'I'm better at notes than words, and when I don't play music I get lonely'

PICTURE the scene: a cute little girl with great musical ability; her mum, a flute teacher and single parent, can't afford to pay a babysitter, so she gets her daughter to sit quietly in a corner with books and puzzles while she teaches other people.

When they play a tune the girl knows, she hums along; when mum tests them for exams by playing a snatch of music for the student to sing back to her, she does it, too – and sometimes more quickly. She may be only three and already playing the flute, but she really wants to get her little hands on a cello.

"I was really annoying," says Cheryl Frances-Hoad. "I took to music very easily and tunes would pop out of my mouth, which must have been irritating to mum's pupils." A few years later, when she had been playing the cello for only six months but clearly had outstanding ability, Ann Frances-Hoad travelled to the world- famous Yehudi Menuhin Music School with eight-year-old Cheryl to ask them if there was any point in her working towards an audition a couple of years hence.

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The school, which at that point only took half-a-dozen international pupils a year, saw enough potential to want Cheryl to start the following term, and far from paying a contribution towards the privilege of being taught by some of the best music teachers in the world, they gave Ann Frances-Hoad 500 a year – which no doubt helped towards the expense of driving 200 miles each week to take Cheryl home to Essex for the weekend.

"I owe my mother so much," says Cheryl, looking back. "I was an only child, and I don't know if my mum truly wanted me to go so far away. It seems sort of crazy with hindsight, and being at the school wasn't

easy. I missed my mother terribly, and when not in classes hid myself away in my room.

"I was happy to perform on my own, but I didn't speak much. It took years for me to have the confidence to speak in front of people, and it was music that gave me that confidence. But I'm still better at notes than words, to be honest, and when not playing music I get lonely."

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Cheryl Frances-Hoad is now 29, and has just been appointed as the first composer in residence at Leeds University, a two-year mission that includes not only writing new music but teaching, inspiring and bringing music to the community.

It's the kind of post you might associate with a music professional with many decades of work behind them.

Looking at Cheryl's CV, the truth is that she does, technically, have decades behind her because she started composing at around the same time as she went to the Menuhin School. She enjoyed playing the cello and piano, learning her craft in a highly competitive environment with other musical prodigies having their talent nurtured like rare and beautiful orchids, but it could be stressful, and her increasing bent towards composition was a comfort.

"I don't regret leaving home so young, even though it could be difficult, because I was competitive myself, and where else could you have been in a school orchestra where Rostropovitch would visit and play alongside you?" The great man Yehudi Menuhin was a regular visitor, and Cheryl's growing talent as a composer meant she was chosen to write a piece for nine string players in celebration of his 80th

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birthday. The piece was played for him at the Royal Albert Hall, he was very impressed and signed the first page of the manuscript. Another fond memory of the school's founder was struggling to follow as he taught a yoga masterclass.

While most of the students at the Menuhin School were heading for glittering performing careers, Cheryl Frances-Hoad was one of the few who, although still playing to a high level, took composition seriously. At 15, she won the BBC Young Composer competition.

"It blew me away, succeeding in something so prestigious for a piece I wrote at the kitchen table," says Cheryl, who cites Benjamin Britten among her greatest inspirations. Commissions for other music soon followed, and at 17, after what she says was a "disastrous" interview, she went to Cambridge to study music.

A truly modest woman, she points out that she's still not sure how she did it with only five GCSEs and two A-levels, and recalls feeling completely out of her depth in an Early Music class with students who had studied A-level Latin, a subject she hadn't touched.

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Nevertheless she left university with a triple-first, then a Masters followed by a PhD at King's College, London, and was chosen as one of six former Cambridge music students from different decades to compose music for a psalm in honour of the university's 800th anniversary. "Mine was Psalm Number One, which suited me because it was all about being okay if you were good and damned if you were bad..."

To spare Cheryl's blushes when she reads this, let's just say that her path to composer in residence at Leeds has been littered with prizes, increasingly important commissions and rave reviews. She describes her style of composition as "romantic music with lots more notes in it and modern harmonies. I aim at great emotional immediacy". Others have described it as "mercurial, impassioned, and always compelling in its authority"(The Spectator) and "highly wrought, yet piled high with emotional content" (The Guardian).

Recent garlands have included the Royal Philharmonic Society

Composition Prize, which resulted in My Day In Hell (inspired by Dante's Inferno) premiering at the 2007 Cheltenham Festival, and a 2008 Leverhulme Trust Fellowship for a residency with Cambridge University Psychiatry Department, studying aspects of the mind in order to inspire a new work for cello and orchestra. Her first piano concerto (which took nine months to write) premiered last year, and a new piece based on Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf for voices and piano was recently commissioned by the BBC. It will be performed at the Wigmore Hall next January.

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Cheryl likens the creative process to modern architecture. "Buildings which can look gravity- defying have to have secure foundations to work properly. I think to write a good piece it has to be structurally and technically sound as well as sounding as intuitive and emotionally direct as possible.

"I've been very lucky to have had three years of solid work, with a few life-saving commissions coming along at just the right time. A lot of my work is for performers who want me to write something for them. While writing music rarely pays more than enough to cover your bills, I count myself very lucky that people will pay me to do something I love so much. I like variety, and would like to try music for film or television at some point. I'm not looking to become a John Williams – although financially I wouldn't mind being him for one month a year."

Cheryl says she's "ridiculously excited" to be coming to Leeds to a job which will involve working with many other creative departments and a special relationship with Opera North, which has generously funded her new position. The is the first such collaboration between an opera company and a university. Two years' guaranteed funding mean she can develop her composition, supervise students and work with ON's theatre and community projects.

In her sights is the major target of a first full-length opera. "I will have great freedom to compose without worrying about how to earn a living for a couple of years," says Cheryl. "I'll have the opportunity to work with all sorts of other artists, and that's so important to me. Being a composer, I find the deeper I get into the work the more

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solitary I become, and that isn't so good for the work. You need to be with people and keep experiencing life to create work that is relevant."

"Opera North does so much great work already in reaching out to the community, including important projects with children. My experience with children has been inspiring, although one did say she thought 'all composers were dead'. I'm exploring a few ideas for a full opera – and recent political events would provide a good theme. "

So – Gordon Brown, the Greek Tragedy? "Well... I wouldn't cast him to be Greek, although there's a lot that's operatic about his story."

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