Jamie Elless

“I don’t like lying to audiences; I like making them aware of what sounds they’re hearing… …I like using sounds that are slow and slow-evolving, so they’re aware of the sounds before they change.”

Jamie Elless

Jamie Ava Elless (b. 1998) is an interdisciplinary composer, performer, and designer from Birmingham, UK. Jamie’s work draws inspiration from medieval European music, folk traditions, ambient and drone music, and queer liberation politics; her scores often blend experimental notation and graphic design practices with a collaborative and performer-centric approach. Jamie’s work has been commissioned, performed, and workshopped by ensembles such as Britten Sinfonia, Riot Ensemble, Psappha, Trinity Laban Symphony Orchestra, Terra Invisus, and many others; she was a Britten Sinfonia Opus 1 composer, and collaborated with Rylan Gleave for the British Music Collection’s Celebrating LGBTQ+ Composers Open Call in 2022. Jamie studied at the University of Nottingham as a Henry Thomas Mitchell vocal practice scholar, and was a Gareth Neame scholar at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, where she was the Composition Department’s Gold Medal Finalist for 2024.

In January 2024, Jamie collaborated with London-based ensemble Terra Invisus on a portrait concert for The Strand Contemporary Music Series. We sat down with Jamie at the British Film Institute, Southbank to discuss her concert with Terra Invisus, her interest in alternative notation, folk music, graphic design, honesty in composition, and more…

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Zyggy/PRXLUDES: Hi Jamie! Thanks for joining me today. You’ve recently performed a concert with contemporary music trio Terra Invisus at the Strand Contemporary Music Series here in London — tell me a bit about how you put the concert together…

Jamie Elless: This is probably the fourth time I’ve worked with Terra Invisus, maybe more times than that. I’ve worked with them all individually, and as a group, at various points over the past few years. It really helps that we’re all just really good friends. I’m so glad to have put on a lovely little concert with them – the programme became a mix of new music, old music, folk music, chant music, drone music, whatever music. The group commissioned a few composers for their upcoming album, Visions, which is coming out in Spring 2024, so thought it would be the perfect time to show off the three short pieces I wrote for them. We played a bit of European folk music — ‘The Butterfly’, a slipjig, and a Swedish song, ‘Kristallen den fina’ — and I had also written them a solo piece each. We exposed the solo pieces with seamless transitions — the piano piece blended into the cello piece, which then blended into the clarinet piece. It became a really nice, really varied set in the end.

We also played an improv piece that I wrote a while back in Aldeburgh. I had a lovely chance to stay at the Red Studio, in the shadow of Benjamin Britten’s Red House. I learned a lot about Benjamin Britten while I was there; the good and the bad of his legacy. [I] picked up an interesting book — Britten’s Children — which explores, quite explicitly, his relationship with children, and how problematic it often was. From that residency, I wrote a piece that was this sort of six-day passacaglia; on the first day I recorded a ground, and then recorded an improvised layer on top each day after for a week. The artist Mary Potter lived in the Red Studio for a long while – she used to mix her paints with beeswax to create a hazy painterly effect. So we performed a version of this piece, ‘beeswax’, to finish the concert at St Mary le Strand.

You mentioned this has been the latest in a series of collaborations with Terra Invisus — how did you first get involved with the ensemble?

It’s been really wonderful; working with friends is a uniquely intimate experience. We’re all ex-Trinity Laban students – we started working together as part of a Composition Department project. The trio came in and did some workshops with the composers, and we all wrote pieces for them, and got them recorded. The way I approached the workshops was inherently collaborative; within those first pieces, I wanted to give these performers their own agency within the compositional process. Because yes, they’re all performers, but they’re also improvisers, and they’re also composers in their own right — and this music was something I wanted to build collaboratively. I wanted to make these pieces as much theirs as they were mine. So I started to explore game music, music as a practical “game”, music as an intimate act — that kind of thing.

How did that initial collaboration go — and how did it inform work you did with them afterwards?

That initial collaboration was really fruitful, because we were all being very honest with each other. I wasn’t trying to make music that I didn’t want to make, and in the same way, I wanted them to be much a part of the process as I was, as the composer is. That hugely positive first collaboration was the start of so many more projects and collaborations.

Alex Lyon — the clarinettist — then led a Steve Reich project in 2022 for CoLab, which is Trinity Laban’s big yearly collaborative project. We explored ‘Music for Eighteen Musicians’ in massive depth. Watching her musicianship during that was an incredible experience, seeing a friend lead a really tricky piece. Separately, I’ve worked with Rebecca Burden and Milda Vitartaitė on loads of different projects. It’s just nice to have worked on all these things with them before, have this recording for their upcoming album, and as part of that, we’ve got this concert together where we can reflect on our past collaborations. It’s a really unique experience, being able to do that — and, as a bonus, they’re wonderful friends of mine. I can’t wait for the next thing we do together – me and Rebecca have been speaking about duo stuff, and I need to write Milda something hard to show off her skills (sorry Milda.)

Much of your work stems from an interest in both folk music and medieval European music. Tell me a bit about where those interests come from, and how they’ve informed your practice?

I think I’ve always called myself a folk musician. Some days, that’s more true than others. I started out my musical life pissing around on the piano, guitar — and when I was thirteen, me and my dad drove up to Holmfirth, and we bought my first bouzouki. That was my first conscious attempt to be like “right, I want to learn an instrument, and play some music.”

On the back of me getting a bouzouki, my grandad bought me an album of music by Steeleye Span — a really important band in the 60’s/70’s folk revival. That name comes from an old folk song — ‘Horkstow Grange’, I think. I already had a real personal connection with the folk music of the British Isles, and Steeleye Span having that folk rock sound — although their earlier music is very much “traditional” folk music, there’s no doubt about it — and being quite a varied band, meant that their music was stylistically quite wide. It was both authentic and incredibly modern.

I’ve not heard of Steeleye Span before — I’ll have to check them out.

I just loved them – some of their music hasn’t aged well, but a lot of it is wonderful. And before that, listening to incredibly large amounts of metal, and punk music… their sound blended with those early interests really well. That was my first foray into folk music, through the band. And then I developed an interest in acoustic folk music; I taught myself the fiddle, mandolin, low whistle. I was really interested in bands like Planxty, and The Chieftains, looking at more traditional Irish folk music.

That spurred a lot of my early musical interests. It wasn’t until the end of my Bachelor’s degree at Nottingham University that I started to become interested in medieval European music, and its place in the history of Western music. My relationship with medieval music is partly based on the fact that folk music itself is quite old — there was an immediate relationship there — but it actually grew out of a real interest in the notation of medieval music.

That’s fascinating — what is it about the notation that interests you?

Notation, in general, is a big interest of mine. The notation of medieval music up to the invention of the printing press is a real big focus for me. Once the printing press was invented, I feel we had a sudden standardisation of music notation. It meant that whatever we ended up with, at that point, became how we standardised the notation of music in Europe. That kind of put a stop — it didn’t completely halt — but put a major stop to experimentation for composers.

Before the printing press, there was a real marrying of composition and notational experimentation. There was a tangible culture of experimenting with the way music was visually represented; the way that music illustration was married with graphic design. So many examples of scores being in the shapes of hearts, and circles, to represent the music’s meaning; the performer could get the score and immediately go “oh, it’s a heart, it must be a love song” — they could then immediately add that understanding of a piece to the rehearsal and performance of it. Once we started mass-producing scores, we became a bit more obsessed with musical content, for better or for worse. I feel like European composers became dangerously and toxically obsessed with harmony. What I’m trying to do is look back at medieval music — 14th and 15th centuries, and earlier — to look at where we ended up at with these notation experiments. That’s what I’m really keen to keep alive as part of my practice.

So folk music has this eternal performative role for me as a musician, and then medieval music is more of a research focus. But they both cross over in really interesting ways, that I think I’m yet to actually pick apart. I’ve got many, many years to do that in, hopefully. -laughs-

I’m really interested in how your background with folk music has found its way into your practice — particularly as there’s quite a strong performative element within folk?

I’m actually an incredibly anxious and nervous performer. Performance has been something that I’ve “academically” neglected, because performance for me has always been really personal. I’ve always been much more confident as a composer, as a researcher, as an improviser — I (perhaps erroneously) make a distinction between performer and improviser — but I am never really fully relaxed when I’m performing. It’s something I’ve only consciously started to do recently.

Performance was something I’d have to myself, something I could use to explore music intimately and on my own; or it was something I could share with my friends at parties or in private. I love playing jazz, I love playing blues; having a little jazz band up in Nottingham was a really lovely way to start playing music that I felt more comfortable playing. But it all boils down to being an anxious performer.

That sounds like a lovely way in, so to speak. Were there any particular moments on the performance side that helped you gain confidence in that respect?

I was resisting any performance opportunities until I went to Trinity Laban. When I started there, I began having harpsichord lessons with James Johnstone, and that opened me up to a really exciting world of early music. We looked at the unmeasured preludes of Louis Couperin, and I had a really lovely exploration of them as a composer, rather than as a performer. We looked at music from the Robertsbridge Codex and Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre’s keyboard suites. But also, as I mentioned, Alex Lyon headed up an exploration of ‘Music for Eighteen Musicians’ in 2022 with composer Jack Wood. I’d had experience of performing pitched and unpitched percussion in various orchestras and ensembles before then, but this is quite intense music to perform as an amateur percussionist. I think being thrust so dramatically and directly into that performance environment was really helpful. That made me realise “yeah, performance is tricky, but I can do it. I am able to perform.”

Although performance has always been a part of my musical practice, only recently have I started to embrace it more openly. That’s why this concert with Terra Invisus was so important — I was forcing myself to play. That’s also true of the piece I wrote for Trinity Laban’s Gold Medal Showcase; my role in that was primarily as a composer, but again I forced myself to play piano in that piece. It’s something that’s now important to me as a composer, to really curate the performative element of your practice. A composer is an inherently interdisciplinary thing — you can bring whatever you need from your background to your role as a composer — but for me, it’s important to remember that I am, in some way, a performer. Although I had a performance background further back in my life, I’ve never really embraced it up until very recently. That’s both exciting, and very fucking frustrating – I sometimes find myself in a very rusty state. It’s very hard to reconcile, but the more I do it, the more I get used to it, and the less anxious I become.

Of course. For me, I feel a kind of dichotomy between “classical” performance practice — or things that happen in academic institutions — and folk performance practice. Is that something that resonates with you?

Absolutely – that’s something that I still have going on in me. The academic in me is the one that sits and thinks that people are critiquing everything I’m performing. But deep down… I listened to too much punk when I was younger, and too many crap metal bands for that matter, to really give a shit nowadays. -laughs- If something makes me feel good when I play it, on my own, then that should be it. There should be no further extrapolation than that.

I think it’s about the social act of music-making. It’s not about the academic critique of music. Again, in the folk revival in the 60s and 70s, there was this ideological difference between people that critiqued and analysed folk music, and people that actually played and performed it. Obviously, the lines weren’t as clear cut as that, but some musicians actively resisted the idea of the electric guitar being made part of folk music performances, because it was not “proper folk music” — but then electric guitars became cheap and available. They then became an inherent part of folk music because that’s what people were playing. So I think you’re right. Part of being a folk musician is not really giving a shit about the “sound quality” of things. It’s: are you enjoying it, and are you engaging with other people while you’re playing music? I think that feeds into my compositional process, as well.

Aesthetically, you’ve also expressed an interest in drone music and electronics; when writing for musicians, or yourself, how does that interest manifest in your practice?

I’ve always struggled to connect with electronic music that relies on MaxMSP, or pedals, or this “extra-human” element to it. I think that’s because I lack the understanding of it. So I’ve felt like there’s a real disconnect between the “human” — or the performer, or the audience — and the music, once it has to go through an electronic process.

A lot of my earlier pieces still relate to what I do now, in that I use fixed media and live musicians. I find that a really easy and effective way of incorporating electronics into a performance practice. You can arrange sounds into what is essentially a backing track; you can use timestamps, you can say “at 2:37, play the loudest fucking note you’ve ever played.”

It means the fixed media can take any form. For example, let’s write a piece right now: we could have two clarinettists, they both have a fixed media part where we record them doing things, and then play that while they’re playing. And then at 2:37, these “four” clarinettists — two in the past, two live — do this thing together. That, to me, is more exciting than having a live musician play through a complex pedalboard and getting this almost alien, disconnected sound at the end. Don’t get me wrong, that’s a wonderful way of writing music, but I always kind of switch off when I see those performances. It’s sort of a real block for me: “I don’t get how the sound goes from there to there…” -laughs- Again, that’s a ‘me’ problem, no one else — I hope I change my mind soon.

What is it about this kind of approach to electronics that appeals to you?

I love having an extramusical layer that you can play with and playing with the audiences’ expectations of it. I don’t like lying to audiences; I like making them aware of what sounds they’re hearing. If I do use fixed media, I like using sounds that are slow and slow-evolving, so audiences are aware of the sounds before they change. For example, if you have a piece that’s reliant on birdsong, having the first two or three minutes just be the birdsong — and then once that’s established, you can play with that live element.

I think that’s kind of a Theatre Complicité thing, exposing methods and tricks straight away. ‘The Encounter’ is great, because right at the start, Simon McBurney is like “right, this is what I’m gonna be doing — I’m gonna explain all these sounds — and then we’re gonna get on with it.” Because then the audience isn’t sitting through the whole thing, watching the array of monitors and speakers, thinking “when are we gonna see and hear the weird thing in the corner?” If we expose our methods right at the start of a piece, we can all then get on with a piece’s content more readily — the audience is then receptive to whatever it is you’re throwing at them. So doing fixed media stuff, and making it slow and longform, gives the audience time to process things. It reminds the composer that the audience is there as well as you.

There’s a lot of honesty and integrity in that approach — laying all your cards out on the table at the start of the piece. I’m not sure if you’re aware of Alexander Schubert’s ‘Star Me Kitten’? For me, that piece really embodies that approach…

Even if you’re exposing all your stuff at the start — or you’re exposing them so slowly that the audience isn’t second-guessed — it doesn’t mean then that you can’t break it. Because then, the moment in which you switch things around becomes incredibly exciting. For example, a fixed media and live instrument piece you’ve built up for twenty minutes, and then everything turns off, or suddenly goes really “dark” within the parameters you’ve defined, or something immediately changes… that can be really exciting. It doesn’t mean you’re laying all your cards out just for them to be seen. It’s more like you’re showing someone the deck, then turning the deck back over; like showing everyone the cards and then shuffling them.

You mentioned earlier about your interest in “alternate”, or non-conventional notations; ways of putting instructions on paper that aren’t standardised Western classical notation. How have you explored these kinds of notations in your work, and where did that interest first come from?

That’s exactly what I need to figure out, I think. All these relationships… For a start, where did this interest in experimental notation come from, where has it led to, and where the hell is it gonna go after that?

I have a lot of experience singing in choirs, mainly from when I was at Nottingham. I found a real love for vocal music. I was a really shit student at UoN — I was a competent musician, good at what I was doing, but a real dickhead. -laughs- Really late for things, wouldn’t turn up for things, classic ‘rude, don’t-give-a-shit’ student. But one of the things I latched on to was the University Choir; I was in the Chamber Choir for my third year, and I performed in Elizabeth Kelly’s opera ‘Losing Her Voice’. So vocal music became an unexpectedly massive focus for me at UoN. It’s never really left — I’ve still got that huge interest in it, and as a singer, I still have that practice going on in some way. I feel like the voice is a far more intimate portrayal of a person… but that’s a whole other conversation for another day.

In these choirs, I found a lot of music we were singing had this inherent gender binary in the notation: things like “men do this”, or “female voices only.” Granted, this is music that was slightly older — some of it pre-1900s — but even if it was written later, even in the 21st Century, the music was clearly written with the idea that high voices meant female voices, and low voices meant male voices. At that point in my transition, I was ‘very’ non-binary, and I was like: “this is an immediate problem”. The choirmaster — not through his own fault at all (he was wonderful), but because of the choral tradition — would look over at the basses and go “men, do this”; and I’d have to do that thing where you look over your shoulder and go “do you mean me, as well?”

I’m sorry you had to experience that. In what ways did you first notice those connections between these problems and notations?

I realised that, although it was a problem as part of the choral and vocal traditions, it was also a notational problem. These incorrect interpretations of gender were reinforced by notational traditions. It was something that I immediately found a research question in: To what extent does the standardisation of notation, or the tradition of Western notation, reinforce exclusive attitudes to gender? In what ways does it reinforce the gender binary, and in what ways does it exclude queer people from music-making?

That’s where a lot of my initial experiments came from. Initially, whenever I wrote music for voices, I wouldn’t put “vocal parts” — soprano, alto, tenor, bass — I’d order things 1, 2, 3, 4, highest voices number 1, lowest voices number 4. I wouldn’t put any gendered terms in the score and would be more prescriptive in the vocal quality I wanted, rather than assuming the alto voice had a certain timbre, based on the gender that a lot of alto singers are. That was where it all started. Because I was (at that point) critiquing notation quite directly, and looking at the design of notation more generally, it led me to think about ways we can depart from traditional notation, or common Western notation practices – ways we could alternatively notate music that inherently didn’t have a gender, that inherently didn’t exclude queer and trans people from performance and composition.

Of course — and how did your notational practice evolve with this inclusivity in mind?

It sort of led me down two different strands. There is still a part of my practice that is innately queer liberatory; it still relates back to that real problem I encountered as a trans musician, one that I needed to rectify to alleviate dysphoria. But then it also led me down the route of: why do we even notate music in the way we do?

Through little projects here and there, I started to explore graphic notation and alternative notation more seriously. I had a project with Britten Sinfonia where I started to use lines and squiggles to say “do this”, because it was much easier than painstakingly writing out the sounds I wanted. I did a project with Riot Ensemble where all of the notations grew out of a tracing I did of the clouds. So, how do you play clouds? All this graphic notation, this research into alternative notation, has actually given me much more artistic inspiration than traditional notation ever could. Not that I’m anti-score — actually, that’s an interesting point: am I anti-score…? -laughs- Probably best not to unpick that yet.

Where are you now with this research?

It started very much from a queer liberatory, political angle. And since then, it’s grown into a really diverse practice that looks at the relationship between music notation and graphic design. That’s what all my compositional approaches revolve around at the moment, the relationship between instructional graphic design and music notation.

How have you incorporated this idea of graphic design and queer liberation into your work — would you still call it notation?

I’d call it notation — writing scores. I’m still making music. That’s the thing I’m acutely aware of: yes, it’s all very exciting and academic, and we can all make these exciting, experimental scores out of queer liberation politics — but it’s all got to be for a reason. Scores are meant to be used. They’re meant to represent musical instruction. I take a lot of inspiration from the designer Bruno Munari, who explored a “beautiful, functional, and accessible” approach to graphic design. And that’s what I try to apply to my scores: yeah, it’s all fun and games making these pretty graphic scores, but they need to be functional as musical instruction.

Of course. I feel like it’s so important to think about these things in tandem when it comes to graphic notation: like, “this is pretty, but what does it do?”

Notation can just be pretty. I still do it where sometimes I’ve just made a piece because it’s pretty, and not really considered it as a score — or made it pretty on purpose, to make it as vague as possible for a specific compositional reason. Part of that is a conscious effort to give the performer agency — “I’m gonna give you this pretty thing as a starting point, then, for anything not ‘notated’, use your intuition, use your own performance practice” — it’s a bit of a get-out clause. But it’s still a real challenge to make scores that are inherently experimental and progressive, and that are functional and useful for musicians. That’s something that’s gonna crop up throughout the entirety of this research: is it human-centred enough that performers can use it?

But is it human-centred enough for you, then?

I don’t even know if it is. -laughs- I don’t know if I’m gonna get to the point in fifty years’ time where graphic notation is useless to me. Because often it’s not as useful as seeing a treble clef on a stave, and seeing a C, and being like “I know, based on this graphic, what note to sing.” I don’t think we can go past that in terms of clarity… or maybe we can. A lot of the time, my scores blend traditional notation with graphic notation, because some things are probably most efficient in traditional notation, but certainly not all things…

That’s the point of exploring these different kinds of notations, right? There’s things that are best said in traditional notation, but at the same time, there’s parameters that traditional Western classical notation can’t say.

Definitely. For me, all this notation research stems from this very direct queer experience — but sometimes I do forget that’s where it comes from. It becomes less “queer”, because I’m perhaps just looking at the distinction between notation and graphic design. That’s something I’d really like to rectify — re-add this queer element to it and see what else I can make.

I’ve written a few pieces that do explore both this notation-graphic design distinction and queer liberation politics at the same time. There’s a piece called ‘waiting times’ — I say it’s for string orchestra, but it was just for me playing and multitracking some bowed strings. It’s for twelve violas and twelve cellos. The notation is just long, diagonal lines; it’s not the most amazingly experimental score ever. It was based on my experience of waiting to get on HRT from the NHS, and the fact that it took nearly four years for anything to happen. The idea is that a performance could take place over years, days, hours, seconds, minutes; but it was always gonna be an excerpt of itself, that the waiting times seemed indefinite. So these lines, they start out of nowhere, and end up fading in and out; because they were, by nature, infinite, slowly undulating, creating this uncomfortable mass of dysphoric sound.

I wanted to create this sonic representation of dysphoria. What I ended up doing was having this square canvas, full of diagonal lines — 24 diagonal lines, for each string part. The sound of it is horrible! It’s like opening the door to one of the circles of hell; you stand there, ears aflame, and you’re like “what the fuck? I’m terrified!” — but that was exactly what sitting, seemingly indefinitely, waiting just for first contact with a gender identity clinic was like… It was like an infinite wait. That’s true for so many people.

How are these elements of your research factoring in to your current and future compositional practice?

I’ve not done much on it recently to be honest. It’s something I want to jump back on, especially now that I have a lot more practice as a designer, a lot more to say as a designer, and now that I’ve had so much more experience as a queer person — my identity has changed so much since — I really want to explore this within the music I make. Somewhere deep in my brain, I’ve got so much more to say about it. But I think I need time to get it all out.

Are there any projects you have coming up that you’re particularly excited about?

My New Years’ resolution for 2020/21 was to write an album: right, I’m learning Ableton, I’m in lockdown, I’ve got nothing else to do, I can now learn to write, record, and produce music. It got to March, it got to November… it’s now 2024. -laughs- I think I’m now at the point now where I can produce music that I want to hear — I’m not necessarily good at it, but I can at least make it. This might be the year that I finish the album. It’s already taken so many different forms. At one point, it was going to be this big recording project… but now it’s gonna be whatever it turns out to be. I think it’s gonna be a collection of 7 or 8 pieces that I’ve recorded since March 2021, presented as authentically as possible.

It’s been an incredibly lonely experience doing it. The only thing that’s been consistent about the whole project was that, for some reason, it always had to be a solo project; something that I’m recording, producing, writing, releasing, all myself. I find that it’s usually helpful to get the cogs turning — putting a restriction on stuff. But it’s been lonely, and having to do it all myself means that I’m the only one who can work on it. If I’m busy with other stuff — which I have been over the past few years — I can’t really focus on that thing. Which is why it’s got to 2024 and it’s not ready to come out just yet.

That’s amazing — fingers crossed on getting the record finished! What’s the underlying concept or aesthetic of the album, if there is one?

It’s an album of string music – that’s what it’s always been. Mainly, I’m a keyboardist and a string player — started out as a plucked string player, can also do a bit of bowed strings, can tap away at some keys with varying degrees of success… Either way, the album’s got to a point where, if I leave it any longer, the music won’t be mine anymore. Some of the music in there is some of the work I’m most proud of — it’s still authentically “me”, but if I leave it any longer, the pieces will become stale and old. I think it’s just gonna be something that appears on Bandcamp one day; I had this idea of it being a big release, having all this stuff done for it… but I can’t be bothered. -laughs- I want to get it done just to say that I’ve done it, and then no one can say that I didn’t.

It’s a collection of all the things I’ve composed while I’ve been producing it. Some of it is ambient and drone, some of it is improv, some of it is really strange, some of it is less so, but it’s all still work I’m happy to call my own. My early influences still linger — American and European minimalism, sonic meditation, all that shit — and a lot of that comes out in the album; regardless, it’s probably the most honest sonic aesthetic I’ve ever put on record. It’s honest music — and when it comes out, I’ll be happy with it.

Apart from the album, I’m just glad to be able to have a long rest over the next few months. I’ve done lots of exciting things over the past few years with so many wonderful musicians. It’ll be time soon to start releasing them, but only after I’ve had a massive sleep…

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Jamie’s work can be found at the following links:

• https://linktr.ee/jam.ell
• https://jam-elless.bandcamp.com/
• https://vimeo.com/jamjar

References/Links:

• ‘The Butterfly’ (trad.), performed by Flo Ryan
• ‘Kristallen den Fina’ (trad.), performed by Orphei Drängar
• John Bridcut, Britten’s Children (Faber and Faber, 2006)
• Steve Reich — ‘Music for Eighteen Musicians’ (1976)
• Steeleye Span, full performance at Ainsdale Beach (1971)
• ‘Horkstow Grange’ (trad. / Percy Aldridge Grainger), orch. Michael Sweeney
• Planxty, performance at the National Stadium, Dublin (1973)
• ‘Rex Caeli’, from the Musica Enchiriadis (ca. 9th Century)
• Baude Codier — ‘Belle, bonne, sage’ and ‘Tout par compas suy composés’, from the Chantilly Codex (ca. 1350-1400)
• Louis Couperin — ‘Prelude No. 7’, from the Bauyn Manuscript (ca. 1690)
• Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre — Pièces de clavecin, Livre 1 (1687)
• Simon McBurney and Theatre Complicité, ‘The Encounter’ (2016)
• Alexander Schubert — ‘Star Me Kitten’ (2015)
• Elizabeth Kelly — ‘Losing Her Voice’ (2019)