All in hand: Scottish composer Anna Meredith heads to the Proms – but without instruments

If you find yourself suddenly surrounded by scores of young people clapping, slapping and beatboxing, don’t panic… you’re in a free performance of the latest work by composer Anna Meredith for the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain.

AT THE tail-end of a BBC Proms concert later this year, members of the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain (NYO) will lay their instruments gingerly down on the chair behind them and begin a raucous performance comprised entirely of sounds made with their own bodies. For 12 exhausting minutes, they will clap, stamp, sing and beatbox their way through HandsFree, the latest pioneering work by leading Scottish composer Anna Meredith, who created it as part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad.

The piece was greeted with enthusiasm both at the official premiere – in the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall earlier this year – and the unofficial one, when it was performed impromptu (they refer to it as “flash mobbing”) at a service station on the M6 as the NYO travelled north.

But its inclusion at this year’s BBC Proms – the programme for which was unveiled last week – marks a foray into new territory for the classical music festival and another triumph for Meredith, whose eclectic and increasingly high-profile career has ranged from collaborating with the beatboxer Shlomo to helping drum’n’bass pioneer Goldie create an orchestral work in the BBC documentary, Classic Goldie.

Despite the breadth of her experience, the sassy 34-year-old says creating HandsFree with a band of talented but slightly sceptical youngsters, was one of the most daunting challenges she has faced.

Not only did the piece have to be controlled by the orchestra themselves (with no conductor) but – because the NYO always intended to flash mob it – it had to be portable and flexible enough to be performed by as few as 16 and as many as 165 musicians.

“Over the years I’ve done lots of kind of odd and crazy commissions, so I wasn’t too worried, but the more I dug into it, the more complicated it seemed to become,” Meredith says. “The hardest thing was the duration. It was quite clear the orchestra wanted something short and snappy, and I wanted to write something short and snappy – but 12 minutes just isn’t.

“I also realised that, when there are so many people performing, hitting yourself on the chest and hitting yourself on the arm doesn’t sound very different – so it was more about pacing the sounds there were and eking them out, and every now and again introducing something the audience hadn’t heard before.”

Inspired both by the way beatboxers illustrate the rhythm of their beatboxing with their hands, and by watching the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, Meredith was determined HandsFree should be visually as well as aurally stimulating. So she enlisted the help of dancer David Ogle, who choreographed the movement and turned it into an exciting spectacle.

Despite initially questioning whether the piece played to their strengths, the NYO soon embraced the concept. “I think there was a moment when, knowing they had to do the cues themselves and basically drive the whole piece, a self-sufficiency had to click in. There was a recognition that the piece does celebrate what an orchestra does – really it’s about virtuosity, playing rhythmically together and working as a team.”

Given the cutting-edge nature of her work, Meredith’s own musical roots are surprisingly conventional. Born into a middle-class, creative, but not overtly musical, family (her father lectured in journalism, her mother restored paintings), she learned the clarinet at school.

Though she has friends who were writing tunes when they were six, her interest in composing grew as she made her way through Napier University, York University and the Royal College of Music in London.

On leaving, she and some fellow musicians started the Camberwell Collective, organising their own concerts to avoid having to sit around waiting for commissions. However, Meredith admits she was lucky. Arriving on the scene at a time when there was an open-mindedness about music, a trend towards a lo-fi, DIY approach and plenty of opportunities for young composers gave her scope to experiment.

Within a few years, she had built up a reputation for exciting new works, from her froms – a commission for the Last Night of the Proms in 2008 which involved five groups of musicians playing in different parts of the country – to Four Tributes to 4am, a piece which combines Meredith’s music with visuals created by her video-artist sister Eleanor.

So busy has Meredith been, she has only now had time to take stock and realise she wants to be more involved in the performance of her work, so recently she has branched out into electronic music. Tracks from her EP Black Prince Fury have been played on 6 Music and Radio 3, and she has supported These New Puritans in concert. Sometimes she performs alone, sometimes with her band Horsebox and sometimes with Eleanor, who has been known to draw live on stage as Meredith plays.

“I have never been one of those craftsmen composers who labour over a nuance of how to do something,” Meredith says. “I’ve always been more of a broad-brushstrokes person.

“For me, the least fun bit of composing is going from knowing exactly what you want to pinning it down. If they could figure out some brilliant technology that would wire into my brain and take my ideas and put them onto a score, then I’d be a happy girl – and that’s the appeal of the electronic music because you don’t have to work out if this is a semiquaver or that’s a sharp.”

Having a Canadian father and English mother, Meredith says it would be disingenuous to claim her music was influenced by her Scottish upbringing. But her childhood memories are all of growing up north of the Border and her work Songs for the M8 is inspired by moments of consciousness as she drifted in and out of sleep while shuttling backwards and forwards to gigs in Glasgow.

This is typical of Meredith, who is, she admits, moved less by sunsets than by everyday objects, such as the dodgy car indicators on her mother’s old Triumph, which inspired another Proms commission Left Light.

“I have never understood this idea that every piece you write should be about something really big or deep, about a poem or a musical landscape or a Mongolian bell you’ve never heard of. I’m not the sort of person that does look at a landscape and hear a chord. I’ve always tried to write about small or universal stuff that anyone can imagine or understand.”

This conviction that music should be accessible to everyone is the thread that ties Meredith’s pieces together. Certainly, it was her guiding principle throughout the documentary on Goldie, a musician she describes as “amazingly talented, quite eccentric and fun”.

“He kept saying, ‘I don’t know which note goes with this note on the piano,’ and I kept saying: ‘There are no rules – if you can make a decisions in your drum’n’bass music, you can make decisions about what note goes with E flat – there’s literally no difference.”

It was the egalitarian nature of HandsFree that made the project especially appealing to Meredith. The piece took an orchestra – traditionally a very hierarchical organisation – and flattened it out. “I love the fact that while they’re performing HandsFree, everyone is equal, the principal violinist is no more important than the second violinist.”

Meredith is excited about having the work performed at the Proms because it means it is being accorded the gravitas it deserves. She says: “It is recognition that this is a proper piece which has been composed with thought, not just a workshop game.”

But her overarching mission appears to be to democratise contemporary music.

“There’s an idea that you need to have a certain background to listen it,” she says. “One or two times, my granny has said, ‘I think I enjoyed it, but obviously I’m not qualified to know that.’ That is sort of insane – it’s just sounds. Her ears – your ears – are as good as anybody else’s, you don’t need to know anything.”

• HandsFree will be performed as flash mobs in cities across the country over the next few months and performed at the BBC Proms on 4 August.