Ahead of our Still Life concert on Sunday 21 June 2026, we caught up with composer Charlotte Bray to talk about her piece Reflections in Time, her music, and her long-standing relationship with BCMG.

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Can you introduce yourself and tell us a little about your music?

I live in Berlin with my husband and son. I find the city an excellent place to live and work, with its international artistic community and relatively affordable living. It suits me very well creatively.

My music has been described as lyrical, energetic, and richly coloured. I try to find a direct emotional expression that communicates strongly and immediately with audiences rather than remaining abstract or detached. I often respond to human experience and global events in my work, exploring themes including refugees, conflict, memory, fragility, and humanity’s relationship with nature.

Ungrievable Lives, commissioned jointly by Elbphilharmonie, Wigmore Hall, the Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival, and the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, is one of my most powerful and politically charged works. Written in 2021-22 for string quartet, the piece was inspired by an installation of the same name by British artist Caroline Burraway. The installation consists of thirteen children’s dresses made from discarded refugee lifejackets collected on the island of Lesvos in Greece. Each dress represents one million displaced child refugees worldwide. Hanging above mounds of sand and suspended from weighing scales, the work confronts questions of loss, borders, justice, and the unequal value societies place on human lives. I transformed this visual and humanitarian stimulus into a 22-minute string quartet made up of thirteen highly contrasted miniature movements, one for each symbolic dress.

American Mother is my first full-scale opera, based on the memoir American Mother by Colum McCann and Diane Foley. The book recounts Diane Foley’s experience after the kidnapping and murder of her son, journalist James Foley, by ISIS in 2014, and her later meeting with one of the men involved in his captivity. Rather than focusing on politics or reportage alone, the work explores grief, humanity, forgiveness, trauma, and moral complexity. The emotional centre of the piece is Diane Foley’s voice: a mother confronting unimaginable loss while searching for understanding rather than vengeance. The opera was commissioned by Theater Hagen in Germany.

Can you tell us about Reflections in Time?

Reflections in Time was commissioned by the London Sinfonietta as part of its 50th anniversary season. The work was written in 2018 and received its first performance on 16 May 2018 at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, conducted by Peter Rundel.

The piece was inspired by my newborn twin nieces, Florence and Isabella Sweeney. I wanted to explore the innocence, curiosity, fragility, and sensory discovery of new life. Musically, the work centres on pairs of instruments. Eight instrumental pairings pass fragments of sound between one another, sometimes echoing, overlapping, or gently interrupting each other, almost like two children interacting and discovering the world together. In this piece I place emphasis on timbre and resonance: tiny details of colour, silence, and texture become structurally important.

This will be the fifth performance of the work and I am delighted to learn that this performance, and the previous one presented by BCMG, is supported by PRS Resonate funding. Further performances of existing works are crucial for composers and are often overlooked in favour of premiering new pieces.

I previously received support from the PRS Women Make Music programme for a commission from the Oxford Lieder Festival, which resulted in a song cycle for baritone and piano performed by Roderick Williams and Andrew West. I was also awarded a grant through the Composers’ Fund, which helped finance premiere recordings of several chamber and solo works, including Invisible Cities, winner of an Ivors Composer Award in 2019, Zustände, and The Sun was Chasing Venus, as well as a launch concert for the recording.

Reflections in Time is written for 14 instruments and is around 12 minutes in duration. The piece invites the audience into a finely detailed sonic landscape of great delicacy, colour, and concentration. It unfolds as a sequence of shifting musical reflections - fleeting gestures, resonances, and exchanges that seem to appear and disappear almost like memories or sensations.

Can you tell us more about your compositional process?

Sketching on paper remains an integral part of my compositional process. I use Sibelius later on. I typically work at the piano or cello to develop ideas and identify the appropriate sounds for the piece.

I seek to find a balance between immediacy and complexity. The music has to excite me in the first place and then have the ability to connect with an audience. I believe there is a balance in composing between musical material, instinct, structure, and atmosphere.

I often immerse myself in visual art, poetry, text, or current events connected to the work I am composing. Extra-musical inspiration is central to many pieces, whether that comes from literature, political subjects, nature, or visual imagery.

Can you talk a little bit about your history with BCMG as Apprentice Composer in Residence?

BCMG played an important role in my early career, and I am thrilled and honoured to have had a long-standing relationship with the ensemble. In 2009–10, I was appointed BCMG/Sound and Music Apprentice Composer-in-Residence. During that residency, I worked closely with the ensemble and its musicians, gaining practical experience writing for chamber forces and developing new works in rehearsal.  One of the most significant outcomes of that collaboration was my violin concerto, Caught in Treetops, commissioned by BCMG and Sound and Music. The work was premiered in Birmingham in 2010 by violinist Alexandra Wood conducted by Oliver Knussen, and was dedicated to the ensemble.

BCMG was a cornerstone of my relationship with Oliver Knussen. He significantly contributed to my development and provided support for many years during my formative years as a composer. The legacy remains strong as I am currently composing a violin concerto for Leila Josefowicz, a close friend and collaborator of Olly's. More on that soon...

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Reflections in Time receives its second BCMG performance thanks to support from PRS Resonate.

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