Joanna Ward

“I have a community of people who are in a similar situation to me, who are making it work; but it’s also quite complicated. We have each other and we make work for each other.”

Joanna Ward

Joanna Ward (b. 1998) is a composer, performer, and writer from Newcastle-upon-Tyne, currently based in London. Joanna’s score-making ranges from the relatively conventional to the very experimental; she often works with pre-recorded audio, video, and in close collaboration with other musicians and artists. Joanna was a Britten-Pears Young Artist in 2021-22; recent projects have included works for Slide Action, the Marian Consort, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Zubin Kanga, Aldeburgh Festival, EXAUDI, and Newcastle Youth Choir, alongside upcoming projects with her sister Laurie Ward and LCMF, longtime collaborator Omri Kochavi, and Musarc. Joanna graduated from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama with a Masters in Composition in 2021, learning with Amber Priestley; she was subsequently a Junior Fellow in 2021-22. Joanna graduated from the University of Cambridge with a BA in Music in 2019. Alongside her work as a composer and performer, Joanna works as a fundraiser in the performing arts and does a small amount of teaching.

We met with Joanna at a coffee shop in Finsbury Park to discuss graphic notation, field recordings, “bean” pieces, composing for friends, financial inequity in classical music, and more…

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Patrick/PRXLUDES: You have recently had a work of yours — ‘Playing Frisbee, May 2022’ — included on the recently released album from trombone quartet Slide Action. Tell me about how that collaboration came about?

Joanna Ward: We were both Britten-Pears Young Artists at the same time. It was one year, 2021-22, in which they ran an unusual programme. We [the Young Artists] went to Snape Maltings a lot, around 9 or 10 times throughout the year. Sometimes it would just be the composing cohort; but a lot of the time, there were also instrumentalists around, because they wanted us to build a community. That part of the programme really worked, and some of the nicest friendships and working relationships I made were with Slide Action. We just hung out a lot, basically, with Omri Kochavi, a very close friend and also a composer who was also on that course with us — Maddie Ashman too. The four of them [Slide Action] and the three of us really formed a strong bond, I would say.

As a Young Artist, we were all offered the opportunity to have a piece or project in the Aldeburgh Festival in 2022, an amazing opportunity. What I chose to do with that was to make a film [IN SUFFOLK, WORKING / PLAYING], and I got Slide Action involved in making the music. The way I made the audio for the film was a reiterative process, which really interests me: giving very abstract, non-musical, verbal prompts to a wide range of performers who I had recruited through an informal open call on social media. Alongside this process, I also made some open scores or little fragments which I recorded with Slide Action when we were in Snape. Those recordings of Slide Action form the backbone for a lot of the sound that’s in the film — if you watch it, you hear a lot of trombone! It was a nice, organic and relaxed process where I was giving them bits of material or talking with them, they would play stuff [for me to record], and then I would chop it up and layer it to create music in the film. 

During our year as BPYAs, Slide Action were preparing for an event they had created, Rebuilding the Trombone. This concert featured new commissioned works, some of which Slide Action had written themselves, or which had been semi-devised. When they were then turning to making an album for NMC, they decided to have it be basically the music from the Rebuilding the Trombone concert, but they wanted a postlude — a new additional piece — and they asked me, which was really nice. 

I’ve noticed in several works of yours that you utilise field recordings, even as far back to your earlier works (for example ‘to think at the sun’ for Next Wave 2). When you capture field recordings, are they something that you do spontaneously or do pre-plan it all conceptually?

Often, it’s pretty spontaneous. The field recordings in ‘Playing frisbee, May 2022’ are from some B-roll that was from when I was recording for my film [IN SUFFOLK, WORKING / PLAYING]. Slide Action gave me a prompt for creating a new piece for them, which was “maybe you could think about the future of the trombone” — and I was like “well, I don’t know about that…” -laughs- So I made it about what I think the future [is] in terms of new music more broadly; different framings for thinking about new music that might be interesting.

I was thinking about this whole idea of playfulness, which was really integral to the film — and is integral to how I think about things. Because (as it’s obvious in the film) playfulness is also about the other side of the coin, thinking about labour and work. I wanted to think about making a piece for Slide Action which had the group very embedded within the piece itself, so it’s got fragments of written material which are interspersed with field recordings. The fragments can be played in a different order each time it’s performed and then the field recordings came from this source of us being silly, playing frisbee. 

The Next Wave piece [‘to think at the sun’] used a field recording made on a train. I was really young at the time [19], and only a couple of years into thinking about composing in this creative way — in terms of not just being pastiche, I suppose. I was really interested in using pre-recorded sounds, but I had very limited technical horizons; there were lots of unknown unknowns in terms of what you could do with manipulating sound. So I was taking quite a scattergun approach, which included a lot of randomly recording stuff. I still have a lot of stuff in my voice notes on my phone, from all sorts of moments — inspiration just strikes sometimes, and often in unusual contexts. But [for] this piece with the trombone boys [Slide Action], the field recording coming from something that I didn’t intend to be used as a field recording has become another layer of interest for me in terms of its use as source material. 

The choice of using that choice of field record gives the piece another layer and ties it back to the time that you met the group.

Yes, I think so. A lot of my most fruitful pieces recently have this reiterative, relational quality. Another recent collaboration that I’ve done with saxophonist and composer Lucy Havelock — ‘bean piece 2 (bean piece 8)’ — has a film with fixed audio as well as live saxophone. It was a really informal process — Lucy and I talked, and then I sent her little fragments of notated material, some of which are open and some a bit more fixed in terms of pitch or fragments of rhythm. We then spent some time recording quite a lot of takes of those notated fragments, some of which became very open and improvisatory, and I then edited those recordings into the fixed audio  material of the film, along with editing and displacing the audio from the film clips themselves.

The piece exists as a standalone film, but as a performance, Lucy was also playing from those scores and improvising, using mics and loop pedals, over the top of the film. This building in layers of back and forth I suppose has become a very interesting thing for me. We still want to do more versions of that project; I’m especially interested in how to add more layers of her and my input, and maybe into doing a much longer form version which could become something more like an installation.

Years ago you moved away from fixed, conventional notation into more open scores. I think one of the biggest benefits artistically from that, is that there is more importance placed on the collaboration process, which gives you more skill in doing that…

I’d like to think so. -laughs- The way I think about it with this film process [is]: I’m working with a performer who’s an integral part of the project, so I make material as a composer in quite a loose way — and then they record it. So I have a relationship with a performer within which we’re usually working with both live and acoustic sounds, so when I want to make a fixed audio part, a soundtrack for the film… It’s like the sample pack I have is the recordings that we made together based on my ideas, their playing, and their ideas. That’s really fun, a very rich format to me.

It’s like because each work has a stronger collaboration process, the pieces have this meaning of the coming together of two people to make a work…

Those are my most enjoyable and meaningful pieces. For a while, I had a very troubled relationship with making scores which are given to people and which they then play. I’m still not sure that’s really where my biggest intellectual interests nor artistic pleasure is derived; but I’ve come back round to it being something that I find fun and acceptable. I definitely had a period of time where I felt very, very concerned about, and really, eluded by, the artistic and ethical justifications for composing in that kind of way, having that kind of relationship with scoring and with performers. But I’ve come back around to it being okay for me to have ideas that I want to be realised — if people want to perform my work, then that’s what it is. It’s okay to be a composer: composers have an ego, and that’s okay. But I was very troubled by that for several years.

When you did move into more open forms of notation… I’m guessing the Next Wave 2 piece was fixed? 

It was a completely fixed score, yes. I don’t use notation software like Sibelius at all [now], and I haven’t since the first piece that I made during my Masters [in 2019]. There was a brief period where I was thinking about still having to use it for logistical reasons — for the sheer volume of notation needed being very arduous when making a piece, especially for larger forces. But the Next Wave 2 piece was two years before even that. I was very grateful to get onto that scheme at the time, and it’s still a nice piece I think. It’s [just] super removed from me artistically now. If I had only been composing in a way which was engaged with my actual artistic voice or ideas since I was 17… I was 19 when I wrote that piece, and I’m 26 now. So it’s very, very early in that process. 

And also, I was completely hamstrung by being at the University of Cambridge. -laughs- Part of the reason why I really had quite a violent rejection of more conventional ways of notating music, and more conventional conceptualisations  of what composing is, was this real revulsion I felt towards the institution. I was not super political when I was a teenager before going to uni; I lived in Newcastle, everyone I knew was kind of left-wing, I was at an all girls school, so being a girl wasn’t that big of a deal. In a way, there’s something good about that context. 

I was super naïve when I went to Cambridge and didn’t think being from a non-traditional Oxbridge background would matter, which in a way might sound absurd to say; my parents went to university and now teach in one, how strange can Cambridge be? But I felt really alienated. Being a woman felt like a big deal — especially as a composer. This was 2016 and again, [I] feel that it was quite a different time in terms of gender and composing. I found the atmosphere really alienating and grim and had a real feminist urge to revolt, I remember it very vividly. Those more violent and extreme feminist values are still values that I hold very dear of course, but at that time I felt a lot of rage which has now diffused — it was a rage which became focused on the ways things were taught and conceptualised, and the way that composing in particular was assumed to be. 

For my course, if I wanted to do composing, I really just had to keep doing conventionally scored, notated music. I don’t think Cambridge is like that anymore, but at the time, it definitely was. My composing professors were really nice, always extremely kind to me and supportive on a personal level — which also felt a bit hard at times, because really I wanted there to be action to change things from the top down. Because it felt like there was no way to assess different ways of composing, different modes of creativity — which again, having been through Guildhall for my masters, feels like an absurd thing to say! Because what’s so hard? What’s so confusing? It felt bizarre that very widespread modes of composing, of musical creativity, which had been around for sixty or seventy years were not deemed to be acceptable. And I suppose there’s a big problem when the legibility of intellectualism within scoring is the easiest method for composing to be assessed — which again, is a deranged thing to be what is valued above all in a composition. So I clung onto this strict conventional scoring thing for longer than I wanted to — as soon as I started at Guildhall it was out the window. 

So going to Cambridge kind of galvanised this…

It did, and I feel really grateful for it, because I did learn a lot. I had a great time in my final year when I could choose all of my courses and could do really interesting stuff — just not compositionally. I had some amazing, very inspiring teaching, and met a small but mighty group of friends. We made a lot of our own fun — including some quite ambitious projects which helped me learn a lot in terms of producing and curating — as well as allowing me space to do some quite experimental performing and composing. And I feel in a sense that many of my convictions have become things which began as defining myself in opposition to what was going on. 

And then going from that into Guildhall, is it a lot more accepting and open ended? I always get the vibe as an outsider that there is quite a good community with the composers there. 

There is a great community of composers, both within the [students] and the faculty. It’s a very broad church, and I really loved it. I was there over Covid, which was a shame. And also, in a way I regret not taking a year or two before going into my Masters, partly because you don’t know you’re born when you’re in full time education — you don’t know how lucky you are.

Even before I started my undergrad, I knew I wanted to do postgraduate composing. I had really the most amazing, supportive music teachers at my school, who had some funding and got me four “composing lessons”, which was my first experience composing really. I then applied for the National Youth Orchestra composing programme — I didn’t play an orchestral instrument, and I found out that I could do it as a composer — and then I got onto it and that really changed my life, I guess. -laughs- I was hanging out with Larry Goves and Anna Meredith as well as a bunch of other really nice people. That broadened my horizons in a huge way. So that’s why, even when I started my undergrad, I already had some experience which meant I knew why I wanted to do composing more in the longer term.

So I went straight into Guildhall and I loved it. I had amazing teaching and the faculty are really great. And there’s great people across the spectrum of styles of composing and ways to think about composing. I felt respected by all of the teaching staff (even the ones who don’t make music like mine) and all of the students. 

Was Guildhall a place where there was less academic work and you could just get on with composing?

For sure. I think I was really, really burnt out when the pandemic started — I had gone straight from my pretty high-pressured undergrad finals, a really busy summer doing loads of composing stuff, into moving to London and starting a degree. I was a bit paralysed with fear about money, living in London and negotiating a city which I had never lived in before; making new friends, sorting a new living situation. It was really tough. I was living with my partner at the time, and they were also going through all of the same things as me.

I guess I am an extrovert, and I find it so hard in London to not be busy all of the time, I don’t do a good job of it at all. I book tickets for gigs, say yes to meeting friends — and partly that’s because I have lots of different friends from different places in my life, which is of course lovely, but I find it super hard to have free time basically. -laughs- Because I work full time as well, and all that just means it’s really hard to find the time to compose. In a way, forcing socialising to not be a thing [in the pandemic] and coinciding with my Masters did mean that I had proper reflective time for my creative practice, which I have found to be impossible to replicate ever since, basically.

Many people during that time had a lot of artistic pivots — or even more broadly, just changes with their life.

In a super banal way, it made me start filming things, because I wasn’t making pieces for [concert]. It opened the door to making work in this totally different way. I didn’t realise that I even could, or wanted to, make work that wasn’t staged in a concert. We did do a dance collaboration [as part of the Masters] which was amazing, and I started thinking about dance as maybe a viable medium for my work. So I feel really grateful for that as well, because it had started me off making work in a more experimental way — which then wasn’t always necessarily working super well in a concert music context. I was working stuff out, but Covid definitely expedited the figuring out of things. 

You mentioned about using video, which was the start of the bean piece series…

I was really under-stimulated, and my grandad sent me some beans in the post. And I was like “wow, they’re amazing, I’m going to film them” — why else would that happen other than during Covid? It’s pure February 2021 stuff…

That miserable winter…

It’s horrible to say, but I was having a pretty nice cosy time in my flat doing nothing, you know?

I still do bean pieces — we’re branching out a little bit, but I still do them. There’s a couple of pieces that have been affected by the beans without being called a bean piece, because there are some bean based drawings in them, but they are not a fully fledged bean piece. I am broadening out into other plant pieces. -laughs-

In this series you have composed for Orkest de Ereprijs, Zubin Kanga, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra… How do you transform this process into completely different mediums?

I think the original bean piece is the blueprint, because it contained all of the different processes in the score, which I sent to Dom Stokes — a viola player and composer I was working with at the time. The words about the beans are from the letter my grandad sent me about the beans, and a melody is also in the score for the piece — which is a melody of a nursery rhyme my grandad used to sing to me. So it’s kind of a grandad piece really, but through the filter of a bean piece.

For people who don’t know, they are these special beans — runner bean seeds I believe — kind of the size of a kidney bean, but they’re a violet mauve colour, [and] have these detailed black splotches. When you blow up a picture and trace around the splotches, it makes this very detailed, craggy shape, which many people mistake for being an island — which I like! I’ve had people get in touch and say “can you comment on your practice of using islands in your scores — is it something about migration or is it something political?” and I respond, “Well, it’s just bean actually.” I quite like that it has this other resonance — no bean is an island, I suppose.

So they [the beans] make a shape — like a notehead, but are not a notehead. They can lay on top of each other, and they can be layered on top of staves, and they can be layered on top of conventional notation. I was making graphic scores before the bean pieces came along, but they were very abstract and I didn’t really have a focus which made them make sense. I was interested in the idea of abstract notation, and giving that to performers to see what it gets out of them; but the beans gave it a focus and gave it a language.

The orchestral piece [‘from the trees and from my friends (bean piece 3)’] is made up of notated or bean-based material. The orchestra is broken up into assorted instrumental groups of a non-specified lineup, and then there’s a group of people who move around. There is also a group of people who can’t move around — the cellos, double basses, tubas — and they have an audio score which is made from beans. Across the elements of the piece, the beans became the source of material. 

In this world of post-rage abstraction… Being interested in making work that in a way invited performers in — making it more democratised, more ethical maybe, asking these questions — the beans helped me return to some kind of aesthetic focus, however oblique the result in sound can be.

Giving it a framework…

And it became a real kind of bit, and it still is a bit. I was like the bean girl. -laughs- At the BBC Scottish performance, I gave people beans; Cassandra Miller still sometimes texts me to be like, “I’ve found a bean in my pocket!”. They’re special and they’re precious. And my grandad is a precious person to me, so it’s about him as well. I lived with him for a bit when I was small, and I was on his allotment with him and was helping grow the beans — his wife, my Nana, died 12 years ago, and the first bean piece was about that as well. What if the beans are about mourning?

There’s all sorts of avenues you can go: you can go ecological with it, you go personal or spiritual with it, you can also go on the pure technical level, considering bean as object or shape. When I am editing the bean scores, they are a really rich graphic to play around with, because they have this organic almost-tessellation thing going on. So they became a very rich seam. -laughs- I feel super eccentric when I talk about them, but it also makes me excited — it makes me feel like an artist. Because this is what artists are meant to do, right? They’re meant to have an eccentric thing that they’re really interested in; I have to try and not feel too self conscious about the eccentricity. It’s my bean era.

It’s something you’ve been… 

-we both collectively laugh-

It excited me at [a] time where I wasn’t very excited. And now, for about the past year, I’ve felt like I’ve had a lot more ideas, not just bean ideas — I’ve been artistically excited and have wanted to make work. I didn’t feel that way for a long time and I think it’s what I’ve said about being burnt out. Whilst I was really relaxed at Guildhall and during covid, I didn’t necessarily feel super creative. I almost wonder, also, if it’s a scarcity thing — as in, I don’t have the time to do it, so the ideas are getting backed up in my mind. I’m not sure if I have a higher rate of ideas… -laughs- But yes, the beans sustained me through a period of ambivalence about creativity.

Living in London and also working full time, being busy, are you perhaps dried up on “pure” ideas where something pops in the mind? Now your process is a lot more about, “I’ve met this person, we get on, let’s work together” and then the idea emerges from that…

A big thing that is really in my mind is that I want to make an album. To do it myself. But it will be an album of solos for my friends — an album of these pieces from hanging out with someone for a couple of days. My boyfriend bought me a Tascam Portastudio, so I have been wanting to record this album straight to tape and it be super bootleg-y. A lot of pieces I do have some pre-recorded sound at the moment — or layers of other edited technology — and this would be the opposite of that; I would be making pure acoustic pieces.

And I want to make the tapes and paint their covers. I am a very visually minded person, maybe that’s part of the graphic score thing as well. I really like working with tactile mediums, that inspires me; and I want to work with all of these people that I have relationships with — that are my friends — and I want to make little pieces for them. In a way, it’s a more traditional composing thing to make a bunch of five minute solos, but I feel super inspired to do that for some reason right now.

It’s a case of finding and building the ideas, rather than waiting for them to pop into your head.

It’s trying to claw back time and energy to build some actual time to compose or do music making into my schedule, and I am trying really hard to do that.

Several years ago you wrote an article for I CARE IF YOU LISTEN, where you talked about that…

I was super depressed when I wrote that, it was a really bad time in my life. Having said that, I [still] stand by it. Lots of people got in touch with me and told me that they resonated with it; that makes me happy, but I was just angry and sad, and I still feel this feeling of, “what the fuck am I meant to do and how am I meant to make this work?” I think when you leave full time education — especially after an undergrad running straight into a postgrad, making work a lot — I suddenly felt like I hit a brick wall thinking, “oh my god, how am I meant to have the space or time or energy to do this?” I think I’ve come to a gentle realisation that I’m just not going to be making work a lot of the time — at least for now, that’s not what my life can be like. But as long as I’m still having ideas and making some work, even carving out time to think about it, that’s good enough for now. In a way, that’s painful; and I definitely have days where I feel angry because I feel like people who have more privilege get to do it all the time.

I feel anxious about the idea of rebuilding my life in a way where I could make a bit more time for myself and be less anxious about money and career. I think if you think too deeply about working to pay your rent — or the realities of finding time to have any creative pleasure — of course that’s super depressing. I am in that place sometimes, especially when my work is draining. I work four days a week at a national dance charity; in a way, I’m grateful for it because my day job is stimulating and that should be a good thing, but then I feel like an impostor as an artist.

But more broadly, I feel slightly more at peace, if not more neutral about the situation, even though the inequality is still a real source of rage. I don’t want to be resentful towards people who are nice and who are my peers — but it makes me angry that some people don’t have so much anxiety about money and get to be freelance or work less. That’s what I find troubling, because it’s just unfair. I know I probably sound really embittered about this, but I find that upsetting for myself and also for the community and the culture, because it’s not artistically enriching to have a certain group of people be privileged that way. When we talk about diversity, to me, that’s kind of where the I CARE IF YOU LISTEN piece is leading: the diversity conversation is bankrupt if it’s not talking about socio-economic criteria.

And I find it hard when I have conversations with people when they ask what I’m up to and I reply “well to be honest, I’m just working really hard” — people don’t understand that sometimes, maybe they assume I am spending more time composing than I am. I don’t know. It’s the same for lots of people. I have a community of people who are in a similar situation to me, who are making it work; but it’s also quite complicated. We have each other and we make work for each other.

On the topic of community: you’ve got a number of collaborations on the go with a variety of different people. Would you be able to tell me a bit about them — how did you meet them and what have you worked on with each of those people so far?

I’m going to make a piece for Musarc next year — this experimental kind-of-choir, kind-of-performance art troupe. I feel full of ideas about it. I don’t think I would have felt like that if I had a commission a couple of years ago — where I would have been like “oh god, I don’t know what to do” — I [now] feel good, I feel motivated.

I saw them perform at LCMF in 2019, when I first moved to London and then joined because I’m a singer. Even though it’s not paid and much of the other singing work I do is, they are just really cool and I want to be a part of that. Joseph Kohlmaier, who is the artistic director, [is] not from a musical background; he’s an artist and he teaches at London Met, where we rehearse. I’ve met people who I would never have met [otherwise] — all the people who aren’t musicians — that’s what Musarc is. There’s a lot of architects, there’s a lot of artists, actors, people from all sorts of different backgrounds, who are united by not being phased by being asked to do super weird music — and that is just amazing.

People come from all sorts of different walks of life — and it has really energised the idea of making work with quote-unquote “amateurs”. This is something that I intuitively cottoned onto when I was at Cambridge: I felt that my creative horizons were being curtailed, and options were being precluded for me by the rigour of my education in this conventional way. People who don’t necessarily have that training have quite open minds in a different and deep way — they haven’t had these avenues closed off by being taught a certain thing. So that is really a fertile and exciting context for me. Musarc are good at strange things which no other group would do, and that’s what is so compelling as a creator.

And you also have a piece for LCMF coming up…

I’m making a piece with my sister for LCMF this year — which is in a month now — and for that I feel really excited. Partially because she is a really exciting person to be working with; but also just because as I said, I feel inspired to be making work right now.

We [currently] live together also, and have lived together for nearly a year now, which is amazing. Since being adults, we’ve always been pretty close; she is trans, she also went to Cambridge and was coming out during covid. She is a performer and a theatre maker, and she devises most of her work with another trans girl [Charli Cowgill] in a company called piss / CARNATION, where they devise and perform their own work. She came to my performance with Omri at Café OTO, where we were doing a piece of his that we devised together — and she was like “what the fuck was that? It was really weird but also kind of like what I do” — so ever since then we’ve been wanting to make work together.

Igor [Toronyi-Lalic] of LCMF was just chatting to me at a gig at GRAIN, which is this improvised music night that happens in south London that I’m a frequenter and resident fundraiser of. He said “I’m trying to programme LCMF, let me know if you have any ideas.” I’m not sure if he meant for myself to do or if he meant other ideas, other people, but I thought “this is my time”. 

So Laurie and I are in the process of making that together now. It’s really fun to make something with someone you are so close with and who you also live with, although it’s also troublesome because it’s hard to actually carve out dedicated time. She’s just off the back of a month at the [Edinburgh] Fringe; she has a very rich scene of inspirations and we have our joint inspirations and I have all of my world. And on top of all that, because we’re so close and we’re sisters, it’s a very open space to be able to try out anything at all, which is really fun.

Do you find with your close collaborations where having those informalities aid the process? 

Absolutely. They’re mates, we text about when to meet up, I voice note them my ideas. I love that and that’s enjoyable and pleasurable and fun, and that way of working has also artistically enriched me I think.

At the moment, I also want to write songs. It’s partly because my boyfriend is in a band (they’re called Ugly), and so a lot of the live music I see actually is band music. I went to a couple of festivals with him in the summer, and I just hung out with loads of people who are in that scene in London — which is not “my scene” traditionally — and I thought “huh, maybe I want a piece of this world.” I’ve always loved pop music and it’s always been my most comfortable home as a listener. 

I was at this festival, [and] people were like “I can’t believe you and Theo aren’t in a band together, everyone else who’s a couple are in a band” — so… though it feels a bit embarrassing to admit, me and Theo are trying to write some songs and start a band project. I’ve sporadically written songs over my life and it feels as though that will be fun. We are drafting Omri in also; so I can be the singer and maybe play bass, Omri can play guitar, and Theo can play the drums. And it’s so fun to me, it’s really engaging with the rawness of what I find fun and interesting. It’s extricating myself from this very intellectualised framework of composition. It has made me realise that’s what this whole project is: when I say “project”, I mean my post-Cambridge composing journey of trying to think what is fun, what is pleasurable, what is joyful and aesthetically interesting to me in a way that is really broad.

With the band scenes, they have such a network of not just other musicians, but venues and programmers, it’s a different world.

They are all mates, and they all support each other a lot. They go to a lot of each others’ gigs, and they play gigs at the tiny venue circuit in London and that’s their community. It’s nice and it’s often pretty DIY. I’m never going to make my creative nor financial life through BBC commissions, you know — and [the band circuit] feels, in a strange way, a much healthier model. Almost everyone isn’t really talking about making lots of money, or any money, from touring or gigging, but they are dedicated to it and love it, and they find the time to practise — and most importantly, it forms a community. Part of why they find the time to practise is because it’s social as well. That’s where composing is slightly a problem for me, but I guess I’m trying to make solutions for that. 

This might be a sweeping generalisation — but I feel like people in bands have perhaps caught on quicker to the fact 20 years ago the industry got turned over. I think classical music especially as a whole, we’re a bit more behind on that maybe?

The cultural production of classical music is not compatible with our economic and social life. We sustain a delusion that it is. And there’s maybe people who get a bunch of commissions and they have it good for a couple of years and then it goes away and then they come back to being like the rest of us, cobbling stuff together. And I fear that there’s just not a way to be realistic about it, because the very essence of the form of cultural production that we want to engage in is not sustainable, or compatible. There’s nothing to be done about that really — apart from binning the way of making work as composers, which nobody wants to do. But I guess I’m trying to, if not bin, at least bend the way of making work — to something that is slightly more, if not financially, at least spiritually sustainable. And who knows?

As you’ve mentioned, your creative time is more limited nowadays. Is it something that you now value and appreciate more?

It’s what I said at the beginning: you don’t know you’re born when you are in full-time education. I feel really inspired when I spend 20 minutes improvising and playing guitar; I feel inspired when I go to gigs. I was tired on Tuesday and I had a really hard day at work in the office, and I went to Musarc and I felt really inspired by doing a new piece by Benjamin Oliver and Rachel Warr. I was just thinking “this is really nice, this is a community and we’re making something together” and I know for a fact — because I’m their fundraiser — that they are not being paid very much for their work. I just felt really inspired to know that there are spaces for wacky art, and I am part of them sometimes.

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More about Joanna and her practice can be found at:

• https://joannamward.com/
• https://soundcloud.com/joannamward
• https://www.youtube.com/@joannaward6937
• https://www.instagram.com/gingerjoanna
• https://musicpatron.com/composer/joanna-ward/

References/Links:

• Joanna Ward, ‘Redefining Compositional Practices Under Contemporary Capitalism (Casting Light #5)’ (2021), I CARE IF YOU LISTEN