“I am a big believer that intuition comes from years of practice, experience, listening to music and living life. It is a kind of embodied knowledge. And part of the work of composing is giving yourself the space to use your intuition to generate music, and then taking a step back to evaluate.”
Anna-Louise Walton
Anna-Louise Walton is an American composer of chamber, orchestral, and electronic music. In her music, she explores concepts of mimicry, the notation of improvisatory rhythms, and the utilisation of household objects such as PVC pipe, shot glasses, and knitting needles. Her works have been performed by ensembles such as Talea Ensemble, Trio Catch, Quatuor Diotima, and [Switch~ Ensemble], with her music featuring at festivals such as Musikprotokoll, MATA Festival, IRCAM’s ManiFeste, Darmstadt International Summer Course, impuls Festival, New Music on the Bayou, and highSCORE Festival. Recent commissions include works for Trio Zukan and Ensemble Proton Bern, having been selected for Protonwerk No. 13 in 2022. Anna studied composition at Kunstuniversität Graz with Beat Furrer, Tulane University with Rick Snow, and studied Sonology at Royal Conservatory The Hague. She holds a DMA in music composition from Columbia University.
Patrick Ellis recently caught up with Anna-Louise Walton to discuss working with voice, found objects, PVC pipes, complexities of intuition, and “making things strange”…
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Patrick/PRXLUDES: In a few weeks’ time [at time of interview] you have your DMA defense at Columbia University, which is the culmination of a six year long process of research. How is the prep going for that?
Anna-Louise Walton: It’s going well. I think the biggest amount of prep is writing the thesis; that was quite involved and I learnt a lot during that process. I did a lot of research and a lot of reflecting on my own music, which is part of why I chose the subject to be partially the music of two other people, along with my own music — to reflect on my own work. The research is based around my own intuition of what I’m interested in writing, but also what I’m attracted to listening to, and then trying to formalise that by doing a lot of research. [I ended] up taking a framework from literature theory, which was a bit of a surprise to myself. But it was a useful guide for how I think about composing music for the voice.
Talking about formalising your intuition and integrating literature theory — talk me through what the procedure for that is and how you brought that into your own work?
The subject is “Defamiliarising the Voice” — which is the formal subject of the dissertation. As a composer, I write a lot for voice. When I was young, I was performing in choirs, and then was a singer-songwriter as a teenager; so the voice has always really been an important part of my practice.
I came to the theory of defamiliarisation from Viktor Shklovsky, who was a Russian thinker and literary critic in the 20th Century. It’s this idea of making things strange, in order to slow our perception of things around us. There’s what he called automisation, where we reduce things mentally — for example a word to a letter, using acronyms to get the information as quickly as possible. Which in turn makes life dull. Over time, you would become dull to war, your own wife — his idea was to make things strange in order that we may appreciate the aesthetics of those things. I think that’s very much what I have been trying to do… I think we all are trying to do that, right? We frame things in a way where we are appreciating them and listening. This goes hand in hand with Pierre Schaeffer, putting the sound of a train in a new context; so I think we’re all doing this in our own personal way.
I connected to the voice because I think I have somehow been trying to find approaches to the voice that are personal to me. I feel that I am a very intuitive composer. Chaya Czernowin has a great essay about this kind of intuitive approach to the voice that she has in her own music. So it’s formalising that — “why do I want to avoid the traditional or typical sounding?” — and it’s a case of wanting to make people pay attention to it in a new way. It made [me] understand and hear the voice in a new way.
For at least five or six years since I’ve been writing for voice, I [have] attempted to utilise it in different ways. Sometimes it’s by processing the voice with physical objects, other times it’s just with instrumentation… By combining it with the flute or clarinet, you can’t tell whether the pitch is a voice or clarinet, which is very exciting! The voice comes from the body, it’s such a personal instrument — and it’s not just an “instrument”. We all have voices, and we should all be able to tell what’s a voice or not. So if I can make other people play something that makes people unsure if it’s a voice… That grey space is something exciting. You may think “wow, can my voice do that?” — and that’s the reason why I’ve been trying to do this over the last six years.
I’d say with formalising processes, it can take quite a long time and even if it is unconscious; our own intuition can be quite complicated. For you, how long did it take you to get to that realisation?
In terms of the paper, I think I would have the instinct to say I just formalised this half a year ago, when I thought “I have to write this paper now”. But just the other day, I was looking at a proposal for a vocal piece that I composed a year ago and I talk about exactly this, but with different words. I didn’t know who Shklovsky was at the time — I didn’t have all of the more developed parts of that — but I already had the idea of making the human non-human. So I think this has actually been something that has been there for many years. It’s like a lot of things; it’s not until the moment where it’s realised you understand what the idea is. So as much as writing a paper isn’t the most fun thing, being forced to formalise something and put it into words was really helpful.
As a composer, I’ve always been very intuitive in how I start. The creative spark for me always has to come from a specific sound or parameter, from loving a timbre or an orchestration (depending on the stage in my career). I’ve always had to start with just something tangible, musical, and sound-based, not theory based — that has never worked for me. At various points, I’ve felt pressure to be a bit more formal in my composing, but it was always terrible and I would throw it out, because it never worked for me.
The vocal pieces, where I was trying to defamiliarise the voice… I wasn’t consciously thinking that was what I was drawn to. Again, that’s the intuition: “That kind of sounds like a voice, but it also sounds like a flute and that’s exciting”. But that intuition is very complicated as it’s based on experience and not knowledge. It’s not something that’s always on the surface. I am a big believer that intuition comes from years of practice, experience, listening to music and living life. It is a kind of embodied knowledge. And part of the work of composing is giving yourself the space to use your intuition to generate music, and then taking a step back to evaluate: what is my intuition giving me, what is the root of what’s going on there? And so for me, once I have material to start with, I always try to step back and ask myself “how does this work in form?”, “how does this sound?”. Asking yourself what is going on there and why I am attracted to this — that’s a really important part of composing, but also a hard part of composing. Every piece I’m always trying to get better at doing that. But it’s also giving credit to your intuition, because it’s sometimes written off as “less serious”.
With your own intuition, you’ve been exploring the abstraction of the voice, but each time the approach has gotten gradually more sophisticated. Do you feel like when you were first doing that you weren’t so conscious about it?
I don’t know if it’s more sophisticated, but it’s using different approaches. I think that as I continue to compose, I am very conscious of being experimental in multiple ways in my music. What I mean by that is it’s not just the product, but I also try to experiment with the process — finding different kinds of paths to a final product. I try to continue to keep that fresh, just for myself frankly, because I think it keeps it interesting.
I’m trying various pathways to explore the voice. One of my earlier vocal pieces from 2016 [Basket of Figs] was a trio for flute, clarinet and voice, and I think I was very much at a point where [I] would take out the composition paper, start writing some extended techniques, and I would set a poem. That was the last real poem I set. It was a lot about orchestrating the voice with those instruments, and having the other two musicians whisper a bit — and you get confused. At the time, I wasn’t thinking about defamiliarising the voice, but some people would come up to me after the concert and say “I couldn’t tell if some of the parts were the soprano or the flute or the clarinet” — and I [was] totally enthralled by that, because my intention was to blur the voice with an object.
Having a text in an earlier piece, and then slowly moving away from that is very reminiscent of painters in the early 20th century changing from realism to abstraction…
Totally! This is what you do [in] vocal music where you set a poem to music. That’s what it is, that’s what it means to “compose”, that’s what I was starting from at that point. But I then got to the point where I started setting non-poetry. I made up my own poetry, taking from textbooks or generative text (before OpenAI). Then I moved onto not using text for several vocal pieces. Language is very interesting, but there are also a lot of things about the voice that I wanted to explore that weren’t connected to language.
When you were using text, did you elongate words and/or break the syllables up?
Yes — that was part of the reason I stopped using poetry, because I really tore the poem[s] apart. I really used the text as sonic material, just the sounds of the words; repeating something a lot, pulling the syllables apart, words being completely unintelligible.
When you moved from using external source material to creating your own syllables and timbres, what were some of the challenges that you faced?
Notating voice is one of the most complicated things that I can think of in music, honestly. Of course, every composer has an idiosyncratic approach — there’s people like Erin Gee who’s really approached non-semantic music very categorically and efficiently, for example. A lot of people have turned to IPA [ed. International Phonetic Alphabet] as an exploration of different vowels, the idea being that it goes across languages.
When I was using text, I would repeat phrases over and over; [I’ve] always been experimenting with my own voice and my own body, that’s something which each [vocal] piece has in common. Going back to the trio piece, during the composition process, I was singing the text to myself, repeating it, recording it, then listening back to it. Even when I moved away from text, I would have Logic sessions featuring voice memos of me making total gibberish sounds — but eventually, you find something special there.
With figuring out how to notate it — there are no fingerings, like instruments. It’s just these strange metaphors. Everything is covered from the inside of the body, and you are figuring out how to control it. The voice is incredibly mysterious… -laughs- Each voice is different and each body is different. Getting someone to go up on a stage and speak naturally [from notation] is incredibly hard. It’s like when someone holds up a camera and you have to pose; it’s an incredibly weird thing and a lot of people just can’t do it. The best method that I have found is coming up with symbols; using IPA (which is most useful when there are only a few vowels), and sending the performer a few videos of me producing the sound with my voice.
When you workshop or trial these sounds with performers from different regions of the US or overseas — or with people who can’t produce certain effects with their voice — have you ever faced any of those challenges?
Yes. Whistling especially — a lot of people can’t do that. It wasn’t actually a vocal work, but I recently completed a piece for Ensemble Proton Bern [with] some whistling in it. I was conscious if someone had to switch because they can’t whistle, I had to build that into the piece. I try to be conscious of things. You have to be flexible even with instrumentalists — the multiphonic doesn’t work on their clarinet, etc. — and you just have to be able to adapt to that.
I think it’s wonderful to compose away from paper, using more recording and experimenting with your body; but the danger of that is you get used to the way that you perform. And it’s even worse with the voice — everyone has a unique range. There are certain soprano notes that I can do and sing in a particular way, but other people don’t sound like that. I have a really choral, pure sine-tone kind of timbre; and maybe a lot of singers who are maybe trained in bel canto have a much stronger, more present vocal timbre. Of course, you want to use people’s individuality to [your] advantage, not wishing I had six of me. So it’s really nice to compose in that way, but you have to remind yourself that the music exists with the live performers — and not your Logic mockup.
When you had these options, was one based around your own voice? And then the others were similar sounds that you researched? How did you find them?
The piece I’m working on now is for Vokalensemble Zürich. I had the opportunity to do a workshop with them, and I had the chance to record them. I asked them to demonstrate all kinds of sounds and show me how to produce them, so that I had all of that documentation in mind — especially with the male voices, because I can’t sound like a low bass. It’s good to get all of those things in the ear.
Another thing is also not necessarily used — which I talk about in the introduction of my dissertation — is: what is the voice? Even defining what the voice is very complicated. Is a tongue click using your voice? Does it have to be the vocal cords, does it have to use the mouth? So the way we think about the voice and what vocal music is is very much up for debate. I utilise sounds that don’t utilise the vocal cords all the time, and that is a way to equalise different vocal types in a lot of ways. If you are using sounds with the mouth, the lips, the tongue, that can be another [way] to equalise those sounds. But those are also incredibly hard to compose, explain and notate, because you think “okay, if I use those kissing types of sounds, how much can you expect someone to control that?” I’m still trying to push the boundary a little bit, but [also] be in a place where the performers feel comfortable with what they are doing and have control over that.
Earlier on you talked about beginning with a germ of an idea and also researching ways to formalise that process. In a work such as Bliss, how did you take the initial sketch and then transform into a whole piece? You mention in your bio that you explore concepts of mimicry and you certainly feature that in that work with these glissandi that are almost hocket-like…
In the case of that piece — since it is written for traditional instruments, a lot of the music comes from the capabilities and limitations of the instruments. We all have compositional ticks; most composers I know return to something, whether it be an extended technique or structure. I really have an intuitive liking to glissandi for some reason. I had used textures of falling glissandos in other pieces before, but I also had a workshop with Proton Bern, which was very helpful — I could really ask them to try things.
We often think of glissandi as going along a string instrument. A glissando on a cello is fantastic: you can have a really long, perfect, gesture that can put lots of movement and motion into it, the performer can control it very well with the bow. But it’s very clunky on wind instruments, because they are not meant to do that. And so that is the germ of the idea of that piece. It really features the wind instruments more than the strings doing the glissando, because it’s uncomfortable; you get all of these wonky timbres between the keys when they are trying. I was asking them to play something very vulnerable, because the nature of their instrument [means] that they would never perform a glissando the same way twice. But it was that vulnerability that I found so fascinating.
In terms of fleshing that into a whole piece: I asked them how long they could perform it, the range — where the different keys are in the range, figuring out the possibilities of each instrument. That really limits the material, but at the same time it gives you a lot to work with. And again, I had all of that recorded, so I was working with that as a reference, really listening to the recording. [I went] back to some advice that I had in one of my earliest composition lessons — “try to do this measure in ten different ways” — and so you start to think: what can a glissando be? It can be a short, little pitch bend or this eternally long, falling, [James] Tenney-like texture. And so in the piece, I was really trying to approach that from different angles.
A glissandi itself on wind instruments is in a way a defarmiliarisation of its natural function…
I’m sure many orchestration books say “do not try to do this”. Even the clarinettist Richard [Elliot Haynes] — who’s a wonderful, wonderful performer and person — in our emails was concerned. -laughs- Part of it was the range which I had to readjust, but I also had to say, “no — I understand that it sounds a little bit funny, but I wish to use that as a feature”. I think there is a lighthearted quality to that piece for myself. In the premiere, some of the audience actually laughed — which I think is one of the biggest compliments in new music. It’s not a joke exactly, and abstract sounds don’t necessarily have semantic meaning… But sounds can be funny sometimes, you know?
In several works of yours, you also utilise found objects — such as PVC pipes in the deep glens where they lived. When and how did you first get fascinated by using objects in your own music?
I was just fascinated by finding new sounds. The first object that I ever used was a shot glass as a small part of a percussion set, where everything else was a typical instrument. I think I found that from a long list that a percussionist had used, which started that germ of an idea — again, if it sounds interesting, then it’s worth putting it into a piece.
In terms of using objects, it is very similar to writing for the voice; I can compose for it myself. It’s kind of a pragmatic thing. If I was a virtuoso clarinettist or something, then I would be doing that. But it’s that I can take objects with my hands and figure out what to do with them, find sounds that are exciting and are practical — so that I can explain and demonstrate it to someone else.
With the PVC pipes, did you hunt through a series of different objects until you settled onto timbres that you found interesting?
You could argue with the pipes that it’s a homemade instrument on an extremely rudimentary level, but that actually does have a story. So in another work of mine — my mouth is the transmitter — at the end of that piece, I ask the soprano Charlotte Mundy [to] whisper the words into a joint of a flute. [She’s] performing alongside four instruments where one of them is a flute. The first line of the piece is “my mouth is the transmitter” and last line was “and your ears the receiver”; I was really determined that the end of the composition is not the same as the start, because the point of the piece was that the journey between me and you changes. And so there was a flautist there who would have another head joint and I thought “okay, so it’s transformed physically with this object”.
Even though I only used it at the end of the piece, it made me feel that there was more to be done with that. So when I was composing for Ekmeles Ensemble, I wanted to use the idea of singing into flute headjoints with six singers; and Zosha di Castri (who I was studying with at the time) suggested “well, why don’t you make your own with some PVC pipes or something” — which is how the writing for that piece began.
During the listening of the piece, I noted that there are these three distinctive blocks. Did you utilise these as a way to present three separate studies of material? Or did these sections stem from the same place?
The germ of that piece is the voices being physically modulated by the pipe. Some of those inflections are playing mostly on a G, and those pipes have a resonant frequency around that pitch; so there are these subtle, micro inflections that happen when the mouth closes on the hole of the pipe. I didn’t really choose that pitch — I actually made the pipes randomly — and they all ended up being different sizes. The material is all developed from that idea, so I guess it is really simple in that way — but it was really a what if: “what can I do with this?”
It was an experiment in form. I think there’s this idea that is so engrained — not even [just] for classical music, but also songwriting and all other kinds of music — about relationships between different materials. So in the case of this work I took more of the approach of: “well, maybe the material can just be”. That is an equally valid form for music.
How did the performers feel about working with these pipes and then singing purely for only a small portion of the piece?
Going back to the idea of defamiliarising the voice, the use of the pipes is another approach to that. With the pipes physically modulating the voice, they are obscuring the humanness and its individuality; by letting the voices sing without the pipe, you are revealing the “familiar” voice in order to establish a barometer for the “unfamiliar”. It is an aural reminder that these “instruments” are people, they [have] voices that are creating all of these sounds. It’s a musical reminder for the source of that. I talk about that in the dissertation — about being conscious about what we are hearing coming from a body. Which is a big contrast to the Schaefferian theory that a sound object is benign — it matters where it comes from. It changes the way we hear it. It’s also an aural reminder of the space that we’re now navigating.
There’s another piece of yours that utilises objects — Flex, which you composed for Yarn/Wire. When you sourced those objects was it a case of you hunted down those sticks, or were the ensemble more hands on?
I — coincidentally, for a different piece — had bought a cheap glockenspiel on Amazon to experiment with. I actually didn’t end up using [the glockenspiel], but it came with this really crappy, black plastic toy mallet, so I just had that in my apartment.
I did a workshop with [Yarn/Wire]; I was asking them to try a bunch of different stuff. I already asked about how they could produce ricochet, and Sae [Hashimoto] — one of the percussionists — had a mallet that she had slapped on the table, and I thought “that’s interesting”. So I went home and tried it on that crappy mallet and it worked way better, because it was of such a poor quality that it was really flexible. That moment bore the whole fruit of that piece. It’s funny, because it’s just a one-second thing that happens in a workshop that goes on to become an important element of a piece.
So I wondered “what if I do a whole piece where it is just ricocheting stuff off the edge of the table?” — and so I start seeking out more objects. That was another piece that had a really hands-on composition process. The techniques are really specific, but because of that it was difficult to figure out how to notate the material. That became a huge part of the writing process, it took up a lot of time… -laughs- So it’s a kind of confluence between my instinct [and] where the musician happens to show me something.
When figuring out the notation and the development of the piece, were you obsessing with the amount the mallet was on the table?
I learned a lot in that piece. In a lot of my more experimental pieces where I was more hands-on — where I am using my own voice, my mouth, PVC pipes — a lot of it was about notating or figuring out how to describe your mouth, or body, or whatever. But with Flex it was all objects on a table. You spend weeks with yourself trialling different ideas, and you treat it like an instrument — like a violin, you move a millimetre and then it produces a totally different pitch. That’s actually the case with the mallets; I mean, it’s not that extreme, but a lot of it has to do with how your hand pressure is and how far it is off the table, what the table is made of, how hard you are flipping it.
So you spend weeks learning to play it — and then you have to come back to planet earth and go “okay, we have this many hours of rehearsal”. So I had to make arbitrary decisions and then work from there in order to reduce the infinite possibilities. I had to start drawing lines, measuring them and figuring out “okay, in relation to this line, where does it go?” — and “where does my hand go, what is my hand position?” I even actually injured my wrist a little bit composing that piece… -laughs- Then of course, some of those arbitrary decisions end up informing the piece in some way. With each of the mallets, I made markings [on them] as a practical way to help notate it. But if you want to have control, it’s kind of an oxymoron; you have to make arbitrary decisions at some point in the process in order to be specific. There could have been a different piece where you just let them decide the material, but that’s not what I wanted. I tend to be very specific [with my notation] in the kind of sound that I want — so in that case, a centimetre of difference really mattered.
You mentioned earlier about the types of tables that they use in order to perform the work; when they go to perform it, do they use the exact same tables for each performance? Or do you have to adapt and find new tables…
Sometimes you just have to accept that you can’t control every condition. It’s like the acoustics of a room for a vocal piece, it’s the same thing. If the room has carpet, the room has carpet — what are you going to do? So that was one of those things where I realised it wasn’t really practical for a seven-minute piece to ask them to lug around tables, and so I just had to kind of live with that. Instead I requested that the table needs to be a square, hard table, and I think in general it’s worked out fine.
Another thing in that piece that is a little stressful is that whilst the mallets work really well, they also break because they are so cheap. I learnt [that] when I was composing the piece; I was very shocked after I had been playing with the mallets for two weeks and then one day, it just snapped in the middle. And so in the score preface, I listed down: “all musicians must have a spare mallet on their person” — because I was so terrified that you were going to snap one in the middle of the piece, and [then] what were you going to do? There’s a reason why people write for the violin [or other established instruments], because it has over several hundred years of design — it has been crafted to sound very good and be functional. So there are drawbacks also to working with objects that you have to accept as part of the game.
Do you have plans to use more found objects for future pieces? Is there one in particular that you want to explore?
I imagine that I will continue to use objects, because I really enjoy composing for them — in a similar way that I really enjoy composing for my voice. It really feels like you are just playing with things. I also try to be conscious of enjoying my work, because otherwise I’m not really sure why we would be doing this. -laughs- I think for most composers, we are always kind of “saving” sounds — I had a mental sticky note of techniques or timbres that we really like — for example, there’s some metal IKEA bowls in our kitchen that sound very cool with water in them. I still have never quite found the piece for that.
In terms of next steps, what’s the pathway now the DMA is all wrapped up?
For me, it has always been piece or project based. It’s really sound first. I don’t really think so philosophically about combining an object with a voice, or violin, or whatever the instrumentation might be. Everything is game — if sonically it makes sense. I think that’s the same case for music that I listen to. I really like music that is self-evident, in the sense that you hear a piece with objects in it and it doesn’t leave you guessing about the meaning.
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Learn more about Anna-Louise Walton and her practice:
