Composer and pianist Eric McElroy’s forthcoming CD from Somm Recordings, Tongues of Fire, features his settings of poems by Gregory Leadbetter, W.S. Merwin, Alice Oswald, Grevel Lindop and Robert Graves, sung by tenor James Gilchrist.

McElroy has written for solo piano, voice, choir, orchestra and various chamber ensembles; his work has been performed internationally and he is currently working on a commission for the English Symphony Orchestra. He has recently been researching at Merton College, Oxford, where this conversation took place on 31 January 2023.

GL: Eric, I know very little about your background. Could tell me how you got into music, how you started playing – indeed, where it all came from?

EMcE: I started playing piano when I was three. My mother’s a piano teacher, so that’s why I began so early, and I’ve been playing piano ever since: I can’t remember a time in my life when the piano wasn’t there. I did an undergraduate degree in piano performance in Washington State, then went to Vienna, where I did my Master’s degree, and afterwards to the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire – because I wanted to do a degree that focused on British piano music, the repertoire of early to mid-twentieth century; then I came to Oxford to do a research degree on that repertoire. That’s sort of the elevator summary. But yes, I’m a pianist-composer or a composer-pianist. For me they’re one and the same.

GL: And how did you begin to compose? Have you always composed from childhood?

EMcE: It would have been very ...