Jessica Cottis: still standing

When a brutal unprovoked attack for the ‘entertainment’ of a group of men left conductor Jessica Cottis badly injured, her rescue came from an unexpected quarter.

Conductor Jessica Cottis. Picture: Kaupo Kikkas

Conductor Jessica Cottis was enjoying an afternoon walk last December just a few hundred metres from her home in leafy North London, when she noticed a small group of young men coming towards her. True to the learned instinct of 2020, she moved off the path, being sure to keep the two-metre distance but the youths kept coming in her direction. Then the unthinkable happened: the gang punched her and smashed a glass bottle in her face. Her fight-or-flight response kicked in and she shouted and chased after the group, before she became aware of an awful pain and blood running down her face.

Cottis suffered a broken nose, concussion and was plagued by splitting headaches and a dizziness behind her eyes. She was barely able to stay awake for more than an hour for the next few weeks. The unprovoked nature of the attack and the fact that it was unmotivated by theft sent her into a void.

“It’s really awful thinking back on it,” says Cottis, speaking over Zoom, the same day the body of missing woman Sarah Everard was found in London woodland. “It’s kind of the highest level of objectification that a human could be subjected to violence as a kind of entertainment, or just something that’s done. It’s a complete subjugation of what makes somebody a person. Philosophically there’s something I found really dark and worrying.”

The attack took place about three months before Cottis, 41, was due to fly to Australia to lead her first concerts as chief conductor and artistic director of Canberra Symphony Orchestra, succeeding the 15-year tenure of Nicholas Milton.

As well as driving the orchestra’s programming, her position will soon see her conduct Kurt Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins and a program featuring soprano Deborah Cheetham.

The position is a homecoming of sorts for the Australian-British conductor who studied music at Australian National University before embarking on a successful career in Europe as an organist – a path she was forced to abandon due to a wrist injury – and then as a conductor.

“It felt really important to kind of come back to some of my roots in Canberra and to give back in that way,” Cottis says, speaking from quarantine in Adelaide en route to Canberra. “It’s this meeting of like minds where we can program lots of Australian music and look towards emerging composers and soloists and conductors and see what we can do to help develop Australian classical music right here, right now.”

As was the case for most performers, 2020 was a whirlwind of concert cancellations and her Canberra concerts will be her first since November.

Jessica Cottis and foster dog Bella.

“The last year has been so up and down for the arts. I’m really looking forward to getting back to the act of making music.”

Music, it turns out, was an enormous comfort to Cottis when she was recovering from the attack. The first piece she reached for was Wagner’s Parsifal and then the final opera in his Ring Cycle, Götterdämmerung, the textures and colours cradling her in her darkest moments. “These kind of never-ending harmonies seemed like a great place for me to exist in,” she says. “There was that kind of being suspended by that music.”

Her other saviour came in the form of a small, four-legged creature named Bella, a dog with a penchant for chasing squirrels. After losing their beloved Boston terrier Florian aged 13 last year, Cottis and her partner were unsure about owning another dog right away but decided they could foster animals on their way to a “forever home”. So, a few days after the accident a large yet gentle man with a “Brahmsian” beard pulled up at their house in a van from UK Boston terrier Rescue and produced a dog “with this little wiggly tail who leapt into our arms”.

“She helped my recovery without any doubt,” Cottis says with a smile. “There were times where I wasn’t feeling well, but there’s this little creature in front of you wanting to play or wanting to chase a plush toy squirrel around or whatever.

“The point of fostering is to see what the dog is like ... She came as a kind of angel to help me. And that was repaid by working out what kind of home and what kind of situation she would need as a little creature going forward in this world.”

As is the case with many conductors, Cottis’s musical journey started with an instrument. She was just two years old when she was tapping away at the piano on her mother’s lap. At ANU she studied organ, piano and musicology and then went to Paris to study with French organist Marie-Claire Alain. In 2001 she made her European debut at London’s Westminster Cathedral and her career was really starting to take off, but then she started to develop a pain in her wrist.

“Being a keyboard player, I thought I’m just a bit sore so I kept on playing … My fourth and fifth fingers became quite numb,” Cottis says, holding her fingers in the air. “They need to move, I don’t know how many thousands of times for a 10-minute piece, and if 30 per cent of the time they’re not going to move accurately, then that’s a big problem.”

Cottis had to do what self-help gurus these days term “pivot”, although the reality of this forced her to pick apart the bones of her identity.

“Making music is a valuable and important job but it’s also our personality,” she says. “Starting to play music as a three-year-old, music is just as relevant in terms of communication or understanding as speaking English.”

Law seemed like an intellectually stimulating path so she enrolled at the University of London but she didn’t feel as though she was being authentic to herself. “I felt like a large portion of my insides had been taken out, it really felt that physical … (But) there were very few possibilities to be a musician if you can’t move your fingers properly.”

Cottis had always been drawn to the textures and colours of symphonic music and the prospect of being a conductor crystallised when she visited a friend in Vienna and went to the Staatsoper where “it struck me there and then that the sound coming out of the orchestra pit was like nothing else”.

After graduating from the Royal Academy of Music in 2009 Cottis held assistant conductor positions with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Sydney Symphony Orchestra before working as a guest conductor across Europe. Last year she helped set up the Women Conductors Course at the Royal Opera House in London which was completed by 35 emerging conductors “who happen to be female”.

“I graduated from the Royal Academy in 2009 in London. It had been a decade since there had been another female on the course,” she says. “And now I think it’s roughly half-half.”

More women are pursuing conducting, she says, but as with the proportion of female chief executives of major international companies, there is not yet gender parity. If the fan mail she received after conducting a BBC Proms concert for preschoolers is any indication, then the future is promising.

“What surprised me was about 70 per cent of the letters were from little girls. One of them wrote this amazing letter with some hand-drawn pictures. She said to me ‘when I’m older, I want to boss the music men around just like you’.

“Music is genderless. Sound is universal and the expression of emotion through music is universal.”

Jessica Cottis will conduct CSO in The Seven Deadly Sins, March 31 and April 1, and Sharing the Sky, April 8 in Canberra.