Workroom Conversations: on composition

The Workroom Conversations are ‘backstage’: there is no audience. Instead, we invite practitioners to share, debate, challenge and enrich. These are conversations rather than public forums. We would be delighted for you to join as many of these as you would like to and bring your ideas to the workbench.

Composer Errollyn Wallen and graphic designer Sonya Dyakova in conversation on finding rhythm, harmony, form and texture on a page and in music.

Join us for a conversation over a glass of wine in a beautiful space at Somerset House.
Spaces limited, RSVP essential.

Errollyn Wallen MBE is an internationally renowned composer, librettist and singer-songwriter. Her prolific output  includes fourteen and a half  operas to date and her music has won numerous awards including  the Ivor Novello Award for Classical Music and a British Composer Award. She was specially commissioned to write two large scale works for the opening ceremony of the Paralympic Games for London 2012. Errollyn founded her own Orchestra X who recently recorded and released a new orchestral album, PHOTOGRAPHY, on the NMC label, recently voted Top Ten Classical Albums of 2016 by USA’s National Public Radio. Orchestra X will perform her Mighty River which will be featured in PRSF’s New Music Biennial at Hull City of Culture 2017, London’s Southbank Centre and in Oxford. Errollyn Wallen’s music has the distinguishing honour of travelling 7.84 million kilometres in space, completing 186 orbits around the Earth on NASA’s STS115 mission. 

Sonya Dyakova is an art director and graphic designer, who studied and began her career in San Francisco. Sonya worked with Vince Frost and Kerr|Noble, before joining Phaidon Press in 2005, where she worked closely with the iconic British designer Alan Fletcher. At Phaidon she was responsible for the art direction and design of a wide range of books, from contemporary art and design to architecture and photography. Her approach is strongly rooted in conceptual and typographic experimentation developed through research with special attention to tactile details. In 2011, Sonya re-designed frieze magazine and was the publication’s art director for 5 years. In 2011, she received a Grand Prix from the Tokyo Type Directors Club. In 2013, she became a member of AGI, Alliance Graphique Internationale. Sonya runs her own practice Atelier Dyakova whose clients include museums, galleries, cultural institutions, restaurants and fashion brands. Currently the studio is working with clients such as Noma, Foundation Cartier, Rizzoli, Aperture, Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth and Vitra Design Museum.