“When you have been doing composition this long, you know that you love it — and however it comes up in your life, you are going to find a way to do it. It may not be to the scale that you want, or shared at the places you might have hoped, but you know that you are not going to let that take away the thing that you love.”
Chloe Knibbs
Chloe Knibbs is a composer, songwriter and sound artist whose work is deeply rooted in lyricism and vulnerability. Drawing from a range of feminist and interdisciplinary influences, her portfolio spans opera, music theatre, songwriting, choral and chamber works, sound art and electroacoustic pieces. Chloe’s work is often developed through long standing collaborations with musicians — such as Pace New Music — receiving support from Jerwood Arts, PRS Women Make Music, Arts Council England, and the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Drummond and Lockyer Award. Her work has been performed at Flatpack Film Festival, Birmingham Weekender, and Cheltenham Music Festival, and commissioned by Illuminate Womens’ Music, Marian Consort, Lilith Ensemble, and British Council Music, among others. Chloe is currently pursuing a PhD at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and the University of Birmingham, supported by Midlands4Cities; she holds a BMus from the University of Manchester and a Masters in Composition from Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, where she studied with Joe Cutler.
Chloe is currently an Artist in Residence at USF Verftet in Bergen, Norway, where she took part in an Open Studio event in May 2025. During her residency, Patrick Ellis had a video call with Chloe ahead of her Open Studio to talk about supportive communities, pragmatism, freewriting, storytelling, and music that has “moments to breathe”…
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Patrick/PRXLUDES: Hi Chloe, thanks for joining me! You’re currently on a residency at the USF Verftet in Bergen — how are you finding it, and what are you working on at the moment?
Chloe Knibbs: I have been here for a month or so now and I still have another month left; it is quite free with what I do here. I’m working on this portraiture project, and I have also been exploring Beethoven through a few different lenses — but it’s very much a space to just sketch.
Have you done many residencies before? And have any been as long as this [three months]?
I have done residencies before, but most have been only two or three weeks. You might go in with a set project that you want to make a good headway on, and you can pause your life whilst you do that. Comparing that with here, it is a bit different; on top of concentrating on my own work, I have been finding out what it is like to live in Bergen. It is a place that has a thriving arts scene — there’s lots of performance art around and gallery openings. There has been a process of getting to know this scene and understanding how it works.
Have you stumbled across any nice surprises whilst you have been there?
The main one has been the community at USF. They are very supportive of each other. There is this group of women who are part of a “twelve o’clock club”: they meet every day at twelve for a coffee — and some of them have been in this building for 30 to 40 years doing their art, some of them are in their 70s and 80s. That has been a nice thing to discover; this feeling of the way you might be able to make a stable life, and be in a supportive community.
I feel as though there is this pressure in composition to get everything done before 30 — and if you haven’t done it then, you should get it done before 40… -laughs- Here, it’s been a breath of fresh air to see people in their 70s still going on, and having lots of things that they want to try, putting on exhibitions. There is also this sense that there is a lot of time here. I don’t know what age I will live to… -laughs- But on average, I actually have more time than I sometimes allow myself to think. That has been a nice discovery in this place.
For you, what are the differences between a short and a long residency?
It has been an interesting process. There was a point at the beginning of the residency where I was doing different things I wouldn’t do normally, and exploring, but then suddenly the perfectionism and the wanting to control would slip in — where I was telling myself “actually, I should just be writing something”… So I have been moving between those viewpoints. I was talking to Joe Cutler the other day [about wanting] to get better at being in the middle, where you are not pushing for the deadline, but you are still working in a more playful space — where you are just making. So for me that has almost been the challenge of the residency; trying to exist in the middle a bit more.
In a couple of weeks, I have got an open studio here at USF. I have been experimenting with visuals and I have been sharing my works in progress in that way also. There is not quite the same equivalent in the composition world, where you are sharing things that are yet to be completed.I am looking forward to it, but there is also the resistance to showing something that is unfinished. A younger version of me would much prefer to be left alone in her room until she was totally happy with everything. -laughs-
So your younger self was always working towards a perceived perfectionism? Not performing or recording anything until it was completely done?
Absolutely. It’s funny because I also like to write songs, improvise, as well as play music with other people.Things that are more free. I’ve always valued that. For me the challenge has been bringing that kind of headspace into everything — that more playful energy.
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When you are writing now, are you more flexible with the end result?
I think so. As you have done a bit more and have a bit of a back catalogue, you start to trust yourself more and think “well, it will work out, I know that I care about the piece and I will figure it out, let’s see how it best fits”. Sometimes it’s easy — especially when you are starting out — to feel like “I’m going to do it this way and it’s for this kind of a performance, so it should be this kind of thing”, and you let that shape it a lot; when [in reality] you’ve got to let yourself reveal your own kind of intuition I suppose.
That trust only comes after years and years of writing. It’s been almost a decade since you began your masters at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire…
It goes back to what I was saying about these older artists as well. I see myself in that, where I think “oh, I will just be doing that anyway” — even if I don’t get the commission, I just know that I will be working on the project. Perhaps I am less tied to that, which is good.
When you have been doing composition this long, you know that you love it — and however it comes up in your life, you are going to find a way to do it. It may not be to the scale that you want, or shared at the places you might have hoped, but you know that you are not going to let that take away the thing that you love.
As a composer, do you solely enjoy the writing process or do you also like the other sides of it?
I’ve noticed that compared to some other composers, I don’t really get so excited about the score. I know some artists who love that. For me, my favourite part about being a composer is when you are imagining the initial ideas; and then there’s a really magical moment for me towards the end of the process where you are wondering how you bring this into the world — how does it become a living and breathing piece? That for me is exciting — the first time you bring it into a rehearsal or a workshop, that is when I feel as though the piece is finished. When I have reached the double bar line, it doesn’t really feel like the process is completed.
I won’t apply for a call for scores; there is just something really unmotivating [about] the fact that I might not ever hear the piece. I would rather work with people who I know, or if the project has a guarantee that I’m going to hear it live in a room, so that I can work with it and mould it in the space.
In your more recent compositions, is it vital that the performers are involved?
That’s funny that you ask that. I’ve been working on more electroacoustic projects and that is simply just speakers; so that has been a totally different experience. Having said that, I do really value working with other musicians. Earlier in the year, I had a new piano piece performed by Melissa Morris, and we workshopped that, going into detail about the pedalling and the phrases.
I love those moments where you’re learning more about the instrument, and the performer is getting something out of it — because they’re approaching their instrument in a different way. There’s just something that is really human about that which I really value; I much prefer projects where you get that time to have that kind of bond. When the piece was performed, both Melissa and I had a lovely connection, which in turn made the performance better for me. I felt as though I could hear it in the music.
It’s also a lovely feeling for them if they are so invested in the project…
It feels like an exchange and a willingness to learn from both sides, as well. Like, even though I play piano a lot — but not as well as Melissa… -laughs- — through working with her, I learnt more things that I can take away as well.
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With the electroacoustic work that you are doing, when did that truly begin?
I was actually really resistant to it… -laughs- It is interesting, because I did my undergrad at a place that’s known for electroacoustic stuff — but at the time I was studying there, you either picked acoustic or electroacoustic music, so once I had felt that I been put in that “box”, I couldn’t really exit that. Even though I knew that acoustic music was my thing, I just didn’t feel like there were many examples of existing between different worlds and doing a bit of both.
When it came for me to do the masters at Birmingham, it was a bit unnerving; because I realised that people who had done the undergrad there knew far more about music tech than I did. So instead of asking a lot of questions about it, I found myself digging into what I knew. But then after the masters, I started to realise that a lot of my pieces come from extramusical sources; and that I have been interested in a story, even if the story isn’t immediately apparent to the listener. I just kept having ideas for electroacoustic pieces, and being frustrated — because I didn’t know how to do that.
It was just before the pandemic, I got this Jerwood pot of money and had a few electroacoustic lessons — and felt that something had clicked there. I realised that I liked making collages with sound, and I enjoyed playing with the material.Then the pandemic hit, and instead of learning a language, I learnt Logic Pro. -laughs- I just couldn’t deal with writing pieces for live streams. I don’t know why, but it just really wasn’t for me. But I knew that I could finish an electroacoustic piece on my own, and on my terms. It also became a bit of a feminist thing as well, as I was aware of the lack of representation — and I thought, if I care about feminism so much, then I probably need to do this [electroacoustic music] myself. Be a bit more empowered as an independent artist, so that you are not relying on other people as much.
Did you approach those earlier electroacoustic pieces in the same way that you would have done with the acoustic works, or was there a completely new method?
It didn’t feel completely different, but there were changes. [The process] actually felt nice. It is good as a composer to try new things, and maintain a playful joy that is similar to when you are just getting started out. You can lose that — but if you use new methods that allows you to stumble back into the playfulness, then you get that feeling again. I believe that there is a value to that feeling and following that hunch.
Going back to the question, I would say that it’s different but it wasn’t completely untrodden pathways, as I was centring the piece around a story. I suppose with the method, I enjoyed the way that you could experiment with live time; you are able to rejig things around, you are able to reverse and displace material, and you can upend the piece quite quickly. That can be a fun way of figuring out what is possible and what you actually want the piece to be. I liked that feeling of working on something that was mouldable.
And then did that approach begin to infiltrate your acoustic work?
Do you know what’s funny? I hadn’t thought that it had — but Melissa [Morris] had made this point that the material in my ‘Prism’ piece was almost like electronic music because it glitches in this way; and I hadn’t realised that’s what I had written in. Sometimes you are not fully aware where one influence bleeds into the other, but I think that it must do.
When composing, I don’t like writing two acoustic pieces at the same time. I’ve found that I can write an acoustic and an electroacoustic piece simultaneously if I have to, there is some space there mentally somehow.
You can compartmentalise them because they are two separate projects?
Exactly. Whereas I hate it when I have had deadlines come up, where I have had to do two pieces for acoustic instruments. It’s just not for me… -laughs-
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When you were composing the acoustic works in your masters, did you have a sense that there was something that was missing?
Less so. I was getting into theatre, and I hadn’t done any of that kind of work during my undergraduate.. I can remember composing a piece that was about a dialogue between two instruments — it felt much more [of a] contemporary composition technique — and the narratives that I wanted to use didn’t really fit in that. -laughs- Whereas with the masters, I wanted to explore the more theatrical things, and to be able to be more open in saying “this piece is about a particular topic or story”. I think that was liberating; so I didn’t feel too bothered that there was something missing in my work during that point.
So the involvement of theatre was almost a discovery of yourself then?
I would say so. I can remember in my first few lessons with Joe [Cutler], the approach was so not what I had been used to. He would ask me “So what would you like to create?” — and I was thinking “Does he mean that? Oh wait, he really means that”… -laughs- At the time, I was so used to being given a brief where you were set the parameters. So, when you have someone turn around and say “Would you like it to be a long piece? A short piece?” — it was a new thing. It was really great for me to have a teacher like that who was just so open minded. So then you do go away and have a think about what you do what to do, and then you develop agency.
Did it feel terrifying trying to write something without any set impetus — or did you find it more liberating?
For me, it was a bit of both. I had felt as though I hadn’t quite been able to do what I had wanted to do with things anyway. But there was also difficulty with choosing which way to go first. When you are doing a masters, you are figuring out how you want to work and the right structures for you. It’s all well and good if you say to yourself “oh, I’m going to do this piece by the sea that will last for two hours” — but you’ve got to be there and at least drill it down a bit. A part of composition is looking at the resources that you have and working within those confines. Learning to map fantasy into reality was tricky, as well.
What were some of those fantasy-reality challenges that you had to juggle with?
The budget, for starters — but also your own time and energy. You have to think to yourself, if you want to write a certain kind of piece and include it in that academic year’s portfolio, you have to think of different considerations. Maybe I would make a smaller version of a piece; perhaps it needs to be 5 minutes long, not 25 minutes long. Those kinds of basic things. I think if you accept the resources that you have at the moment, that can be a good thing for the writing process. Because if you compose with those things in mind, then it can work quite well. I enjoy that challenge; you can begin with a blank page, but if you take into consideration the circumstances, then they are a part of the process and can guide the piece.
And so you became more pragmatic as a composer?
I suppose so. But for me, there has always been a balancing act between fantasy and pragmatism.
In terms of comparing your studies at Manchester and Birmingham, what were some of the differences?
I guess with Manchester it was different because the course was equally split between composition, performance and musicology — and more emphasis on academia perhaps than on the professional musical world. And perhaps with more students, it was less of a composer cohort feel than Birmingham. I think that it was really good for me to come to Birmingham. I remember being in the postgrad forum and I was asked to talk about my work, and I was terrified! We hadn’t done anything like that in Manchester; whereas over at the Conservatoire, I had gotten a sense that the undergrads had at least gotten a sense of experiencing that. Personally, there were lots of practical, professional skills that for me were really helpful to be able to practice there. There were certainly moments where I felt out of my comfort zone, but I knew it was good as some of those skills were the things that I needed to get better at in order to facilitate your progress.
In my year group there were only four of us — [myself], Emily Levy, Chris Cresswell, and James Oldham — and we each had our own feel. I was the younger one at that time, and so I felt like I got to learn quite a lot of stuff through my peers. They had more industry experience, and so I learnt a lot by just being in their company. That was really nice because it had an energy of being surrounded by people that wanted you to do well, and find your thing. Chris, Emily and I also each did our own songwriting, but again, it was all from different experiences and perspectives.
Do you still write songs?
I would say that it’s still very much part of what I do — but it doesn’t always go into the world. -laughs- I’m often writing songs and sketching things out. Again, it’s one of those things where by doing it, [it] probably influences things in how I write. I have often used voice in a lot of compositions, and I think that comes from the songwriting. When the PhD is less intense in my life, I will probably go back to songwriting in a stronger way — it’s something that I do really love, but I just haven’t always put it centre forward.
So it is something that can always go back to?
Yeah. It is something that I know will always be there. It’s one of those things sometimes that’s a clash with the identity of being a “composer”; but nowadays, I am more interested in blurring each of my facets and not worrying about that. I am more open to making what I want to create and to just put it out.
When you do your songwriting, have you noticed that you try to write it in a more “compositional” way? Or is it still an escapist way of working that just comes more naturally?
I think I would prefer it to stay quite natural, and to then encourage that intuition to come into my writing. I prefer to use my own instinct and my own ear when writing — that is far more what I relate to in composing — so the songwriting is a good reminder of it. I suppose that I am aware of themes; when people listen to my songs without knowing me, they are not surprised to learn that I come from a classical background.
I enjoy the process of songwriting, because I can just wake up, go to the piano and mess around and just see what comes up. I think that it is nice to hold a space where you see what comes out of it, rather than trying to engineer it, because you’ve then got that in your palette. Even if the text isn’t so good, you can shift the chord sequence into a piece, it becomes a malleable thing.
And in your other composing, do they have pre-planned procedures or is that also similar to your songwriting?
No, sometimes they are quite planned. I did drama at school, and I remember this exercise that we used to do — where you would sit on a chair in the middle of the room, you would act as a character in the play, and the classmates would ask you questions. The whole idea was that you would get to know the character really well, because you would be asked things like “what did you have for breakfast?” — and you would make it up based on where the character lives and what time they exist in.
I spend a lot of time freewriting before I write a piece that I really care about. For me, that’s my way of doing that exercise — having a sense of the piece. I will ask myself questions such as “what do I want this piece to be?”, and then I would freewrite for five minutes — and then I will find some words that I find quite interesting and then I will freewrite around that. I like writing pieces where I haven’t written a single note in months and I have been really thinking about the concept, the choice of instrumentation. It’s almost like making the mould — and then once I feel as though I have made that, then the piece is then made of that mould. Perhaps it doesn’t turn out how I expected, but I’ve thought about it a lot and I would really like to get the concept very clear in my head. Which is why I think I prefer to compose more theatrical, slightly longer works. To do that process for a five minute trio piece doesn’t quite gel always… -laughs-
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Once you have made the foundations of a piece, how much flexibility do you allow within that?
In terms of musical parameters, there is quite a lot of flexibility — but in terms of the subject matter, I don’t like to wade too much away from the concept. So for me, it’s like: how is the music and the concept working together? While working on the concept, I’ve thought about why I want to work with that instrument or that person; because that range of the instrument is going to work really well and that’s going to help communicate what I want to communicate. For me, some of the best pieces are where they make their own rules and then they break them. The rules I establish whilst working might not use common parameters such as traditional harmony, but I will have made my own rules or world for the piece.
How long does it take you to make those rules?
Well, I wrote my ‘Prism’ piece for piano and electronics last autumn. But if I really think back to when I started my PhD, I was already starting to think about things for that piece in slow ways. It was probably a year of thinking in the background. There were other pieces happening, but I knew that I was heading in [that] direction. That is usually the case with works that I am invested in.
When you started establishing your own compositional rules, was that something that you were doing back during your studies in Manchester?
Back then, I would try to put my own stories in somehow. At that age, I was always quite interested in myths and legends or characters; I always wanted something of that to feature if I could, but it felt like I was having to find a way to do it. However, once I developed more skills, I think I started to go that way when I was in Birmingham. It’s become quite common practice for me where at the beginning of writing a piece, I would sit in a cafe with a notebook and freewrite. You know [how] people would make a map with the duration across the top and the instruments? Well I would do that, and then slowly map out what that’s going to look like in a musical form — and that’s become my go-to method if it is an acoustic piece.
I see the pre-compositional plans as a framework, because I’ve mapped out the notable moments in the piece: the soprano is going to have a moment there, and she’s going to end in the lower end of the register, so then I’m mapping out the viola to take over in that register — something like that. For me, I use the framework to anticipate what is coming next. If I am writing a particular section, I might find that it’s helpful to orient myself. Like with anything, sometimes you start writing according to your framework and then you think “well that’s wrong, the ending is actually the beginning” — and then you change it. But I think for me, I need something to see where I’m up to. Once you have the material, you can begin to evaluate it and make adjustments if things are not coming across.
I think a lot about space in my music. I quite like music where there are moments to breathe and there is space around the sound, so you know what is there. That’s often what I think about: the auditory journey for the listener, what they are going to pick out, or what they are not going to get because there is so much going on. I often think about if the piece has enough space around it for the work to really stand out — or [if] I have put too much before it to feel like it’s a follow-on.
Do you recycle parameters or plans from previous works?
Inevitably, as you find your style as a composer, you find things that you are beginning to like. We’ve all been there — when you’ve got a looming deadline — but in a weird way that’s when you find your trademarks, and you recycle ideas without realising.
In new music it’s interesting, though. I feel as though there is this pressure, because the tagline is often “this has never been heard of before, here’s a world premiere” — I’m trying to counteract that in my brain, but I used to feel that everything had to be completely new for it to be valuable. And I’ve come to realise, that’s not a human way of treating my own brain. I would like to think that new music can exist because it is good, and not because it’s not been heard before. So I am trying to be more comfortable that I might reference an old piece in some way; I am aiming to work with something that I really like, or what will fit in with the piece that I am working on.
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Learn more about Chloe and her practice:
