“I really like having honesty and vulnerability in my music. I feel that it allows space for discomfort and not very beautiful things, which happens a lot in real life.”
Gloria Xia
Gloria (Xinyue) Xia is a Manchester-based composer originally from Shanghai, China. Her creative practice is rooted in humanity, relationships, and feminism; she creates music that embraces vulnerability and honesty, allowing space for discomfort and bizarreness. Influenced by New Discipline and cross-disciplinary, intercultural installations, her work merges music with text, movement, and visual storytelling — often through embodied, performative gestures and language. Gloria’s work has been showcased internationally by ensembles including Ensemble Modern, Hypercube, London Contemporary Soloists, and Trio Immersio, among others; as well as in collaborations with choreographers and animators from the Northern Ballet School and Manchester Metropolitan University. Her work ‘Unvoiced’ was selected for the Vocalverse Call for Scores in April 2025, as well as Eugene Difficult Music Ensemble in October; she is also currently writing a new work for United Instruments of Lucilin for the 2025 Rainy Days Festival in Luxembourg. Gloria is currently pursuing a composition degree at the Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM), studying under Larry Goves and Steven Daverson.
In summer 2025, Gloria attended the IYCA academy in Ticino, Switzerland, where Ensemble Modern premiered her work ‘Before the Question’. Over the summer, Patrick Ellis had a Zoom call with Gloria to discuss narrative, rituals, New Discipline, autobiographical experiences, and honesty and vulnerability in composition…
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Patrick/PRXLUDES: Hi Gloria, I hope you’ve had a great summer! Have you been busy with any projects over these past few months?
Gloria Xia: Yes! I had a piece premiered in July titled ‘Before the Question’, which took place in Switzerland with Ensemble Modern. The work is about trust issues in relationships. The piece features players speaking, whispering, shouting, and singing, with the conductor reciting at the beginning and the end.
At the moment, I am working on a new piece for the United Instruments of Lucilin, which will be premiered at the Rainy Days Festival [in Luxembourg]. Right now, it is scored for six performers each with a set of fork, knife, and plate — although I might still change my mind.
I’ve noticed that your work often incorporates autobiographical elements into your own music. Do you see composing as an outlet or a resolution to those personal events, or do you more use your life as a tool to create work?
It’s both, and they actually complement each other. When feelings become too messy or intense in my head, I turn to write them down. That process helps me process and release those feelings, while sometimes also transforming into material for my work.
How do you translate these personal experiences into a piece — is there a set process?
Mostly when I draw from personal experience, I write my own text before I begin the music. For example, in my piece ‘Unvoiced’ — for amplified vocalist and electronics — I explore the male gaze. The text was inspired by my experience of walking without a bra and noticing people — mostly men — staring at my chest for way too long, which made me extremely uncomfortable and angry. In the piece, the text is fragmented into phonemes, recited by different voices, and eventually sung.
I don’t aim for the audience to witness the scene itself, but to feel the emotion[al] journey from struggling to find a way out. I created this character that is trapped by others’ comments; and [they] find that they can’t speak after they try, but [are] slowly struggling towards the lullaby-ish singing at the end. Lullaby is usually innocent and playful, but here [it] becomes the character’s means of release and fight.
So it’s an outlet for those experiences. You capture the mood of that event, which then becomes abstracted for the audience…
Exactly. I want the audience to have their own understanding; we all have very different lives while sharing similar emotions.
‘Unvoiced’ begins very abstracted, almost ASMR-like; and then in the middle of the piece, you can just about make out a text that is coming out, which is revealed later on.
I used a lot of fragmented text in the piece, especially at the beginning; [there are] only consonances in the original order in the text. While writing, I was listening to Luciano Berio, Rebecca Saunders, and Georges Aperghis — their use of fragmented words inspired me as a way to convey the struggle of trying to speak.
Tell me about the electronic elements in ‘Unvoiced’. Were the electronics fixed or live?
The electronics were fixed. It was actually my first major project involving electronics. My teachers encouraged me to use live electronics, triggering sounds from a keyboard to give the performer more freedom. However, when the piece was first performed in San Francisco, I couldn’t attend, so the performer was on their own. We decided to use a fixed track to make the performance easier.
What is the relationship between the voice, the electronics, and the text?
In this piece, the electronics and the voice form a duet. The electronics embody the character’s inner thoughts as well as external comments they’ve heard — haunting, pressuring, overwhelming. The live voice becomes the outlet, the visible struggle: at first whispering only consonants, then gradually finding the courage to produce a sound. While the electronics are largely independent from the text, the second half introduce[s] different voices reciting it. The vocal material, however, is rooted in the text — fragmented and sung.
Did you use pre-recorded or found sounds with the electronics?
Most of the sounds were recorded by myself using my own voice, while for the reciting part I borrowed the voices of a few colleagues. There are also some sounds made from train noises, soda water, and footsteps to increase the layers and background. When I was writing the piece, I was actually considering making a video piece; I created some video fragments, but as I developed more of the piece, I realised that having video alongside the live performance might be too overwhelming for the audience. Still, at some point I still want to do an audiovisual version of the piece.
What kind of ideas did you have for the video element of the piece?
There was an underwater scene with objects floating in the water — layered with a large image of my face performing corresponding actions and facial gestures alongside. A big face of me.
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Tell me a bit about your musical background — how did you initially get into composition?
I didn’t start composing seriously until I began my studies at the Royal Northern, though I’ve been playing piano from very early on. I was actually planning to study psychology for university. In year 12, we had a new music teacher. One day after class, he told me that he saw my composition from the summer and asked if I’d ever consider studying it. I was quite surprised, since I had no idea what composing really involved, but intrigued by the thought of exploring a bit of every instrument and different aspects of music. All the composing [I] did back then [was] for my A-Levels.
I applied to several places and got in[to] the RNCM. Transitioning there was actually quite difficult from the start, because I had never had any formal compositional lessons with anyone before (apart from my music teacher as part of my A-Levels) — and I had also come from a background where teachers would usually tell me what I should do and what is “good” and “bad”. I expected universities to work in a similar way. But I came to the realisation that there were no textbooks or people telling me what to write and how to write, and I was given a lot of freedom. The Royal Northern’s course is very flexible, and was rather disorienting for me at first — because I lacked a strong grounding with repertoire — and [I was] quite shy and insecure compared to some of my peers.
In my first two years, I was studying with Laura Bowler and Adam Gorb, who gave me a lot of support and encouraged me to take risks and trust myself — which was hugely inspiring and important for me at that stage. I was also lucky to be around a great group of peer composers who have been a great source of inspiration and encouragement to me. So over time, I came to really appreciate the flexibility of the course, and gradually I found my own way and began to develop my personal aesthetics and voice. I don’t think [that] would have been possible without that journey.
In terms of your tutors, how did you find studying with Laura Bowler and Adam Gorb — as well as your current teachers, Larry Goves and Steven Daverson? What did they bring out in you?
I feel really lucky to have studied with them, and to have the opportunity to learn from such a wide range of wonderful teachers and composers; I’ve gained so much from each of them. From my perspective, I sometimes see a similarity between Laura and Larry in the way they encourage me to take risks and to think ambitiously about the bigger picture of a piece — the overall shape and the concepts behind it. Adam and Steven, though very different from each other, often bring my attention to the details. Adam talks a lot about intervals and pitch, while Steven really focuses on scoring and the practical side of things.
With Steven, for instance, lessons often start with whatever I’m working on, but then we might branch out into pieces I’ve been listening to or ideas I’ve come across. I find his focus on practicalities especially useful, because in contemporary music we’re often trying new techniques that don’t have a standard way of being notated yet. Larry, by contrast, often pushes me to zoom out — to think about the broader picture and to be bold in trying unconventional approaches.
What I really value is having those different perspectives side by side. When I go to lessons, I usually bring questions that have come up while writing. Sometimes they’re broad — such as whether a section works or if a direction is interesting — and sometimes they’re very practical, like finding the clearest way to notate something. I’ll even bring different versions of a passage if I’m unsure. Because English isn’t my first language, I know I can jump around a bit when I’m explaining things; my teachers are always so patient and generous. Rather than just giving me the answers, they guide me through the uncertainty and help me discover my own solutions. That has been invaluable — not only for my growth as a composer, but also in how I think about music and creativity as a whole.
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Let’s talk a bit more about how you’ve incorporated personal experience into your compositions. How did you approach pieces such as ‘Before the Question’ — which was premiered by Ensemble Modern in July?
‘Before the Question’ is about trust issues in a relationship — when you really want to check your partner’s phone, but you are trying not to, and then you end up fighting with yourself all night. This is something that I have encountered in past relationships, but also something that you see online a lot too.
I began by writing a series of poems — and in this case, I gave the words to the conductor and performers instructing them to speak, whisper, and sing. At the beginning they recite a paragraph of text, setting up [the] scene, and the players start to play really softly; pizzicato textures, short notes and counterpoint with their own whispers. Kind of like the movie Inside Out, where there are many little characters inside the [main] character’s head who are constantly speaking and fighting for control of the character. There are also moments which the performers stand up and recite during the music, with a bit of singing at the end. I’d say text and performative gestures are my main ways to interpret very specific experiences and emotions, as they’re less abstract and more accessible.
How was it to convince the players to sing?
It was quite smooth! We did practice it a few times in rehearsals. I was a bit worried about this before the rehearsal; but I thought that it would be easy to figure out, because it was just one note — and they all sing together, so no one has to stand by themselves. Although I asked them to sing a B7 after an A minor chord in the strings, I had prepared a backup for them to sing an A. The main result I wanted to achieve is a surprising and theatrical singing of the word “love”, but I wasn’t extremely strict on how exactly [it] needed to be in this case — because I know that it can be a bit intimidating for some performers.
Earlier this year, you had the premiere of your orchestral piece, ‘Air lifts the butterfly, grain holds its flight’ — inspired by early human rituals. What rituals did you use as inspiration and then how did you translate or use it to inspire you?
The piece was inspired by a dance show that I watched last summer in China. It had a lot of traditional Chinese drums used in very ritualistic and theatrical ways, and I loved how it created a whole atmosphere for the audience. In ‘Air lifts the butterfly…’, I take this ritualistic use of percussion into the orchestra, having a percussive motif in the three percussion [parts], piano, and harp throughout — they play the same pattern throughout. The pianist played the muted highest key while the harpist knocked on the sound board, both creating percussive sounds. This “percussion group” forms the core of the ritual, representing human-made instruments crafted from natural materials. These sounds mirror the rhythms of the earth and the cycles of nature.
Other than that, I used a lot of white noise in that piece, where the wind and the brass were basically speaking nonsense phrases I made up into their instruments. I intentionally use[d] words with lots of consonants, because I like the murmuring sound — like the wind, trees, nature is talking to you; it’s a very different sound between the performers only reciting consonants and [them] reciting words, even if the words don’t really make sense. It also gives a very different kind of visual effect onstage. The strings make this soft, cloudy texture, kind of like the fragile flutter of a butterfly’s wings just coming out of its cocoon — it’s delicate, but at the same time, it suggests those subtle yet powerful shifts in the earth’s crust.
One really distinctive musical ‘Air lifts the butterfly…’, is this rhythmic texture of whispers. You’ve called these metronomic whispers — what do you mean by this term?
So instead of speaking naturally, the performer whispers in a very regular, mechanical rhythm — tick-tick-tick — as if marking time. It refers to the theatricality that I wanted to create, which was contrasting with the flowing white noise in the strings, responding to the metronome at the end of the piece.
Have you used this kind of metronomic material in other pieces?
I think that’s the first piece where I use that kind of material; I definitely want to use more though. I do have quite rhythmic material in ‘Before the Question’, especially at the beginning where they were counterpointing with the whispering — they are mostly percussive sounds, with specific rhythm I wrote.
There is a lot of timbral detail in your music. When you wrote ‘Air lifts the butterfly…’, did you actively find performers from Royal Northern or did you try to do workshops to try to get those sounds? Or was it all from an extensive knowledge that you’ve built up over time?
A bit of both, really. I play the cello a bit myself, and so I have an idea of how the cello sounds and works; but I do constantly borrow string instruments from the college to experiment with in order to find different techniques and specific timbres to use in my own music. It is easier having the strings in my hand, as I vaguely know how to play them, and more efficient than bothering friends to be in a room with me and give workshops. It is quite hard to explain ideas, especially at an experimental stage; so that’s how I usually deal with strings. For wind and brass instruments, I do need to find friends to workshop because I have very limited knowledge. There are also YouTube videos now, which are super helpful for finding sounds and learning techniques.
Tell me a bit about the form of ‘Air lifts the butterfly…’ — how did you create the structure for the piece?
Typically, I don’t come up with a structure before I write the piece. When I have tried to do so in the past, it always goes off track and ends up being very different from what I was planning at first. I think that the structure usually comes naturally through the writing process; I sometimes figure the structure out halfway through creating the piece. I find that [the process of] writing gives me the feeling of what’s coming next; but if I had decided upon the structure first, it would give me constraints. Having said that, I do have ideas for what kind of sound world I want initially at the beginning — as well as at the very end of the piece. So whilst there isn’t a strict ratio of structure, there is more of a sound [world] in mind, as well as a contour and a shape of the music that I have.
Would you say your working process is largely material and narrative-led?
Definitely. For pieces like ‘Before the Question’ and ‘Unvoiced’, the narration and structure are based around the text rather than music. I would say that those two pieces had their structure before writing — not the “time” structure from one minute to the next — but the structure of the narration is set.
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You have also done a lot of cross-discipline collaborations over the years — one being ‘Equinox’ with choreographer Giannella Cassar. What was the process of that piece and how did it vary to work with a choreographer and dancer over classical performers?
‘Equinox’ is quite an early piece of mine. I wrote it during my first year studying at Royal Northern; it was made as part of our curriculum, where we collaborated with choreographers from the Northern Ballet School. At the start of the project, we met all the choreographers and did a little presentation, and then paired up by ourselves. We talked about what kind of music she [Giannella] liked and found inspiring; she sent over a Spotify playlist to me, and I went through some of the music and then discussed the theme of the piece with her. We chatted, then I wrote the music, and she made the choreography around that.
Have you done any other collaborations?
I worked closely with an animation artist who was graduating from Manchester Metropolitan University. That process was a bit more back and forth in terms of the process; she gave a playlist to me that included the kind of music that she wanted, [and] she also gave me a draft of her video. We had an extensive discussion on the work — which included finding out what kind[s] of sound effects she wanted in the piece, and different mood[s] in each section. I did quite a few versions, but the composition method was more about making sound effects. I also synchronised the music to the video a bit more, and to include some sound effects as the scene was playing to match the movements of the characters. There were also some other cross-discipline pieces including visuals and theatrical elements, but they were done by myself without other collaborators. I’d love to have more opportunities to collaborate with artists from other fields, though.
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How does the idea of narrative interact with your work — are these similar to the use of personal events, whereby it is slightly “hidden” within your works?
Yes it’s quite similar to the use of personal events. When I use text, it acts as the narration itself that supports [the] structure and generates the music. I’m also aiming to include more theatricality in my music and also physical movements; this is my next step for what I want to explore more. I believe that using those additional elements will give more narrative to the story — which will become more tangible and less abstract than pure music alone. It will also give people more ways into my music. I wish to build a bridge [both] within the music community, [and] also for those without a musical background — offering connections through language, storytelling and performative gestures that would invite people into the work a bit more on their own terms.
So you like the idea of bridging your own work into other communities or types of audiences?
I love seeing all kinds of work in other forms. I spend a lot of time in contemporary galleries, and installation works always inspire me. For example, ‘Unvoiced’ was originally motivated after I saw Mikhail Karikis’ ‘Songs for the Storm to Come’ at HOME Manchester. The work was a multi-sound and video installation, which featured a women and non-binary choir who were based in Manchester. It was a collaborative work between the artist and the choir, responding to the climate crisis.
I’m really drawn to cross-disciplinary work. I think that can make contemporary music more accessible; I feel as though contemporary music can be quite intimidating, especially for people without musical backgrounds. Even for people who are working within the classical music industry — which I realised when I first showed it to my family, [whose reaction] was “I don’t understand this”. I was really sad [about] that; it did make me think about what and why I compose, and consider bringing in different art forms.
What do you have coming up after the summer? You’ve mentioned about wanting to try your hand at more multimedia and cross-disciplinary works; what other elements are you wanting to branch into musically?
I’ve recently been drawn into some of the New Discipline composers like Jennifer Walshe, Matthew Shlomowitz, and Jessie Marino — especially their embodied and encoded gesture with music. I guess that it is also interdisciplinary; taking gestures and language to make something that is more “drama” than musical piece. Generally, I’m drawn into incorporating different art forms, and I wish to explore that further because it is very difficult — and I feel as though I need more time and support on this topic to develop my understanding and skillset further.
Do you think if you were to go more into that direction, that your narratives would become more clear and less abstracted?
In terms of the theatricality and the gestures, with the combination of the music and the other elements… I feel as though it will become more transparent and easily delivered to the audience — because there would be more stimulus. I think that it would be less abstract, but it could also be quite difficult to make very clear structurally and conceptually. Ultimately, it also depends on what the piece is focused on. I write works that can be either quite abstract or quite narrative-based; so I think it really depends. But I do want to work towards using more narrative ways that touch on personal themes and present it in a storytelling kind of way. I really like having honesty and vulnerability in my music. I feel that it allows space for discomfort and not very beautiful things, which happens a lot in real life.
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Learn more about Gloria Xia and her practice:
- https://gloriaxxy.wixsite.com/composer/
- https://www.youtube.com/@gloriaxia5055
- https://soundcloud.com/gloriaxxy
- https://www.instagram.com/gloriaa_xia/
References/Links:
- Inside Out (2015), dir. Pete Docter and Ronnie del Carmen
- Mikhail Karikis, Songs for the Storm to Come (2024)
