hcmf// Q&A: Chaya Czernowin

In this interview and Q&A session, Robert Worby chats with hcmf// 2021's Composer in Residence Chaya Czernowin about her storied history as a composer, and the upcoming pieces of hers we'll be hearing at the festival this November. Taking your questions, Czernowin discusses her approach to writing music, and the ways in which she's tried to make her music sit outside of time.
//
Chaya Czernowin is our Composer in Reisdence for hcmf// 2021: hcmf.co.uk/tim...
Read our full-length feature on Chaya Czernowin's music: hcmf.co.uk/tim...
hcmf// returns for a 5-day festival this November:
hcmf.co.uk/hcm...
//
It was in early 2020 that we initially announced Chaya Czernowin as our Composer in Residence. At the time, we wrote that we were thrilled to welcome her ‘speculative’ music to the festival, to ‘delve into the otherness’ that persists in her music. We made reference to her own, fascinating way of describing sound: as a portrayal of ‘a possible, but unfamiliar existence’. We then found ourselves living through one.
Czernowin’s work is often compared to archeology; rather than write linear pieces, her music digs downwards, into the earth. It seems strangely fitting that as soon as we announced her feature role at the 2020 festival we all had to burrow away for a year, to cancel and re-make plans, to exchange Huddersfield for the internet and come up with something entirely different for hcmf// 2020. To go somewhere possible, but unfamiliar.
For hcmf// 2021, we’re feeling immensely grateful that we can switch back to the real world. With the return of in-person events, we can finally realise the immense settings that Czernowin’s large-scale work demands, with spaces that can attend to the resonances of her music, as well as the minute details found within her writing. We’re delighted, once again, to be able to say it: Chaya Czernowin is the hcmf// Composer in Residence for 2021.