“When I’m thinking of a concept of a piece, and how I want a piece to sound, I find the physical process of drawing really useful. I don’t know what it is — something physical about the feeling of pen on paper, pencil on paper. The way that lines fit together.”
Anna Semple
Anna Semple is a London-based composer and singer. Anna’s work engages with her interests in music and gender, and explores processes of embodiment as a way of subverting the classic mind vs body/masculine vs feminine dichotomy; graphic and textual stimuli are central to her process, as is intuitive writing and collaborative relationships. Recent commissions include works for the Royal Opera House, The Sixteen, The Marian Consort, Waterperry Opera Festival, Wells Cathedral, The Choir of St John’s College, Cambridge, The Corvus Consort, SANSARA, and the Wax Chandlers Guild; she has worked with librettists Gareth Mattey, Susannah Pearse, and Kaitlin Sullivan, and is currently in rehearsals with physical theatre performer Emily Pahlawan Collinson, focusing on the intersections between sound and movement. Anna is a composer-singer with HEXAD Collective, and sings with a variety of liturgical and concert groups across London, including Tenebrae, Alamire, Siglo De Oro, Ex Cathedra, and SANSARA.
Anna’s ‘Nunc Dimittis’ was recently recorded by the Choir of St. John’s College, Cambridge, for their album Magnificat 4 — released in July 2024 on Signum Classics. Following the album’s release, we spoke with Anna over Zoom, discussing writing for choir, aleatoric scoring, feminist music theory, embracing physicality, and more…
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Zyggy/PRXLUDES: Hi Anna! Thanks for joining me today. We were first connected ahead of the release of your setting of ‘Nunc Dimittis’ by The Choir of St. John’s, Cambridge on their Magnificat 4 album. One thing that’s stuck out to me about your choral writing is your use of aleatoric notation — tell me about your collaborative process and how that came about?
Anna Semple: As a singer, I really enjoy being invited to contribute, and make decisions. When I write choral music, that’s always something that I’m conscious of. Oftentimes, especially in the confines of an institutional choir, we’re given a piece of music, we just do what we’re told — “sing the dots” — and there’s not much room for making decisions. I think it’s actually a really important thing to be trained in. I think it’s a shame [that] people are sometimes put off new music because they resent having to make decisions… -laughs- Because it’s uncomfortable sometimes, it’s something that can be inhibitive. So I’m quite keen to try and gently encourage collaboration.
I think there’s always limitations on collaboration — especially when you’re working to commission — because there’s no time. You can’t necessarily talk to everyone; if you’re writing for a big ensemble, like an orchestra, it’s even less practical sometimes. But just inviting that small bit of dialogue — giving a score that allows for a little bit of freedom, and also provide[s] parameters to make improvisation comfortable. Even though I really enjoy improvisation, if I’m not prepared for that, and someone gives me [a score] and says “just do what you want”, I find that quite a scary thing. It’s a lot to ask of a performer. So being gentle with that, [with] aleatoric cells, in choral music, is quite a nice way of easing into that collaborative spirit.
What drew you into choral writing, initially — and how did this collaborative practice evolve as you’ve worked with choir?
It’s been a funny one. I think I’ve ended up “falling” into choral music as my main source of work because of my singing. I think choral music has a reputation [for] being quite a conservative genre. I think that is sometimes fair; I think a lot of music — especially for liturgical use — has to be conservative in some ways because there are time restraints, and there are people [who] are trained in a certain tradition. The wheel keeps turning, and you’ve got to get through stuff… -laughs- I’m not a religious person, but evensong is a really special space. It feels really meditative, reflective… it’s all about the music. I think sometimes, really special music-making happens at evensong — even though it’s not about the ego of the music-making. It’s about providing a space for reflection.
And bearing collaboration in mind: [for me] it’s been a way of trying to keep something experimental and fresh in writing for those kinds of situations. Doing the aleatoric stuff, and inviting collaboration, makes each performance different. One of my favourite words is the word “similar”, because it’s like saying something is the same, but also different. And I like how repeat performances are, necessarily, always different. That’s what makes music special — the living evolution of a piece. A piece of Bach will change every time it’s performed; I think that’s really magic. To be able to write that in a score is nice. -laughs- It feels like a really special thing to be given back something in that way. I feel really lucky to have worked with people who are happy to give something of themselves in a performance, in that way.
In terms of your background as a singer — how much of a role does the voice, or your voice, have in your compositional process, and how do you map that onto different choirs and ensembles?
I used to play more — but I don’t really play an instrument, now. I did play viola, and whenever I wrote for viola, it was always somehow limited by my ability to play viola. I think the same is probably somewhat true [for] my singing: I know what my skills are as a singer, and I think I enjoy writing music that I would enjoy singing — and sometimes, that’s not always a helpful thing. I’m sure everyone finds this when you’re writing for your own instrument, your own voice… It’s a double-edged sword. I hope that what I write feels somehow intuitive — but I’ve realised that what is intuitive for me might not be necessarily intuitive for everyone. -laughs-
In terms of my compositional voice — I’m quite interested in line. When I was studying, I did a lot more of this — but I’d use line drawing as a fruitful stimulus for structuring, for getting an idea of what I wanted textures to be. That translates quite well into vocal music, [because] you can’t sing more than one line at a time.
When you’re thinking about lines, and graphic stimuli — how important is the physicality of drawing those lines for you?
When I’m thinking of a concept of a piece, and how I want a piece to sound, I find the physical process of drawing really useful. I don’t know what it is — something physical about the feeling of pen on paper, pencil on paper. The way that lines fit together. How you can create density from a thin little thing; lots of them can make a dense texture. So drawing has always been a useful part of my process.
For other pieces, I’ve used hand-drawn scores. When I do stuff that’s less metered, I do it all by hand; the choral pieces I’ve found most artistically satisfying have been ones where it’s been almost entirely all unmetered. Maybe “aleatoric” isn’t the right word, but “free” — much more of a literal translation of these weaving lines.
Your piece ‘Moon’ was performed by EXAUDI — and I found that the fascinating textures in the piece really reminded me of concepts of embodiment, that the singers weren’t bound by the idea of metre…
I’m really glad you brought that up. -laughs- A lot of what I wrote about during my Master’s was [about] embodiment. I think about this far too much. There’s an article by Suzanne Cusick about music analysis through a feminist lens; the physicality of performance, and how expression can be read through that. She talks about an organ prelude by Bach, and how when the organist is playing, the text from the original chorale says “into the abyss” — something dark and unsettling — and the organist is playing with all four limbs [having] independent lines. There’s no physical rooting to the person. So for the performer, they end up embodying the feeling of the music in a really physical way.
When we watch someone sing, or a group of people sing, there’s a physiological empathy we feel. Even though it’s not a “visible” physicality thing. I really love watching people play stringed instruments — for me, there’s such an innate physicality in string playing, and it’s really exciting to watch someone contending with the physical challenges of their instrument. But with singing, it’s really weird: obviously, we understand that going from a low note to a high note in one jump is a really hard thing, but it’s not visible. As humans, we’re able to embody, and empathise with the embodiment of, that sung thing.
What I find most moving about singing is not necessarily really technically accomplished singing — obviously, that’s really beautiful to listen to — but stuff that’s come from folk traditions, or just untrained voices. There’s something so immediate and direct about the voice; when you hear raw expression, the connection is so quick, and immediate, and physical. We can feel that emotion in a way that we see with other instruments. It’s so physical, but nothing is actually moving on the surface.
How did those ideas of embodiment manifest in the compositional process for you?
When I was studying, I spent quite a lot of time thinking about embodied processes of writing. That’s where drawing came into things, and working with physical improvisation; seeing how that affected sound. I worked on a piece with a friend — we haven’t collaborated for a while — we used to do joint physical and vocal improvisation, seeing how movement affected sound, how sound affected movement.
It comes back to the mind-body dichotomy that’s been set up. That one way of doing things is more “valuable” than the other. That maps on to a gendered divide, as well; “feminine” bodily processes as less valuable than “masculine”, rational [processes]. It’s something I don’t think I’ve fully explored, and drawn a conclusion from; but I’ve found it really useful to me. I did my undergrad at Cambridge, and it felt like [on] the composition course, the real valued thing was complexity — I enjoy really complex music, but for me, that wasn’t how I could express myself. Maybe it was me having a chip on my shoulder, in the context of that place… It has such a history of issues with gender.
So a rejection of something that is termed as “overtly masculine”, the predominant white male thing; rejecting that, and trying to find something else. Maybe labelling it “feminine” is not very helpful — but through a feminist lens. How there can be so much nuance within that; how there can be complexity, in something that is more intuitive, more feeling. A gentle way of music making, that isn’t so self-punishing… -laughs-
Like, an empathetic way of music making?
A bit more self-loving, as a process of making music. I think I always had an issue of “that sounded nice” — I [felt like] I had to justify it with some reason, some numerical thing I can do to justify why I’ve done that. But being like, “actually, it’s fine if I just like it” — that felt like quite a new, and crazy [thing]… -laughs- If I do that, and people like it, that’s nice, but if they don’t, that’s fine.
I guess in a sense, one can find a real sense of liberation in that. Consciously breaking away from the classical and patriarchal models of “perfection” in music making…
For me, I’d always been brought up in [that environment]. I was gonna be a viola player; I loved the classics, the canon was my meat, and it was great… And at Cambridge, I was like “it’s hard, everything’s so hard” — and I left, and I realised maybe it doesn’t have to be hard, or unpleasant. It doesn’t have to be a struggle all the time. I don’t have to write in a way that doesn’t fit with what I’m actually like, and what music I like. It felt like a very difficult thing to do at the time, even though now looking back, I’m like “of course!”
It’s interesting to straddle two different worlds, as a composer and a performer. In the singing world, there’s still so much of that still accepted. You’re such a “product”, in a way — that I think composition has gone further away from now. I love that composers, as a network of people, are so diverse, and varied. Of course, there’s so much work to be done, but it feels like it’s come so much further than so many pockets of the music industry.
If you’re a classical singer, that’s a thing; you have to be presented in a certain way — you have to fit into the SATB thing, you sing it this way, that’s how this piece is done, this is how we do it — and that feels so limiting. I hope that it changes. Much more exciting music making can happen when people are willing to step outside of what they’ve been told is their “box”. Working with performers who are not necessarily interested in being that thing is so much more rewarding. But it’s scary to be outside those things, too. If you’ve grown up in that, then that’s your comfort zone, that’s your safe area — and once you break out, your sense of value has to come from inside yourself, rather than people saying “oh, you’re a great lyric soprano”. Breaking away from that definition is scary.
Yeah — and it takes real bravery to go against all of that training. Do you feel a similar way about composition?
I think it’s something of an interesting parallel. In composition, people often get shunted into [boxes] — especially choral composers, I think, because it’s quite a hard box to escape from. The more I learned about my own singing, the more I don’t know if I buy into the fact that these things exist. When I listen to people sing, they all sound different — so how can the coloratura soprano be a thing if every single coloratura soprano sounds different? Even with mezzos and sopranos; at the moment, I’m transitioning between being a mezzo and a soprano — whatever that means — but I listen to mezzos, and I’m like “you sound like you can sing higher than that soprano I heard the other day”… So what are we doing?
When you’ve worked with voices or choirs in a less “traditional” way — what does the collaborative process look like for you? What aspects of choirs and vocal writing have you had to navigate?
I found one of the hardest things has been, with choirs, in particular — less so with one-per-part stuff, groups that sing one to a part — with choirs, it’s been trying to bring people out as individuals. I think that comes back to that aleatoric thing — encouraging individual decision-making — but also individual singing.
Maybe it’s because I enjoy singing like I sing. It depends on the context, but sometimes the best blending comes from singing in the most natural way. Especially with young choirs, it’s really important to encourage people to sing how they sing. Encouraging that sound; even if it’s just one line that everyone’s singing together. Just encouraging that is really important to me.
In what ways do you find inspiration when writing for voice?
A lot of the time, it comes down to the text. I quite like short texts. My preference for setting choral pieces and solo songs is: the less text, the better. With ‘Moon’, I really enjoyed working on that text because the feeling of saying the words felt really nice. The meaning was implicit in the feeling of saying the words; the percussive elements of the words were really interesting. Working with words in that way — there must be a term…
An onomatopoeic way?
With a word like “moon”. The phomenological, almost physical characteristics of the word. The way that you form the shapes, the feeling of forming the consonants and the vowels. How that is an expressive thing. In the context of that piece, it was so much about atmosphere, and setting; the text is all from an Icelandic Skaldic poem — all about these striking images — and some of the words are striking in themselves, and do enough of the work without knowing the meaning, if that makes sense. There’s a phrase in that poem, the “server of herb-surf”… The sound of it was so evocative, so illustrative, in the context of the poem — that you don’t need to know what it means. You hear it, and you have an image; the sound of it creates an image.
I’m trying to go away a little bit from the idea that in setting music, there has to be a sense of “understanding” or “communicating” the text in a straightforward, linear, storytelling way. If you’re gonna set a poem, if you’re gonna use text in your music, you have to make a decision about the text. A poem exists as a complete artform in itself. I wouldn’t want to say that what I do with my music would elevate a poem — that’s maybe a bit of a stretch — but the collaboration between the two artforms is really interesting. Taking elements from the words, the sense, of a poem, and putting that in your music, is more interesting than just being “now, you will hear the words of a poem that you like, and there will be music happening.” I don’t necessarily think it does justice to the poem, and I don’t necessarily think it does justice to the composer. I think a lot of the time, in contemporary choral music, it seems like there’s a big struggle going on between these two things; communicating text, versus communicating feeling [through] the music at the same time.
I gues there’s the dialectic between the meaning of the words, and the best way of expressing those words through music…
As a singer, if I take a song, or an opera aria, to my singing teacher, [and] I’m like “how do I sing the word nicht on a top G?” — and he’s like “you don’t.” -laughs- You sing a different word, and it just won’t sound like the word, and that is fine; because in the way that you’re singing it within that phrase, you will communicate the sense of the text. You don’t need to be declamatory all the time.
Let’s talk a bit more about how you set text. With the ‘Nunc Dimittis’, how did you choose to treat the text, and how did it relate to your interest in aleatoric writing?
With the ‘Nunc Dimittis’… It’s a text [that] you hear every single time you go to evensong. It’s such a well-known text that I didn’t really feel like it being “heard” was that important. I wanted to get to the root of what the text is, which is a personal prayer; it feels like a very intimate thing. It’s [from the Canticle of] Simeon, who sees Jesus and is like “great, now I can die — Lord, take me now”. It’s always set in a quiet way — it’s a quite personal petition — and I wanted to bring that out in the text-setting. That’s why I started with aleatoric stuff — the “Lord” bit — to bring it back to the sense of the text, rather than the words. To add something to the words, rather than declaim them. I think that’s a common thing in the rest of my setting for the voice.
You’ve also worked with librettist Gareth Mattey, on two chamber operas — ‘Seen’ and ‘Heard’…
Working with Gareth [Mattey]… I really enjoyed working with them, because it was such a nice extension of that piece. Sometimes, I imagine words having a feeling — something you can touch, almost. And Gareth’s words had so much in it.
We did two chamber opera-y things; one quite short, and then one less short. Working with their text, both times… it feels like a gift, because it fits so well with the kind of text I would choose if I were to find some myself, anyway. I felt like [with] the “heavy” words, there’s so much inside them, and implied in them, that you don’t necessarily have to “hear” them… A word like “heard” — the name of the piece we did together — you hear it so much that it loses its meaning, and it becomes this sound. I found that really interesting, playing with that. It’s been really lovely.
That’s a lovely space to occupy, right? Once you hear a word enough, it becomes less about the meaning of the text and more about the materiality of the pronunciation…
That’s the word for it — materiality. -laughs- It just means that it makes [room] for really malleable, expressive stuff to happen. Dramatic stuff. And using aleatoric, more open-scored stuff as a way to enliven each performance… In some ways, the words can be similar. Especially with what Gareth writes. It feels like every time I read through the libretto for ‘Heard’, it hits a little bit differently; different things jump out. It feels right. -laughs-
You mentioned earlier about working with a physical theatre artist — how did that method of working feed into your compositional process? I’m thinking about the embodiment of physical theatre in much of what we’ve discussed…
I think it’s something that I would really like to return to. We did a couple of residencies the year before last, really exploring process and techniques of developing stuff together. I really want to return to it, because I don’t think I’ve managed to successfully find a way of incorporating all of what I would like to in everything that I write. Especially for choral commissions — partially because of the practical and logistical limitations I mentioned earlier, but also a time-constraint thing. Like everyone: it feels like it’s a real luxury to have any time to devote to properly developing those practices. I need to go back to it, and invest more time. Easier said than done. -laughs-
Following the release of ‘Nunc Dimittis’ — what are you looking forward to exploring in your practice in the future?
I would love to do more that embraces the physical. I found that really embracing and satisfying. I sing for a group called SANSARA, and we’re trying to think about ways in which we might be able to build a project with the other upper voices in the group. Some of the thinking is that we might have more contact with this physical embodiment-thing, and incorporating movement. But it’s really hard — especially in choral music. -laughs- It’s very different to opera singing, where you’re so conscious of your body. With choral singing, often, you’re encouraged almost not to be aware of your [body]; maybe walking around if you’re processing, but not much physicality, I would say. So introducing that is quite difficult in that context; it’s a very unnatural thing to do, unless you’re trained in stagecraft.
With SANSARA, we did a residency [at] Britten Pears in April, exploring creative wellbeing. We actually found that moving while improvising, or adding breathwork — connecting breathwork to the body — and feeling grounded physically in yourself, was a really healthy way of making music. Made for better music making, and made for more exciting improvisation. It felt like a safer space to improvise, as well; people were a bit more distracted by having this freedom [in] their bodies. But it took a lot of time. For me, if I want to bring these things into my choral writing, I think I need to spend more time working with performers, and also myself — trying to refine what that practice would look like, and what the outcome will be.
Of course — I guess the physicality of the music itself is very much part of creating that sense of wellbeing.
Strangely, I find it much easier to write physicality, and theatrical elements, in instrumental writing. It’s much more visible — I know, as a string player, if you want to make a really quiet sound, your body has to do x, y, or z. I wrote a string quartet in 2022 which was dictated [temporally] by breath; towards the end, there was a diminuendo, but the movement was still continuing. So you see something that doesn’t match what you’re hearing. There’s a similar thing in [my] clarinet piece [‘They don’t bounce, they skim’]; I was thinking about when you see someone doing a technique, even if you don’t necessarily hear it, it’s like the physicality is there. Taking away sound and leaving physicality, or vice versa, is quite an interesting thing to play with.
What’s coming up next for you, compositionally?
I’ve done some songs for Helen Charlston, that she’s performed in York. That was a collaboration with a composer called Ben Rowarth; we wrote individual [pieces] responding to Dowland, and then we wrote a piece together, which was a really interesting collaboration — I’d never collaborated with a composer before. Often, composition is a personal, on-your-own thing to happen; so it was quite strange doing it with someone else — writing something, sending it to him, and then getting something else back. Bouncing off each other.
I’ve written a piece for lute which is quite rhythmic, but surprising in other ways. That kind of plays a bit with expectation; physicality is so linked to our expectations. What we expect to hear is linked to what we expect to see — and [when] we don’t hear that, or don’t see that, it’s fun.
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Learn more about Anna and her practice at:
The Choir of St. John’s College, Cambridge album Magnificat 4 is now out on Signum Classics – stream and download the album at:
References/Links:
- Suzanne G. Cusick, ‘Feminist Theory, Music Theory, and the Mind/Body Problem’, Perspectives of New Music, 32(1) (1994)
- Kormáks saga (c. 10th Century), translated by Rory McTurk
