Composer

For a preamble, see the welcome page in the composer section.

New Work: Brimming Stone, SATB, strings, piano, organ and gong, with improvisers included through Dovetails and Responses.

This piece, composed 2023, is to be recorded by the New London Camber Choir in 2026.

Jenni’s two commissioned operas The Descent of Inanna and Siddhartha Spirit Child for Lontano are her most extensive and publicly well-received works, along with her award-winning musical direction of Land Mass for The Improvisers’ Choir and her forthcoming The Brimming Stone for the New London Chamber Choir, recording in 2026. These are perhaps her four most important works to date. You will be able to see a complete list of her many other works here (currently under construction).

Spirit Child, the Prelude

“There are concerts that make you realise what you’ve been missing.. Jenni Roditi’s Spirit Child Prelude had the energy, urgency and directness of expression that so much well-intentioned new music lacks.” Stephen Johnson, The Independent.

Read the full review here.

“Her music is unbound by stylistic convention”, Robert Walker of Musical Opinion magazine wrote of her third opera, Siddhartha Spirit Child, performed by Lontano in 2001.

A new storyboard video-montage of Spirit Child Prelude, the overture, and the opera itself (in three acts) have been collated on a separate page. There, you can view the whole composition (2 hrs 7 mins) as an animated visualisation, realised by JR in 2025.

Featuring the sparkling voice of the much missed, late Sianed Jones with Dirk Campbell, Duduk (an Armenian 5 hole flute – Dirk is improvising throughout) and with Lontano, conductor Odaline de la Martinez, at St Johns, Smith Square, 1997. Libretto by the much-missed, late Rebecca Swift, with JR co-writer.

The title of the opera was expanded to Siddhartha Spirit Child – a few years after the performance, to give additional clues about the the subject matter. Please see this dedicated page for music-video montages with audio taken from the live performance on 2001.

There is also a dedicated page for The Descent of Inanna.

Audience Comments

Actress Eleanor Bron wrote after the performance, “Siddhartha Spirit Child was an enthralling, moving experiment, full of thought-provoking images and shimmering sound.. utterly compelling – an astonishing accomplishment altogether.”

Composer Maxwell Michael Steer wrote, “In my heart I felt that, like Messiaen’s St Francis, it is an oratorio rather than an opera. In Siddhartha Spirit Child I feel a fervancy of belief that could not have contemplated introducing a character of comparable moral force to your hero. Thus I am forced to conclude that you and Messaien have written essentially devotional works. There were many moments of poignant beauty.. the whole moral focus of the narrative is on the characters’ vocal expressions of their inner world.. the timbral narrative of the principal vocal part was intense.”

Actor the late Clive Swift wrote of the same piece, “I hadn’t realised the extent of your talent – inventively and emotionally. It’s a highly accomplished score and appeared to me far more exciting than a good deal of stuff I’ve heard at Proms etc. penned by more established names.. it would make a fine Prom in itself.”

Earlier Years, 1984 – 2001

Jenni composes intuitively after having worked through several different, more abstract approaches. Vocal music has dominated her output, although there are instrumental works, too. She finds it necessary to let knowledge recede when composing and be simply at the piano, the desk, the microphone, the looper, or the music notation software, listening, sketching, improvising, and composing as she goes along. This is helped through her study and practice of meditation, which she began in 1985.

Her path as a composer has not been what Stephen Johnson, in his review of her work Spirit Child Prelude in The Independent, described as “music by young, college-educated composers”. Jenni’s college education ended at the BMus level. She didn’t follow up with an MMus but got on with her practice for 30 years before returning to academic education in 2011. While some people have suggested she do a doctorate others have warned her to stay away from the idea, in favour of her doing her own thing.

She graduated [GGSM] in 1985 and then, instead of continuing her studies in academia, she went into teaching different forms of improvisation for classical musicians (at the Guildhall School of Music) as part of a new postgraduate programme, Performance and Communication Skills, with course director Peter Wiegold.

Between 1984 and 1989, she composed music for Peter Wiegold’s ensemble, Turning Point. This work was part of a hands-on, music-making, community-building, experimental laboratory. It was a different form of postgraduate development, more of an apprenticeship.

Her compositions during this period drew on influences from her Guildhall training (with Robert Saxton, and briefly Oliver Knussen) while also challenging that. Lost Jockey, Loose Tubes, Regular Music and the minimalist composers emerging from New York were rising through the 1980s and all made an impact on her. At first, she wondered how they were ‘allowed’ to write music like this – with tonality and groove, the antithesis of the academic forms she had encountered. This new music was infectious and along with her immersion in the principles of the music workshops that facilitated natural creativity as a foundation for spontaneous and devised music making, Jenni slowly transferred her allegiances while at the same time having had her perception of ‘what is modern music?’ blown wide open. Non-Western music, particularly Indian classical, was also calling her, and she first encountered the raga in a third-year module at Guildhall with Viriam Jasani. She attended two, yearly ‘Oriental Music’ Festivals at York University, where she also heard Javanese Gamelan and the farmers’ music of Korea among others.

Her second opera The Descent of Inanna (1992) began to bring through her determination to find more expressive freedom and connect this to an evolving personal and tangible musical language.

The composing of Inanna helped to plant her roots in the musical soil of feeling. That word was a ‘no-no’ in composers’ cafe conversations and classroom discussions. How can composers not want to discuss ‘the need to express?’ was her constant underlying question, for years. Inanna broke through those quiet worries with a score that ‘said it as it was’ and her psyche began to find a way forward.

Jenni started actively exploring experimental voice in 1989 with the Roy Hart Theatre in Paris, and this marked her full exit from the sublimation of feeling into abstraction and the beginning of coming home to a musical truth she could intuitively relate to. Inanna germinated from 1987 onwards following her orchestral piece Six Coins in a Fountain, performed at Conway Hall, by the Schoenberg Symphony Orchestra. The Descent of Inanna was premièred at the ICA in London in 1992, revived in 1994 at The Place and toured, and was then presented at the Zabreb Music Theatre Bienalle in 1997, to name the main events. Jenni arranged for a private recording of about one-third of the entire piece in 2007.

Her third opera, Siddhartha Spirit Child, was premièred in two stages – first Spirit Child Prelude in 1997 and then the prelude with the full opera in May 2001 at The Ocean Night Club, Hackney, East London. There is a good recording of the Prelude from St John’s Smith Square. There is a live recording of the full opera, which has had its audio quality improved recently by the brilliant Steve Parr.

For more on the operas mentioned above, go to Inanna and Spirit Child (no link yet). For more biography of her composing from 2002, and its twists and turns, see the about link.