We sat down for an exclusive interview with Joshua Ballance, who is the conductor and founder of Mad Song, a British contemporary-music ensemble. The ensemble have performed around the UK and abroad, and recently recorded their début album for release in 2026 on the Métier label.
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How has five years of playing together changed the way you listen to one another?
I think what it’s really done is teach us to trust each other. Getting to know people more intimately, as humans as much as musicians, means we can read and anticipate each other so much more easily.
By now we’ve also played such a variety of repertoire together, and in such varied contexts, that everything is much more instinctive. We’re experienced not only as individuals, but as an ensemble, and that allows us to avoid worrying about logistics that might previously have got in the way of making music.
On a personal level, as the ensemble’s conductor I have the sense of knowing better how to calibrate my gestures differently to the different players, but also of being able to read more easily the people in front of me, and (hopefully) help them achieve their best.
How do you approach a UK premiere when the audience may have no reference point at all?
I think the first question comes around the programming. It’s particularly important with a premiere that it’s heard in a context that best gives it the possibility to speak. That’s true stylistically but just as importantly emotionally. In this programme, spatial communication clearly nods towards the American Minimalism present in the rest of the programme, but also has much more avant-garde tendencies, which tie in more with the Finnissy that will follow it. Emotionally, it’s quite a heterogenous piece: though it starts and ends contemplatively it gets much more worked-up in the middle. As a result we’ve put it second in the programme, sandwiched between two works that we think it converses with well.
Otherwise, it’s a question of asking what might help an audience follow the piece and how we might provide this information. In this case, I did a video interview with Kai which we put out on our Insta, in which she talks a bit about the inspiration for the piece: caves on the eastern coast of the Japanese island of Shikoku. We always talk during our concerts to introduce the pieces and help the audience orient themselves, and I know that I’ll mention that background, the endless dripping of water off and onto stone, before we play it.
How does playing minimalist classics sit alongside brand-new premieres in the same programme?
I think that’s a real hallmark of our programming! As a contemporary music ensemble it goes without saying that we’re obsessed with all things new, and it’s always a real honour to give premieres.
That said, something we feel really strongly about is that there’s a huge amount of under-played music from the last 70 years, and so it’s something of a mission of ours to delight in this sort of mixed programming. We’re lucky that there’s a massive catalogue of music written for our lineup, and so being able to delve into that is always so rewarding.
We tend to look for some sort of theme or stylistic connection between works; in the past we’ve done programmes centred around song and non-musical inspirations, this time round it’s repetition.
What does returning to Reich’s Double Sextet reveal now that it didn’t in 2022?
How hard it is to play in tune!
I think with such rhythmic music, especially when it’s fast and always (subtly) changing it’s really easy to focus on rhythm as the big challenge. That was certainly our experience first time round, and especially as we were quite fresh as an ensemble.
Coming back to it now has been so illuminating because we’ve been able to explore so many other facets of the music in detail: articulation, intonation, line… We’re so much more comfortable in the nuts & bolts of it that we’re able to think in much bigger sections and use the music to tell a bigger story: paragraphs rather than sentences.
I think the other personal revelation has been the slow central movement. Often Reich is appealing because of the energy and drive, the groove, but this slow movement is rather more pared back which can make it more difficult to pull-off successfully. When it works, though, it’s quite simply gorgeous.
What would you say to listeners who think repetition is something to be endured rather than enjoyed?
Clearly all art tends to strike a balance between repetition and contrast, and different styles lean more in one or the other direction.
I think what highly repetitive music can do is help us access a different way of listening. Much like (good) minimalist painting encourages us to revel in the subtleties of colour and texture, the music in this programme can create new ways of experiencing music. It’s by no means monolithic, though: while the Muhly is a high-octane race car, the Kubota-Enright is much more meditative, while the Mazzoli tells much more of a narrative. Something for everyone!