surround them.
‘I feel like the UK is a really interesting place in terms of style.'
On a fundamental level, the principle of maximalist saturation makes Ben’s music both a product of and a response to the attention economy, and you can certainly link the music’s onslaught of information to that economy’s desire for constant interest. But the pieces probe in other ways, too: SERENITY 2.0, for example, was imagined as a guided meditation that goes wrong.
‘Listeners are invited to enter into a relaxed, meditative state, despite knowing well that any kind of serenity here is impossible,’ he wrote in a post accompanying the work. The piece found an ambiguous middle ground, balancing the value Ben puts on meditation — he finds it hard, but persists — with the highly commodified form of the practice that props up today’s wellness industry.
Daily Affirmation, a piece for the Colin Currie Quartet that they premiered in December, deals with a similar conflict between the personal and the structural, all mediated by the internet. ‘I’m always trying to find this weird, ambiguous space, where it’s half-ironic but also sincere at the same time,’ Ben tells M. These pieces are neither endorsements nor critiques of these cultural trends: they’re more like pieces of reportage from someone living in the middle of it all. After all, Ben is in a good place to assess the state of contemporary classical music.
‘I feel like the UK is a really interesting place in terms of style,’ he says, having cited Lawrence Dunn, Cassandra Miller and Oliver Leith as composers his ear is drawn to. ‘You can go to concerts and hear almost anything. There’s a lot of things you could say about funding and the state of the arts at the moment, but in terms of the music itself, I feel really lucky to be here and just absorbing things right now.’
Making works that play with style and form requires much more than open-minded performers and listeners. Many of Ben’s works involve electronics and live sound elements, the success of which is ‘really dependent on who you’re working with’, he says. He cites Manchester Collective as a group that truly ‘got it’ by booking sound technician Joe Reiser for their performances of his work, describing Joe as ‘almost like a performer within the ensemble’.
Things have moved quickly for Ben, who received the Manchester Collective commission straight out of university. For a modern-day composer having to deal with dissemination and promotion of his music on top of having to write, being a PRS member has proved useful in balancing his workload. ‘It’s a side of music that I wouldn’t have any knowledge of,’ he says of PRS for Music’s royalty structure. ‘It’s the sort of thing that in the past, maybe you’d have an agent or someone to do that side for you. [So] making royalties very transparent is really important.’
As he looks to the future, Ben feels his musical aims are shifting. What once felt sincere — ‘something really intense, everything all at once, in-your-face’ — has faded. ‘I’m more interested in finding these more subtle, ambiguous blurrings of feelings, emotions or concepts that feel more focused on one thing or a few particular things, and bringing out the rich ambiguity in those things,’ he tells M.
‘I’m more interested in finding these more subtle, ambiguous blurrings of feelings, emotions or concepts.'
Ben’s 2023 piece for Southbank Sinfonia, Break-Up Mantras, is suggestive of this change. It was forced by a change of span: a 20-minute commission ‘forced me to step back from my default’, he says. What he found as a throughline was a specific technique — the sampling of euphoric pop samples, which he’d slow down to a crawl, then build instrumental structures around them. The result retains the sense of surreal whimsy from before, but feels more focused. As Ben notes, ‘the collage or barrage of different material actually feels quite old for me now’.
Ben is making this stylistic transition during a particularly busy period. As well as Daily Affirmation, his recent work includes music for the Tate Gallery and Turner Prize nominee Delaine Le Bas. There’s also an album that’s been in the works for a while that’s finally approaching completion.
‘I really, really want to prioritise the next year,’ he says. ‘It’ll be nice to have one thing to be like, “Yes, this is me,” and have it all in one place.’
This article is taken from M's special Future Makers edition — you can read the magazine in full here.
Ben Nobuto has been nominated for the Large-Scale Composition award at the Royal Philharmonic Society Awards in Birmingham tomorrow (6 March). You can find out more about the ceremony, which is supported by PRS for Music, here.
