Laila Arafah

“I’m trying to think of combinations that don’t come intuitively at all, because that’s what’s interesting to me. To me, it’s no use writing something when I already know exactly how the sound will behave, or if there is no risk, or no unknowns.”

Laila Arafah

Laila Arafah is a composer based in London. Her music centres on perceptions of temporality, close listening, and self guided explorations of hazy, vulnerable, unstable, and disorientating textures and sonic objects. Her practice is focused on conscious engagement with collaboration, and her works are often interdisciplinary and site-specific. Recent commissions have come from Explore Ensemble and LCMF, Aldeburgh Festival Podcast, Dartington Music Festival, and the London Symphony Orchestra, as the youngest appointment in the LSO Panufnik Scheme’s history; Laila has also written for the London Sinfonietta, Talea Ensemble, Zone Expérimentale Basel, Roadrunner Trio, and Aspen Music Festival, among many others. Laila is currently a 2025 Composer-in-Residence for CoMA London, and was recently selected for the XIV Tchaikovsky-city Academy (Russia) and IMPULS festival 2025 (Austria). Laila is currently studying for her undergraduate degree at the Royal Academy of Music, with Rubens Askenar and Gareth Moorcraft.

Laila Arafah’s recent commission ‘Sibelius Studies 2: keeping expectations to the absolute minimum so the disappointment will reciprocate’, was recently premiered by Explore Ensemble at LCMF 2024. Following her LCMF premiere, we caught up with Laila in a café in Marylebone, to discuss Sibelius MIDI, mapping textures, repeat performances, chat bots, tongue-in-cheekness, and more…

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Zyggy/PRXLUDES: Hi Laila! We’re talking following the premiere of your fascinating piece ‘Sibelius Studies 2’ by Explore Ensemble, which took place at LCMF last December. Tell me a bit about the concept — how did the idea of “Sibelius studies” come about?

Laila Arafah: My very first ‘Sibelius Studies’ was one that I did when I was still at Purcell [School]. It was sort of a way of me having fun using a software that I found quite limiting. I didn’t really take the Sibelius Studies seriously until I showed my teacher — and he was like “wow, this is the best thing you’ve done”… -laughs- From then on, I did loads of exploring of what sounds you can make on Sibelius. Personally, I don’t listen to my pieces on playback; so I was like “what if I actually use playback in a useful way to me?”

Last summer, I did this a fun duet with a pianist, where I was improv-ing on Sibelius, treating it as electronics, whilst they were improvising on piano. That opened my mind to the ways you can combine instruments and Sibelius, which I found to be quite a unique medium.

Tell me a bit about how you worked with Explore Ensemble — how did those two worlds of Sibelius playback and live ensemble interact?

Explore Ensemble sort of had two “scores” for this piece. One being the graphics of the playback — the video playback of Sibelius — and the other being an instructional score, with cues and timings on how to react to the graphics of the playback for each movement. For instance, this included whether to treat Sibelius as another player, to drown it out, or let it lead them as players. Some of the instructions include “beat the harshest sound in the Sibelius playback”, or “follow the contour of the graphics.” Some movements are more fully notated — for instance ‘Apologies’, where triads are played throughout, with periods of rest in between allowing the Sibelius playback come through the spaces.

Explore Ensemble are such great improvisers, so we didn’t need too much rehearsal. I think sometimes, these pieces lend themselves well to spontaneity, rather than rehearsing them over and over — and exhausting the piece.

Because it means they’re also listening to each other, as much as they’re running what they’re doing.

Yeah. A lot of the piece feels [to me] like it was composed by them, because it was so collaborative, in the sense that they’re doing so much of the interpreting. It is really valuable to have so many inputs from different players in one work. I prefer when the relationship between composer and performer is multidimensional; sometimes, sending a piece in — just a score, and nothing else — seems so detached from what composition can be.

Tell me a bit about your compositional journey — how did you first get involved in composition, and was there anything in particular that first informed your approach?

I started composing at Junior Trinity about four years ago, about a year before I joined Purcell. At that point, I had had no composition lessons — but [when] I had my first composition lesson, my teacher immediately introduced me to new music and I loved it. Initially, I think I was attracted to new and unusual sound combinations, and being able to control endless parameters. I listened to a lot of Ligeti at the very beginning, and I’d just never heard anything like it, so I was instantly attracted.

Do you feel like there’s still an element of your identity as a performer in your compositions, or do you feel like they’re separate?

I find that physically exploring the instrument you’re writing for can help you understand the instrument in more ways than a book can. For example, I’m currently writing a piece for recorder and double bass — and I got a recorder just to try certain things out, generate new material, and really get to grips with the instrument. -laughs- I don’t nearly do that enough, but I’m trying to do that more. I [also] love working with players even before the compositional process has started; I think it can make a piece so much stronger if you have gone through that process with a performer.

Listening to pieces such as ‘objects that fail as they deteriorate’, it feels like there’s quite a timbral focus in your practice. Is timbre something that’s important to you?

Timbre, layers, and density are some of the foremost things I’m thinking about when writing a piece. Although there may be some loose sense of harmony that you can grasp while listening to a densely multilayered piece, pitch is not the number one thing for me — at the moment I’m getting along quite intuitively with pitch. I don’t really work these things out in advance, which my teachers don’t appreciate.

With timbre… I do a lot of drawing-out and mapping of textures on paper. For me, it’s unexpected combinations of layers that you wouldn’t initially think to combine that I find the most interesting. I once did this course at Dartington Summer School, where a group of us were told to compose these miniatures individually — we were given like, fifteen minutes — and then we randomly layered them on top of each other. It was crazy, because none of us had heard what other people had done; but somehow, you were able to find paths and links between these layered bits of music — and somehow, it worked, because our minds are able to make links between unrelated bits of music. I try not to make certain connections too obvious for a listener, and instead let them listen and work out things for themselves… which might be a bit lazy of me. -laughs-

There’s something I find really intriguing about that approach — when you say you’re not trying to make particular links, is there anything conceptually you’re thinking about conveying?

Usually not. -laughs- What am I thinking about when I write these textures… A lot of the time, I’m trying to create something that I haven’t heard yet. I recently wrote [a] piece called ‘contextualising the lack of context as the context’, and I was a bit worried for rehearsals because I had no idea how it was going to sound. It all depend[ed] on how well they understood the role they played within this texture of middle ground-ness. And that excited me.

I don’t think I usually start with a solid concept in mind. Usually, I try to stay malleable — I’m trying to think of combinations that don’t come intuitively at all, because that’s what’s interesting to me. To me, it’s no use writing something when I already know exactly how the sound will behave, or if there is no risk, or no unknowns — or writing something that Sibelius will play back to me perfectly, because then, there’s Sibelius to play it back for me.

Tell me a bit about how the collaborative process with ensembles works for you, when you’re employing this more textural approach…

I don’t use the word texture a lot. I think when some people use the word “texture”, they mean a generic “sound world”. But for ‘contextualising the lack of context as the context’, it was important to convey to the ensemble that I was thinking of each of their parts as individual lines — micro-paths, counterpoint even, where a listener can choose their path through the music. Thus, it was important to find a dynamic where most things lay in the middle-ground. Almost like a super detailed pointillistic painting where you can choose to step back and take in the general contour, or you can zoom into the details and view it from many different angles. I enjoy creating saturated dimensions of sound, which invites a listener’s drifting, meandering, and re-catching of attention.

I really enjoy the process of working a piece out with an ensemble. That’s when it’s most exciting; it’s like the piece is almost malleable, it could go one way or another. It feels like I’m still making a piece when an ensemble are first rehearsing it, or when they’re trying to understand it from my perspective. Obviously, I appreciate [when] professional new music performers play my pieces — but it’s also great to have performers who are not quite as advanced in new music, because it means I have to work through techniques etc. out with them. So I learn a lot myself about the instruments.

When I work with students at [the] Academy… My process often starts with group rehearsal/reading, and then I work with each of the players individually and really get into their parts — which helps me understand their part better from their perspective. And I also try to help them find solutions to any challenges that arise to make the piece work as best it can.

One other thing I really enjoy is working with a different ensemble on the same piece after a piece has already been performed. Just because you know it’s going to work — so it’s sort of stress-free — and you get to see how they think differently to the previous ensemble. Like, this ensemble thinks slightly differently to this ensemble, and they bring out different nuances, have different questions, things to clarify, based on the experience of the ensemble. I had a [piece] — ‘local paths’ — [that] got played three different times last year, all by completely different ensembles, in 3 different continents. I found [that] so intriguing because they each brought out different nuances, and played slightly differently, even though the music was exactly the same. It’s so reassuring to have repeat performances where you can sit back and let them work it out — because you know it’s going to work itself out eventually.

But also, as they work it out, it’s really interesting to see how different performers navigate different intricacies in the score.

Yeah. It’s funny, because everyone will bring up different notational questions on different bits of the score. It shows that you can’t create a perfect score; there will always be something that can be interpreted slightly differently. Also I guess there are slightly different performance practices/ understandings depending on where you are.

That’s such an interesting idea, that you can’t create a “perfect” score. How integral would you say notation, or the aesthetics of a score, is to your identity as a composer?

I don’t know! I have been exploring loads of different ways of notating things recently. When I first started composing, I did loads of more instructional things, or more Lutosławski-type box notation, because I was limited by my notational abilities. Lots of that stuff I would write for myself, initially, on the flute or on the piano — so it was really badly notated, only in a way I could understand and play. I kind of love those scores, still, because it was very naïve type of composition in a way. Whereas now, my scores have become a bit too clinical, perhaps.

Especially with specifically notated things, I guess you can get obsessed with having a perfectly-engraved score. Sometimes, that ruins the process for me, because you try and work out the best way of conveying something to someone on paper rather than having a more collaborative approach where you work things out together. Working on a computer also kind of sucks; I always try and work on manuscript, or some sort of paper, where I can free-write and draw things — rather than looking into a prison of bars in Sibelius. -laughs- That’s sometimes how I feel when I look at a blank score.

It really ranges. For some of my pieces, they’re just instructional, and there’s so much freedom that performers have; whereas for others, there’s so much detail, and I really want the performer to observe all of those. I write music on either end of the spectrum, but usually not in the middle of this spectrum — just the extremes I think.

On the subject of working with different performers — your vocal work ‘Confabulations with an A.I. bot’ premiered last year in Aspen, Colorado, and I understand is having another performance in the UK soon. How did you approach working with different singers in that piece?

There have been many. With the soprano part, there have been loads of differences. The singer that first premiered it sounds more operatic and classical, I think, but Hannah Dienes-Williams — who is insanely good — embodies it in a very different way. The way they do portamenti is different, their use of straight-tone, their accents… Voices can differ so much. I think this is the piece that has had the most variation for me so far in repeat performances.

Tell me a bit about how you conceived of ‘Confabulations’ — I understand it’s essentially setting text derived from a chat bot?

The idea came out of this chat bot… There’s this chat bot called A.L.I.C.E. It is quite old, and doesn’t seem like it has actually learned anything since the first time it was programmed — so a lot of the responses it gives don’t make sense and have stayed the same for about a decade. A.L.I.C.E. also has no sense of continuation of conversation; it doesn’t really understand the concept of linking something back to something it said two sentences ago. It only responds in one-line answers, and gets confused if you reference a part of the conversation from just the minute prior.

Essentially, I was trying to find the golden nuggets in this bot; trying to provoke it with controversial questions, basically. Asking it about the point of life, whether AI art is acceptable, whether it is okay to copy other people’s work. It got into religion, without me even prompting it, which was quite interesting. I ended up having tens of pages of conversation, so I compressed certain bits and formed it into a libretto.

There’s something I love about using such a human medium — the voice — to set something that’s so obviously inhuman.

Yeah. That’s quite funny… There’s a movement where the AI bot says “I will ask Tribal Toland, to purge my memory log” — I almost began feeling sorry for A.L.I.C.E. It was like it was suddenly becoming more human, though understanding its own properties and limitations as a robot. I found it really fun to find human elements, emotions, that the bot shouldn’t be feeling, but insisted that it was feeling — and find an interesting way to set them, to create this ambiguous space where you can’t tell if sarcasm or genuineness is being involved. On the surface, there are things that seem very “bot”-y — but in reality, if you look deeper, there’s quite a lot of humanness in them. Similarly, it was fun trying to bring humanness to things that didn’t seem like they were human: for instance, making really dramatic statements and contours out of things that were matter-of-fact and not dramatic at all. But equally, really dry reproductions of things that were meaningful. I think doing the opposites of what is usually expected of word-setting was an engaging way to go about writing this piece.

There’s a charming tongue-in-cheekness that permeates both this piece and your ‘Sibelius Studies’ — is humour, or playfulness, something that you’ve consciously infused into your work?

I don’t usually intentionally try to incorporate humor into my pieces — or at least, I don’t think they’re funny — until I wrote the ‘Sibelius Studies’. This was very intentionally supposed to be a joke; hopefully, that’s how it comes across.

I tend to name pieces after I’ve written them, and I don’t really go for “funny” titles either. In the case of LCMF, it was before I’d written it — because Jack Sheen asked me for the title before I’d written the piece. -laughs- There was lots of procrastination, because it’s LCMF; there’s so much to contend with! And then there was a real rush at the end. I guess I knew that LCMF was quite tongue-in-cheek, and was playful in that sense, which is why part of the title ended up being ‘keeping expectations to the absolute minimum so the disappointment will reciprocate’. But I don’t tend to go for that approach in my other music.

Titles tend to come afterwards, for me. It’s usually just what I think reflects the piece in some way, [or] something that’s thought-provoking for a listener. Even if there’s not an obvious link, maybe it’s a scenario or word that reminds of the piece in some way. Like, ‘contextualising the lack of context as the context’ is kind of what the piece is: lines and local paths out of context, but being contextualised with other things that are also out of context — to create something curious and new, I hope.

So being funny in my music isn’t something that I go for. ‘Confabulations with an A.I. bot’ is an exception as was supposed to be funny, I guess — because of the dramaticism of it — but that was the first time anyone had laughed at my music. In a good way, of course. -laughs- I was like, this is actually cool — to evoke that kind of emotion — this was the first time my music had elicited a laugh. A lot of the time in contemporary music, the emotions that it evokes are very individual to whoever’s listening, but also quite ambiguous; there is never one clear-cut or definable emotion.

That’s a nice feeling, right? When you hear and feel people reacting to your music in real-time…

They’re actually listening, yeah. -laughs-

Tell me about what you’re currently up to? I understand you’ve recently attended Impuls in Graz, Austria…

Yes! ‘Confabulations with an A.I. bot’ was performed twice again in Graz, by both soprano and piano, and Zone Expérimentale Basel — a string trio and voice version of the piece. We’ve also collaborated on a new piece over two weeks called ‘BY-PRODUCT’; the ensemble I’ve written for includes five percussionists and electronics. The idea I’ve worked with there is delayed delay; emphasising parameters and aspects of a sound that degrade and emerge as it decays. Highlighting that moment between no-sound and sound, or a sound failing, and very vulnerable sounds. I’ve also used transducers for the first time — which was very insightful, and allowed scope to control resonance speed and explore shifts between passive/active and static/dynamic resonances. In this piece, I played around sculpting a sonic object’s behaviour through spatially organised players — and therefore spatialised resonances.

I also love seeing what the composition scene is in different areas of the world. Surprisingly, it’s very similar! There are obviously nuances and stylistic preferences, but everywhere I’ve gone, there are always incredible performers who offer invaluable insights into their practices.

You’re also on the LSO Panufnik scheme at the moment, writing a piece to be workshopped by the London Symphony Orchestra in July…

I sometimes think about the kind of piece that I want write, more than the actual writing [of] the piece. I’m kind of doing that with this LSO piece right now. I am currently working with a few ideas at the moment — including creating really varied orchestral envelopes with different modules of material, and spatialised delay — so a lot of careful, intentional sculpting of material. I think it’s a fun challenge to escape a conventional orchestral sound whilst still working in units that are perhaps quite crude, to find ways of varying quite basic parameters that will challenge an orchestra.

I ask myself a lot of questions when writing a new piece — nothing is a given. For instance there are probably hundreds of combinations of vibrato you can have within an orchestra, through combinations of pitch vibrato, dynamic vibrato, slow, fast, wide, narrow… There are a few recent pieces that I know of that use the orchestra in a new, and fresh way — for instance Øyvind Torvund’s ‘A Walk into the Future’ and Christian Drew’s ‘Aquarium Drifter’. But I’m still very early on in the process of writing the piece, because I’ve been doing so much thinking and procrastinating of what I want to do. I’m trying to find something that I’m curious about, and something that excites and challenges me.

Is there a collaboration, or project, that you’ve done that feels particularly special to you?

I think my favourite collaboration so far was with the Bozzini Quartet. I only had sketches at the very beginning of our collaboration, and they got so into the details and all the possibilities from the materials I presented them with — you could tell they really cared about the music. They’ve got so much knowledge about the quartet as an ensemble. I think that’s my favourite part about composition; when you’ve got people who really get under the material and challenge you to think about it in different ways, see it from different perspectives, and question parameters of the material that you hadn’t even thought about yet.

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Learn more about Laila and her practice:

• https://www.laila-arafah.co.uk/
• https://www.youtube.com/@lailaarafah9912
• https://soundcloud.com/laila-arafah-616877311
• https://www.instagram.com/laila_arafah_/

References/Links:

• A.L.I.C.E. chat bot, Pandorabots
• Øyvind Torvund – ‘A Walk into the Future’ (2019)
• Christian Drew – ‘Aquarium Drifter’ (2024)