Interview — Published June 2026

The Composer Who Keeps His Own Counsel

By Abram Gilli-Lewis, Music Critic · June 2026

Summary: This is a June 2026 profile-interview with the British composer Gabriel Williams, conducted at his home in north London by music critic Abram Gilli-Lewis. The piece covers Williams's training at the Royal Academy, York, the Sibelius Academy, and the Purcell School; his piano suite Tryst and his unusual method of composing performances first and notating them afterward; his forthcoming large-scale work Codex Albion and the idea he calls "futurist medievalism"; his conversion to Roman Catholicism after hearing Bach's St Matthew Passion in Helsinki; his account of growing up inside a gnostic boarding-school group with roots in Vedanta and Theosophy; and his role founding Vox Alba, a concert series, publisher, and record label built around a scene of young composers drawing on chant, Renaissance polyphony, and sacred music traditions.

Meeting Gabriel Williams

Getting an afternoon with Gabriel takes the better part of two months. Messages go unanswered for weeks, then arrive at odd hours with no explanation for the silence that preceded them. There is no publicist, no diary to be checked, nothing so straightforward as an assistant confirming a time. When the date finally comes, it comes suddenly, and I am told to be at the flat as soon as I can manage it.

He lives in a leafy corner of an unnamed part of north London, the kind of street where embassies keep their black cars idling and net curtains give nothing away. The flat itself gives away almost as little. It is plain, nearly bare, almost obnoxiously clean, a single small painting by the Belgian symbolist Constant Montaldon on one wall, and otherwise the sort of restraint that in an older man might read as minimalism and in Gabriel reads as something closer to discipline. In one corner stands a modest shrine: a haze of incense, a run of icons among which Christ Pantocrator presides, several rosaries in gold that catch the light without quite meaning to. It is the only ostentatious thing in the room, sitting quietly in the corner.

The books are crowded onto a shelf with no apparent system. Nick Land's Xenosystems sits near Alasdair MacIntyre, Augustine, John of the Cross, Nabokov, Tolstoy, a biography of Malcolm X. I ask about the Land.

"A bunch of garbage," — Gabriel Williams

Gabriel himself is hard to place. He is not old gentry, though something in his manner has the unhurried, faintly amused quality of a class that no longer quite exists. He is not the detached irony of his own zoomer cogenerationists. He comes across as something a little anti-performative, there is not a single Barbour jacket in sight. His eyes are dark blue and steady, his affect a little removed, as though the business of explaining himself to a stranger were faintly embarrassing to him, a thing to be got through rather than enjoyed. He is warm to a point, and then he is not, and you feel the point arrive without being able to say exactly where it was. His wife, polite and very beautiful, retreats into another room almost as soon as we arrive and we do not see her again. He makes the coffee himself, for me and for my assistant, without ceremony.

Before we talk properly, he plays us a piano suite of his called Tryst, entirely from memory, and hands me the score first so that I can follow along. I play a little myself, and considered myself a Beethoven aficionado in my youth, but I have not seen a score quite like it: every rubato, every hesitation, every weighting of a phrase written out in such minute and exacting detail that the page looks less like music than like a transcript of a mind. And yet what comes out of the piano is nothing like the forbidding thing the page suggests. It is simple-sounding, direct, almost naive in its tenderness, and it is only the fact of the score sitting open in my lap, matching what I am hearing note for note, gesture for gesture, that tells me how much has been fixed in place to make it sound so unfixed. It is a strange paradox but the result is, quite plainly, beautiful.

A Sound That Resists Category

I have been aware of Gabriel Williams' concert works for some time. Often writing for string ensemble with many divisi, the music itself resists category. It is dense in the way a medieval polyphonic manuscript is dense, voices layered until the ear stops trying to separate them and simply receives the wash, and yet it never loses a kind of directness that has nothing to do with complexity for its own sake. He is more than happy to tell you what he is doing, in effect, is

"threading the micro-polyphony of high modernism through something much older and rougher, the heterophonic singing styles of these islands, the kind of unison that was never quite unison, several voices remembering the same tune slightly differently and singing it at once."
— Gabriel Williams

The melody underneath is always there, almost always vocal in shape even when there is no voice in the room, as though the instruments were standing in for a choir that has stepped out. It sounds radical without sounding difficult, which is its own kind of trick. Nothing in it announces itself as new, and yet nothing in it sounds like anything else being written now. There is a purity to it and an almost devotional plainness that keeps it from ever curdling into the merely spiritual-sounding, the incense-and-drone effect so much contemporary sacred music settles for. It is sensual before it is anything else, earthy, felt in the body. One of the rare contemporary composers that rewards relistening and whose music is nice enough to stomach it. The music is simple, but never minimal; stripped back, but never austere. It has been enough, so far, to win him first place at several international competitions and to be played at Wigmore Hall and St Martin-in-the-Fields. Additionally the obligatory side quests have been completed, several movies in the states and a sound installation at the Saatchi Gallery.

In preparation for our meeting I acquaint myself with his training. It is pristine, The Royal Academy, York, the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, The Purcell School. In the small and incestuous world of contemporary classical music, no doubt, this pedigree, though comprehensive, is not rare. These days he also does quiet, unglamorous work for the trust that keeps Peter Maxwell Davies's name and scores in circulation, a slightly odd position for a composer who is otherwise adamant that Davies has had no bearing on his own music. Listening to Gabriel play the piano for us gives me the impression I felt when I first heard his music. It has the quality of finding something rather than being shown it, an object that seems to have been made a long time ago and only just surfaced, a fragment of chant transcribed by an unknown hand, or a lost codex of polyphony turned up in a corner of the internet nobody else was looking in. It sounds, in other words, like it comes from somewhere else entirely, and the strange thing is that it is also, unmistakably, always beautiful.

Tryst

Tryst, it turns out, is not about trust, despite the pun I had assumed.

"I didn't get the pun on trust," — Gabriel Williams

he says, a little surprised I'd read it that way.

"It's supposed to be a pun on triste, meaning sadness, and tryst, meaning a lovers' meeting." — Gabriel Williams

The eight miniature movements, he says, are looking back at something, though he won't be drawn on what. "I'm very specific with tempo markings. It's meant to embody something quite organic. In terms of the specific inspiration, I can't say." The sadness in the piece, he tells me, is both the sadness of an ending and of a secrecy that has to be kept while the thing is still happening. "These are very intimate love poems," he says. "I like the work claustrophobic."

What is unusual about Tryst is not the sentiment but the method. Gabriel does not draw a line between composing and performing. "The performances are completed aurally first. Always. And then the score is built around the piece," he tells me, and it is clear this is not a stylistic flourish but something closer to a conviction. He improvises, or perhaps simply plays, and then goes back and writes down what he did with a completeness that most composers reserve for pitch and rhythm alone, extending it to the smallest inflections of touch and time. "I don't believe there is a composition. I just happen to interpret it one way," he says, when I ask whether another pianist, playing the score exactly as written, would be performing Gabriel's own performance, or failing at what the piece was actually asking. He doesn't think there's a contradiction. "Whenever I play it I have my habits, micro-gestures, rubato, interpretations. For me, these are just as much a part of the piece as the notes laid out bare. So there is still room for interpretation from a performer. I'm just really quite precise." He sees the density of the notation less as a modernist habit than as its opposite, a kind of insurance policy. "It's contiguous with traditional notation. And in a way it's needed, as the aural tradition of classical music is not transmitted the same way now. As modernity collapses… lots of stuff that was implicit to our ancestors now has to be made explicit in order to survive." He describes himself as working on the far side of something from Brian Ferneyhough, whose scores are notoriously overspecified in the opposite spirit, all impossibility and friction. "It's kind of the complete opposite of someone like Ferneyhough, but something on the other side of the modernist development of the score."

When I ask whether Tryst, played now, still feels like the original meeting it was named for, he answers without hesitation. "Yes, it does."

Codex Albion and "Futurist Medievalism"

Beside Tryst on the coffee table sits a newer manuscript in his own tight, spidering hand: Codex Albion. It is, he tells me, the successor to his 2023 piece Codices Cosmographiae, and he speaks of it with more open ambition than he allows himself elsewhere. "It's going to be quite an epic work. Each movement is an experiment in a different kind of counterpoint. It's all inspired by English music." When I ask, he is unembarrassed about the word Albion, and about what it might suggest to a listener primed to hear nationalism in it. "I think Britain, and in particular England, has something very mythic to me. I truly love it, to be honest with you. There is something very ancient and medieval in the work, but also something very much like my childhood. Something really quite 'yoo-kay,' so to speak. It has some real digital decay. Something haunted, almost." Pressed on whether the haunting is benign, he refuses to simplify it. "A bit of both. I think England in particular is at a very strange point in its history. I think whatever ends up persisting into the future will be quite different from what our ancestors have ever known." He gives the same answer, more or less, to whether the piece reads as tragedy or as the record of something good but not yet recognisable as such. "Again, I think it's both." Even his harmonic language resists a single description. Modal, tonal, pre-modern, or modernist tools turned toward sincerity rather than irony? "Exactly both. It's something we can't quite put our fingers on now. It's something on the other side of postmodernism."

That phrase, the other side of postmodernism, comes up more than once, and each time he pulls back from finishing the thought. He almost has a name for it, he half admits, but he will not use it in print. "It feels like jinxing it to name it now. I think the naming has a time and place. But when it's named, the whole thing becomes self-conscious." Later in the conversation, on a different occasion, he does let the name out, reluctantly and almost as an aside:

"Something kinda like futurist medievalism. But totally different. Vanguard, in a sense, shaped by the internet on one hand and something eternal on the other. Really it's just history starting again. We tried the modern project. We tried to end history for a while. It failed, and now we have to carry on."
— Gabriel Williams

Even having said it once, he is careful to note that Tryst itself sits slightly apart from this larger project. "It's influenced a lot by this. But it's something else. It's something completely personal and confessional. It's really a piece of private music."

On Peter Maxwell Davies

I ask him about one of his moonlight jobs, working for the Peter Maxwell Davies Trust. I ask him how his work measures against it. Gabriel is generous about him in a way that also draws a hard line. "I think he is actually a very well understood composer, and one who is very fairly and justly celebrated. I've written about him a lot for them. There is so much in his work, the political side, his modernist works, the British influences, the liturgical influence. I think he is a massive pillar in British music, unfortunately just not one that has had any effect on my music." What separates them, he says, is where the religious material in the work comes from. "It's completely sincere. There is this detached, ironic form of deconstruction in Maxwell Davies's music. It's this very Anglo thing that I hate, too smart for true sincere faith. I hate it. It's not unique to him at all. I think I'm the complete opposite. I think that whole tract has been debunked for people of my generation." Debunked by what, I ask, a genuine return to belief, or simple exhaustion with irony as a mode. "Well, for myself, I have a sincere faith. I think the whole modernist project, and its deconstruction of religion, ran its course and revealed itself to be a cul-de-sac. I'm not interested in it. It's old hat and doesn't go anywhere." I ask him who else feels it's been debunked. He laughs. "Oh there are some. There's a significant writing scene in London that feels this. I know there are quite a few composers who feel this explicitly. I was talking to a French composer about this last week. One of the phd students at RAM reached out to me over substack. I know there is a little motion in the US."

Faith and a Childhood Inside a Gnostic Group

His faith, when he first mentions it, he declines to name outright, though by the second time he is direct about it. "I'm what people call a Roman Catholic, though I don't love the label. We're called Catholic to distinguish ourselves from the Eastern schismatics, and Roman to play nice with the Protestants." He makes exaggerated quote marks at these and speaks in an almost performatively pretentious tone. "Really, we're just Christian." Sincere here. I ask, he was not raised in it. He was raised, he tells me with a blank candour, inside a gnostic group with roots in Vedanta and Theosophy, and sent to one of its boarding schools, which he will not name. "It had a serious abuse scandal. A daughter of a high ranking member is a famous actress, she was in some Lars von Trier movies, a secretary of a certain former prime ministeress was the headmaster, and a teacher was charged with stealing artefacts from a major museum. There are so many truly bizarre things that happened there. It was a deeply evil place. It eventually all came out." Daily life inside it, he says, was almost banal in its texture, closer to Dickens than to any of the exotic connotations the word cult tends to carry. "Very mundane. It was a school from the Victorian era. It was like being in Oliver Twist. I have so many stories people would not believe." His parents, he says, believed in it fully. "I was a child. So I just accepted it." He does not think the experience of growing up inside a total system explains his appetite now for notation, liturgy, and firm structure, and he is quick to separate the two. "No, they are very different. It was an Eastern-Western orientalist cult. Basically a clandestine networking group for elite agnostic Anglos. If you don't have money on you, you aren't doing anything for them. They aren't interested. The faith is quite weak. It's mostly liberal high Tories."

He left the group's world an atheist, and stayed one for some years. What ended it, he says, was not an argument but a piece of music, heard by chance in a foreign city.

"In my mid-twenties, the truth of the Gospel just became undeniable, like a dam bursting. I remember hearing the St Matthew Passion in Helsinki. It destroyed me. I couldn't go on. I remember thinking, what is this thing our ancestors had that was so real to them, and why is it so distant to me now?"
— Gabriel Williams

When he'd first mentioned Helsinki, earlier in our conversation and in an entirely different context, he had made it sound like nothing more than a young man's restlessness. "I think there is something adventurous about being at the very edge of Europe," he'd said, when I asked whether his time there had been about a person or a programme. It is only later that the city resolves into the site of the rupture that seems to sit under everything else he has told me. He did not go looking for an institution afterward so much as arrive already convinced. "But as far as I'm concerned there is only one church." I ask him if his wife has had an effect on his faith. "Oh that's another story. I can't get into. We have been best friends from childhood. Another day." Later in passing me mentions her again. "She is a great writer…" he smiles "…but she won't want you knowing that." And with that the door is closed on this topic.

Early Life and the Purcell School

The rest of his origins are more straightforward, and he tells them without much ornament. He grew up in the New Forest, land he describes as "very ancient, medieval," in a house where music was loved but not played. "They loved pop. I have a kind of fondness for some of it, but a lot of it I can't stand," he says of his parents. His first piano belonged to his grandmother, and stood, of all places, round the back of a cafe. "I was there all the time, teaching myself." He had no formal training until he was accepted first into the Junior Royal Academy and then, at sixteen, into the Purcell School. "It was a massive learning curve once I was accepted. Technical, and score reading. Formal things like harmony. I ate it all up though. I learnt more in those two years than I might have ever learnt before in my life." He never seriously considered performance over composition. "It was always the mission, as far as I can remember. I remember seeing the old Sergio Leone trilogy movies when I was six and trying to recreate the theme on the piano from memory. I was obsessed."

Purcell was not, in the end, straightforward. Gabriel reveals a story of an unnamed teacher there, a nephew of a well-known anti-orientalist scholar, who had built himself a reputation and a role to match it. Gabriel half smiles at me as if I should know who this man is. Later he almost says his name and then stops himself. "There was a huge amount of hype around him. He was positioning himself as Daniel Barenboim's protégé, or at least that's how he framed himself. He'd invented this role for himself as a musicianship teacher, it was basically ear tests, mandatory one-on-ones. His whole style was to break you down and build you back up. It didn't go well. We were kind of nemeses at the time. It's kind of funny now." The friction eventually reached the head of the composition department, and Gabriel claims his pieces were pulled from the school's concerts. "He was quite rude to me." Asked to say more about the man later, Gabriel is franker still. "He hated my music and genuinely couldn't understand it. He was offended by it, I think. Looking back, the idea of a young composer finding his voice being broken down and remade in the image of this rather charmless character, only a few years older than me, it seems bizarre to me now." He suggests a class dimension. "I'm well-spoken, and he made a big deal of having supported himself unlike others, like he thought I was moneyed. In reality it couldn't be further from the truth, he's actually quite well-connected himself. But I've been told by my wife I can rub people up the wrong way sometimes, very rarely of course." Gabriel claimed the teacher wanted to vet his piece and give a list of revisions before Gabriel's music would be let back into the school's lunchtime concerts. "So I said, fuck it, and built my own string orchestra in my free time." He is entirely unsentimental about the years that followed. Those recording sessions turned into the two Juvenilia albums.

He traces his distaste for irony directly back to that world, and to the wider one it belonged to. "That thing is exactly where I came from, it's what I was raised in and the soup I swam in in the music world. High culture treated as a plaything, a kind of liberal disdain. I completely reject that now. That whole world seems to have died from my perspective, though there are still people wearing it like a suit. My background is a bit different from most people at conservatory." One brief professional connection from that period, working alongside Jacob Collier, comes up only because I raise it, and he closes the door on it politely but firmly. "It was a very brief group project a long time ago. He was very polite and respectful when we worked together, years ago, we went to the same school, and he's really a product of that world. I don't have anything to say about his music or public persona. I don't think we're in the same world."

Vox Alba

Where his energy now goes, largely, is into Vox Alba, a concert series come music publisher come record label come magazine publication and the loose scene around it, which he talks about with none of the guardedness he brings to questions about himself. He sits up.

"Ok so the pitch is this. Vox Alba's whole reason for existing is to repair the world of classical music patronage, to actually connect audiences, composers, and patrons again, so there's something like a living concert culture, not a museum culture."
— Gabriel Williams

He describes recent showcases drawing on Gregorian chant, Renaissance polyphony, and Zen Buddhism, composers he says are "grappling with the aesthetic crisis of our time," trying to reconsecrate their work while still speaking in the textures of the present. It's a lofty goal. "The whole point is that it speaks directly to now, while situating itself historically inside a tradition of the sacred." He names the scene generously: Sophie Sparkes, Ng Yu Hng, whose work with Vox Alba he particularly admires, Thomas van Dun and Max Vinetz, whom he thinks are doing interesting work, the electronic composer Marcus Lancaster, James McMillan, and Oliver Rudland. And beyond the names, he says, there are dozens more he won't put on the record. "Dozens of nameless young composers in the academy and college who are thinking in new ways, even if those new ways have to be secret from their professors for now." Asked what actually happens to a student who doesn't keep that secret, he laughs it off. "Haha, no comment." We laugh and I wait but he does not elaborate. What binds the network together, practically, is friendship as much as ideology, he says, some formal performance through Vox Alba, much of it conducted online. "It's kind of a catacomb culture now. I'm kind of a self-appointed curator and fixer." A shared text or manifesto doesn't yet exist, he says, though the publication is meant to become one by accretion. He claims it is a place where "philosophers can take music seriously and composers can take philosophy seriously, and write alongside each other." The money behind it, he is careful to specify, is almost entirely private. "Nearly all private. People who share our values and want to express them with money. It's about connecting these people with a scene of people that really care about this music." A vague allusion. I press him. "We had a soirée in one house. The man is an art collector. There must have been about fifty of us there packed in. The place was massive. Huge stacks of paintings piled up. That man's a total eccentric. That type of thing is quite common, invite only, after the main event." I ask who exactly are these people. "One has a chapel on his estate, he wants us to perform there. They are all different." He does not see a contradiction between wanting a living, popular culture and needing wealthy individuals to underwrite it. "It's niche. On paper Vox Alba is one of these organisations whose mission is to save the world. I think it can do that. But its short-term goal is to create a place where real culture can be created and sponsored and refined, free from the clutches of the institutions. It's doing that."

Albion, the word he keeps returning to, he is happy to let mean two things at once. "It's both to me. I think England is a kind of mythic ideal to me." I ask whether the word's history, its long use by nationalist and reactionary movements, gives him any pause. It plainly does not. "Not at all."

Closing

By the end of the afternoon something in the room has changed, subtly enough that it takes a moment to notice. He has been generous, a little more so, I suspect, than he intended to be. When I bring up where he sees himself and Vox Alba in ten years, he pauses for a moment, long enough that I think he's going to duck the question the way he's ducked others. Then: "I think a lot of things will be more explicit then." I ask, at the last, whether there is anything in what he's told me across our conversations that he expects a reader to get wrong, and would like corrected in advance. He considers it for a moment. "I think you got it," he says, and that is, more or less, where he leaves it.

Almost nothing about him can actually be placed. Walking back out past the icons and the rosaries and the stack of scores under the coffee table, it is hard not to think that Gabriel has built himself a kind of private redoubt, in a corner of the city that has always specialised in them. The openness he allows a visitor is real but strictly rationed, extended just far enough to be understood and no further.

On paper, he should be easy to place. London, if you move in the right rooms, is not short of the sort: Latin Mass, an opinion on integralism arriving before the starter, a waxed jacket cut in the manner of a grandfather's, except the grandfather in question was rarely a peer and more often a carpenter. Gabriel has the books for it, the faith for it, the taste for the medieval and the devotional. Sitting with him for an afternoon, I am struck by how little he actually resembles any of it, how entirely un-self-conscious he seems despite his guardedness. Much like his music, he seems entirely of this moment and somehow entirely outside it at the same time.

He had, in fact, already told me the only thing that mattered, before either of us had said very much at all, sitting down at the piano and playing Tryst from memory as I followed the score, as if to show his workings, before the questions and the talk. Whatever sits behind the dark blue eyes is not readily given up. Like the music, it isn't especially concerned with being placed. He would rather you simply listened.

By Abram Gilli-Lewis

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