Radio Interview · November 2026
On The Music Show: Gabriel Williams in Conversation with Marcello Palazzo
Radio Maria England
Transcript · November 2026
Gabriel Williams joined the composer and conductor Marcello Palazzo on The Music Show, Radio Maria England, for an hour on conversion, heterophony, Blake’s Satan, and why music must reach beyond the notes on the page. The conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Beginnings
Marcello Palazzo: Good morning, and welcome to The Music Show with me, Marcello Palazzo, where we look at composers, their music and their stories. For full disclosure, I am a composer and conductor myself, and may have some biases. Today we have another composer talk, and we are joined by the British composer and pianist Gabriel Williams. Gabriel’s music has been performed at venues including Wigmore Hall and St Martin-in-the-Fields, and has won prizes at several international competitions, including first prize at the Bruno Maderna Competition. He has also written film music in the United States, and founded Vox Alba, a concert series, publisher and record label dedicated to healing the divide between contemporary composition and contemporary audiences. Gabriel, welcome to The Music Show.
Gabriel Williams: It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.
Marcello: Well, I suppose beginning with something of a standard question: how did you get into composition?
Gabriel: Oh wow. Actually, it was the Sergio Leone movies. I remember seeing those at an age that was probably far too young to be watching those films, and then I wanted to recreate the themes on a little piano at my grandmother’s house. I was just obsessed. That’s where it started.
Marcello: Did you practise your whistling as well?
Gabriel: Unfortunately, not good whistling.
Marcello: Well, those films are great. And as I mentioned, you also have a history of writing film music. How do you factor that into your music making? Is it a big part of it, or a side thing? With Vox Alba, for example, you have a clear mission. Are you able to bring that into the film music, or how do you think of it?
Gabriel: At the moment, the film music is something to the side, I would say. I think it’s a humbling experience to sign on to someone else’s vision and someone else’s story, and it’s a very powerful thing to teach you craft. But at the moment I’d say it’s tangential to the pure concept of music.
Marcello: And I suppose it encourages you to work in a different way. With a commission for a concert piece you’re often given a lot of freedom, and you can write whatever you want within certain time limits, let’s say. But with film music, I imagine it’s on demand, usually at the last minute.
Gabriel: Yes, that’s very true. Another part of it is that you learn a lot from the idea that there is already a dramatic arc and you’re fitting to it. There’s already a structure there.
Marcello: And I imagine it’s similar to writing music for the liturgy.
Gabriel: There’s already a structure there, and your job is to serve it, to sublimate yourself to serve it.
Marcello: So it’s functional music. For our listeners who may not be familiar with this, functional music is music designed for a specific purpose, so for the liturgy or for a film, as opposed to simply a concert commission where the composer can express their inner passions. But I get the feeling sometimes that functional music is not necessarily considered as serious today in the mainstream of contemporary classical composition. It’s usually seen as something of a throwback.
Gabriel: Yes, and this goes all the way back. With the School of Notre Dame and the Ars Nova, that idea developed, but there was a time in Western music when putting your name on a composition was scandalous. The music was entirely functional. It was there to serve God in a specific context. Now we’re so used to the composer being an artist, a critic, someone outside of society commenting on it in some way. But functional music undermines that in quite a powerful way. I think we’re still living in the dregs of the Romantic hero, even as composers.
Helsinki
Marcello: Yes, something like that. And maybe that’s all to change soon. But anyway, I read in your bio that you converted to Catholicism after hearing a performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion in Helsinki. So my question is: what happened?
Gabriel: Well, conversion is such a hard story to tell. All conversion stories are unique, and in some way they’re all kind of the same. I would say it wasn’t really one moment. There are lots and lots of moments, and it’s hard to really put your finger on it. But that’s one moment where I heard something so profound, and it sparked something inside me. I may have known all of these facts about Christianity, all these facts about the history of classical music, but there was something very real there, and I was completely alienated from it. I was outside of it. But for Bach, it was so sincere and it was so real, and it was kind of devastating to realise that. So I think that was one of the very powerful moments that sparked a kind of, I don’t want to say curiosity, because it’s a little deeper than curiosity, but something like it.
Marcello: So you felt you were somehow outside of the true depth of the type of music making that could lead to such music. I think that’s the case for many of us, growing up in ordinary music environments. I’ve always been Catholic, but realising later on that there is a great depth here, which I think most people miss, or most composers perhaps miss, it’s hard to quite put your finger on it and put it into words. It’s fascinating.
Hebridian
Marcello: All right, to begin with, I think we’ll listen to an extract from your piece Hebridian. Am I pronouncing that right?
Gabriel: That’s right.
Marcello: Hebridian, good. So, can you tell us a bit about the piece?
Gabriel: Sure. The primary inspiration for the piece is the heterophonic singing style. For listeners, that’s when one melody is sung in multiple different ways individually, and creates a kind of cloud of sound. This style was actually championed by a lot of modernists, in a lot of music that may be very unpleasant to listen to for some people. Stockhausen comes to mind.
Marcello: Yes, yes.
Gabriel: But it also emerges organically from the congregational singing style of the Hebridean islands, and this piece really draws on that, with a kind of nature music, a storm music.
Marcello: Amazing. Well, without further ado, here is an extract from Hebridian.
[ Music: extract from Hebridian ]
Marcello: And there we are, Hebridian. Gabriel, we were just speaking in the break, we touched on it just before we came back, about the idea that the nice bit is at the end. I quite like this idea, this way of contextualising dissonance. We have these crunchier, perhaps more wrenching harmonies at the beginning of the piece, but they’re contextualised in the broader picture, arriving at some point of peace. And I think we’ve lost a lot of that in the latter half of the twentieth century, this idea that dissonance and consonance can be contextualised in a way that makes them both meaningful.
Gabriel: Yes, I completely agree. We were just talking about Ravel, and his music is so teleological, so forward driven, and that’s something that doesn’t really exist in a lot of modernist music. It just exists for a time and then it goes away. It’s slightly irritating, and then it finishes. Another figure would be George Rochberg, with his idea that a totally atonal, dissonant movement can exist next to totally tonal movements, and that the movements themselves act as dissonance and consonance. My music isn’t really like that, but I think every single dissonance from the whole modernist project can be put in context, and we can have a kind of, I suppose, redemptive quality as well.
Marcello: Well, I sometimes wish we could broadcast the conversations we have while the pieces are playing, because one of the things we talked about in the middle of that piece, which you put very eloquently, and I love the idea, was taking these dissonances, these more difficult sounds, and somehow baptising them. Bringing them into a context where they can have a deeper meaning, something that pulls them from their mere deconstructed sine waves into something that has real weight.
Gabriel: Yes, I suppose this is a deeper point about experimental music. What’s the result of the experiment? It’s not like a scientific experiment, where you have a result. If you take that word “experimental” seriously, what are the results of the experiments? What new sounds were discovered through this whole modernist project that we can actually use, which can actually broaden our understanding of beauty and things like this?
Marcello: It’s true. I think it’s partly the way composition is taught in education. There’s often an emphasis on being original and inventive, and all these very emotional words about the kind of energy you should have when you attack a piece as a composer: you pull the notes from the stone, and there’s something so gargantuan and Romantic about the whole process. But perhaps this goes back to what we were saying about functional music, and the idea that it’s okay to form a voice and not necessarily reinvent the wheel with every single piece.
Gabriel: And if anything, it’s a mark of consistency. Bach comes to mind.
Marcello: Yes, exactly.
Vox Alba and the call to engage
Marcello: Wonderful. So, touching now on your work with Vox Alba. You seek to connect, or reconnect, composers, audiences and patrons through sacred and contemporary music, so that it can, and I quote from your website, “live outside the museum”. It’s a phrase I like, something I really relate to. I wonder if you think that, as Catholics, we have a unique position to achieve this, and how did you realise this was your mission, as it were?
Gabriel: Well, I suppose as Catholics we’re called to engage with the world. There are some people who are called to be apart from the world, but as members of the laity we’re called to engage with it fully. We can’t all be anchorites. We actually have to engage, and that means engaging with the world as it is, in its full contemporary way. And I suppose having a real understanding of beauty and purpose puts us in a unique position. That’s a general answer.
Marcello: I sometimes think of the term Soviet realism. I don’t know why, but it always seems to be in my brain. As you say, there’s a call to engage with the world. In a lot of contemporary opera, for instance, where there’s obviously a narrative, there is in theory something quite accessible to a normal audience. But I wonder whether that necessarily works. People who aren’t musicians will often say, “Where are the tunes?” And whilst that’s obviously a certain position, a tune can help engage everyday people who don’t have a musical background. They want some point of anchorage, something that speaks to them in the real world.
Gabriel: I think that idea of realism justifies a lot of contemporary art that is very upsetting to experience: it’s just reflecting the world, so if you have a problem with how ugly the art is, really you have a problem with the world. That’s the get-out-of-jail card. I’m not suggesting that ugly sounds aren’t part of the world. They are, and they should be a part of contemporary art in any form. But God is a part of the world as well, and is just as real as everything else. These people think they’re fulfilling a moral duty by just showing you something squalid, and assuming depth, but they don’t have a moral basis to assume any depth from what they’re doing.
Marcello: It’s true. At the moment, I feel, in culture there’s this emphasis on realism. Everything has got to be so grotesquely real, and I think the true embodiment of this is things like Love Island, the reality TV shows where you’re a fly on the wall of some millionaire’s house. Who cares? For me personally, art is one of those things we go to, often, to escape the real world, or to find solace, or to find beauty, things we don’t normally see in reality, because there is a lot of disharmony.
Gabriel: Yes. Well, as Catholics we have a broader understanding of what’s real than just the material facts of the world.
The Devil in His Youth
Marcello: Definitely. Great. Well, I think we’ll move on to another piece. This is an extract from your piece The Devil in His Youth. Could you tell us a bit about this?
Gabriel: Yes, so this is inspired by a watercolour by William Blake called Satan in His Original Glory, and I suppose it has within it that sort of drama of a great fall.
Marcello: Wonderful. All right, here we go: The Devil in His Youth.
[ Music: extract from The Devil in His Youth ]
Marcello: And there we are, The Devil in His Youth. We were just looking at the William Blake painting you mentioned. How do you approach writing a piece about, well, we’re talking about Satan here. Remind me of the original title?
Gabriel: Satan in His Original Glory.
Marcello: And he’s sort of enthroned in light and beauty. So how do you find a musical language for exploring this idea?
Gabriel: Well, we almost never see him depicted like this. He’s always some gargoyle, some repugnant figure. But he’s described as being beautiful, as being seductive, all these things, and that picture has this tremendous sense of vanity in the way he’s depicted. You can see the seeds of the fall in it. We were talking about Ravel, and it has that almost too-polished artifice to it. There’s something quite similar in Ravel, I think.
Marcello: Thinking of Gaspard de la nuit?
Gabriel: Yes, I had that idea behind it.
Influences and the transcendental
Marcello: Interesting. Gosh. Okay, well, we’ve talked about Ravel a bit, but I’d be interested to know, and perhaps our listeners are too, who your main inspirations are, other than Bach.
Gabriel: Well, Bach is huge. But I suppose in terms of modernist music, someone like Giacinto Scelsi is just massive, a massive influence. Again, a contemporary modernist, but obsessed with a kind of transcendental mysticism, really looking for some other type of religion, essentially. Obviously he goes into this strange world of Eastern mysticism, but his focus on sound and texture has been huge for my music, although a lot of my music doesn’t sound like his.
Marcello: Yes, it’s so interesting how even in the twentieth century, in high modernism, so many of the great composers are searching for something greater. They’re either religious themselves, Stravinsky or Schoenberg, or they’re searching in a mystical sense for something. Messiaen as well, of course, who is the author of our title track on The Music Show. And even Stockhausen, as we were saying earlier: he believed he was from the planet Sirius, or something like that.
Gabriel: Yes, a strange figure.
Marcello: So do you think a sense of the beyond, a sense of something bigger than the notes on the page, is an essential or original part of being a composer in our tradition?
Gabriel: Yes, I think music is a kind of transcendental art. Why write music unless you have some understanding of the transcendental? I think a lot of music from the last century is trapped inside a philosophy that denies what it really is. The motivations of the composer may be something different: obviously the composer is deeply enamoured of sound, of its play, of something interesting going on sonically. But the received philosophy denies that it means anything. I think all music is trying to be beautiful.
Marcello: Well, it’s often described as the most abstract of the arts, and perhaps that’s in the fact that it defies categorisation, or even words. It’s difficult to explain why a piece of music moves you, or why it reaches for feelings or emotions you didn’t know it was going to reach. When you look at a painting, you have an initial sense of what it’s offering you, and you can spend hours staring at it and certainly go deeper. But perhaps it’s partly that music happens through time, so it’s happening to you in real time, affecting and changing you in a way that basically no other art can, apart from maybe theatre. But in theatre we use language, which is I suppose another strand of the realist: it chooses to depict things as they are, rather than as they could be.
Gabriel: Yes, and I suppose with music, it’s decorating time. It’s moving forward, it’s decaying: it sounds, and then fades away. And it also takes you outside of time, because to make sense of it you have to hold what has just happened, experience what is happening, and anticipate what is to come. It takes you outside of the present moment in a way I can’t think of another art form really doing.
Marcello: It’s a bit like life, I suppose. It has its cycle. What’s that line from The Tempest? “Our little life is rounded with a sleep.” It’s a bit like a piece of music again.
Codex Astralis
Marcello: Great. So let’s move on to your next piece, Codex Astralis. Now, we have two extracts here. What would you prefer? Would you like to play one after the other?
Gabriel: Sure, we can play them back to back.
Marcello: Great, let’s do them back to back. So the next two tracks are extracts from Codex Astralis. A brief intro on this piece: what can you tell us?
Gabriel: Well, the whole codex is about a forty-minute piece made up of little episodes, which are experimenting with different types of counterpoint. The first one draws on a traditional shape-note hymn from America, and has a digital decay effect at the end. The other one is inspired by Byzantine chant.
Marcello: Wonderful. Great, well, here we are: Codex Astralis.
[ Music: two extracts from Codex Astralis ]
Marcello: There we are, Codex Astralis. Just at the end there, before we came back on air, you mentioned that the viola, in that final phrase, was playing with a leather mute. Tell us more.
Gabriel: Yes, that’s it. In Byzantine chant you have two lines. In the West we’ve got something like a cantus firmus, and then there’s the melodic line; they have a different name for it, I can’t remember. But there’s a sense of depth, and the singers can cup a hand over their mouth to give it a different timbre. A real metal mute is too much, but one of the string players had a leather mute, and I thought it was perfect. It really mimics that voice and that mournful sound.
Marcello: Which you were saying is very popular now. For those of you with your finger on the pulse of the contemporary world, there’s a bit of a trend at the moment for very raw folk singing, and it’s very beautiful, a wonderful addition to the scene. I wonder if some groups adopt it in a stylistic way. Because it is so powerful, it can sometimes overpower, perhaps, and I think it’s very important to keep this stuff very pure, and I know that in your music you’re trying to do that. And there’s your connection to Peter Maxwell Davies, through the Max Trust: a composer who lived his final years in Orkney. I wonder if he had a big influence on what you do?
Gabriel: I have to admit I was really quite ignorant of Maxwell Davies’s music. I met him before he passed away, and he was a very, very generous, very friendly, very engaging man. Then I started working for the Max Trust, and part of that is that I’d write about his pieces and contribute to their little online magazine. It was through that that I really came to appreciate the depth of his work. Before that, I knew his name and that he was a big deal, but to be honest I hadn’t sat down and listened to a lot of his music.
Marcello: Well, there’s often this Scottish sense in your music, I think. Perhaps it’s the inspiration of the Hebridean psalm singing.
Gabriel: Well, I think a lot of impressionistic music was very orientalist. The Orient was this mystical place. Ravel, to bring him up again: his version of the mystical faraway place was the Basque country. He never really left Paris, so his exotic world over the hill was the Basque country. This is pre-Ryanair.
Marcello: Yes, yes.
Gabriel: So I think there is something, for us now, like a type of occidentalism, where our own traditions have become kind of exotic to us.
Lights of Los Llanos
Marcello: Interesting idea. Well, in the consciousness of the never-ending flow of time, I think we should move on to another piece. This is Lights of Los Llanos. Could you tell us a bit about it?
Gabriel: Yes, this piece is very programmatic. It’s inspired by my grandfather’s tale of the first time electricity came to the island he grew up on. After school, he and his classmates climbed to the top of the side of a mountain, looking down on the town of Los Llanos, waiting for it to be illuminated for the first time.
Marcello: Amazing. Well, here we are: Lights of Los Llanos.
[ Music: Lights of Los Llanos ]
Counterpoint, and M for Mary
Marcello: Beautiful. Lights of Los Llanos. Before we play the final piece, M for Mary, I wonder, could you share with us whether you have a particular approach to harmony? Other than, of course, this heterophonic language, which is beautiful, would you say you have a flavour in your music?
Gabriel: I think the thing that had the biggest influence on me, studying composition through the system, was counterpoint. It completely changed the way I thought about harmony. Some of my music is very contrapuntal, some of it isn’t, but counterpoint completely opened my mind, breaking this block way of thinking about chords following one another, and thinking about motion through time instead. That really changed my whole perspective.
Marcello: It’s funny, because that whole tradition of block harmony, in a weird way, brings us back to Bach.
Gabriel: Yes, though he’s a great contrapuntist as well. But the chorale is a very Lutheran sort of thing, isn’t it?
Marcello: Yes, yes. And before that, the Ars Nova and the School of Notre Dame.
Gabriel: Yes, they had a massive effect, I think, on the early Renaissance.
Marcello: Well, I can’t get enough of Morales. I’ve been listening to him a lot. For listeners who don’t know Morales, he’s a Spanish composer, with just the most amazing counterpoint and melisma, the opposite of syllabic composition: these long lines on open vowels, where the word is finally closed about three minutes in, and we finally understand what the word was. Beautiful music. Great. So now we’re going to have M for Mary.
[ Music: M for Mary ]
Marcello: And there we are, M for Mary. Gabriel Williams, thank you very much for coming on the show. It’s been wonderful hearing your music and hearing about your work.
Gabriel: The pleasure’s mine.
Marcello: If you want to hear more of Gabriel and his music, and indeed find out more about what Vox Alba is up to, visit the website.
Gabriel: VoxAlba.co.uk.
Marcello: That’s right. This has been The Music Show with me, Marcello Palazzo. Thank you very much for listening.
Music in this programme
Extracts from Hebridian
Extract from The Devil in His Youth
Two extracts from Codex Astralis
Lights of Los Llanos
M for Mary
The Music Show with Marcello Palazzo, Radio Maria England
