“I think that all art is some form of escapism, but you can never go totally away from reality. You will always bring a little bit of the world with you — and you might as well bring a bit of the world that you are proud to fight for.”
Kay Rowan
Kay Rowan (she/her), sometimes known as ghostgirl, is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, and writer currently based in London. Kay’s music is often sparse, minimalist and emotive, drawing on influences ranging from contemporary classical to traditional folk. Kay has collaborated with performers, ensembles, and arts groups including Psappha, Echo Vocal Ensemble, and Rose Collective; she has also composed music for both stage and screen — most recently working on short film and dance piece wharf warble with Ula Moroz, Beatriz Santos, and Pat Dynowska. As ghostgirl, Kay has released a number of singles and a full length EP, I’m going out, and I may be some time, to broad critical acclaim, and has performed across the UK, including at Cambridge Folk Festival 2023. Kay graduated from Royal Holloway, University of London in 2018, where she studied composition with Mark Bowden and Aaron Holloway-Nahum; she is currently writing her first full-length novel, currently going by the title Project ACOS.
Patrick Ellis spoke to Kay over Zoom call, discussing field recordings, breaking stylistic shackles, folk clubs, compassionate collaboration, the role of the artist, finding light, and more…
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Patrick/PRXLUDES: Hey Kay, it’s been a while! One of your recent projects was a soundtrack for short film and dance piece, wharf warble, with Ula Moroz, Beatriz Santos, and Pat Dynowska. Could you please tell me about that?
Kay Rowan: It was a short film that some friends of mine were working on as part of a commission for the Dockyards area of London, as a response piece to that very industrial and localised area of the city. It involved field recording — I don’t really do that kind of work usually, but a big core theme of the project was making the music sound like it’s in conversation with [the recordings]. So it was a good few hours of walking around with a metal implement, smacking pylons, walls and the guard rails around the river; creating a percussive landscape for the people that it used to be based on.
The process has been strange. I am used to writing music for dance, or in conversation with another medium, but I didn’t see the dance before I made the work. I made all of the soundtrack before I saw any of the film aspects. It was weird creating music for a dance that hadn’t been choreographed yet. So I tried to make a piece that felt like: if the dockyards area could sing, that would be what it sounded like.
With those resonant sounds captured from the field recordings, did you have that in mind from the beginning of the process? Or were you more exploratory with your methods?
I don’t tend to go into a lot of pieces with a very firm plan of how it is going to end up sounding. I let the things that we’ve found guide what the piece ended up being. I had a small recording set that I took with me; it was all deliberately lo-fi, and captured as organically as possible. I wandered around and ended up filling the whole cartridge with a bunch of different sounds, salvaging the small little moments: the odd bird call, or a particular pitch that we managed to capture from a large pylon rod, that ended up filling some of the cracks in the music. I didn’t want the piece to feel like a “traditionally” composed piece with a bunch of sounds bolted onto it. I wanted the two aspects of it to work in synchronicity with each other.
Was the dance made completely separately from your work?
I can’t tell you if they listened to it whilst they were filming. I did a film soundtrack before and it was a similar process, where I wrote all of the music before the film production started. There were a few little tweaks and a few things that I had to get changed afterwards — but by and large, 90% of it was completed.
One of my subjects that I did at university was pareidolia, which is the idea of the human brain’s capacity to find patterns and images in random stimuli. I like that within music too; the random, accidental moments of resonance. When you’ve written a piece and have put it over a film or a dance, and see how the two of them speak to each other in ways that you didn’t anticipate… That’s fun for me. I enjoy creating scenarios where that can happen.
Comparing the first project that you mentioned to this more recent one — how did your working methods evolve?
I think that I’ve just gotten more confident in the artistic voice that I strive for. It was a thing that I struggled with a lot in the education system — coming to terms with the sort of music that I enjoyed making — and increasingly, as time is passing, I think I worry about that far less. A lot of my earlier pieces were me trying to sound like what I thought a very “distinguished classical composer” of the 21st Century should sound like, and I think that aspect has faded now.
What kind of stylistic shackles were there?
I was a nerdy kid who used to watch all sorts of documentaries. I remember watching the Leonard Bernstein series of lectures that he did on the “crisis of tonality” during the 20th Century — because I was the cool kid who used to watch those sorts of things. I think that gets drilled into you when you are studying classical composition at university; I think that I was always very insecure that I was bringing a kind of tonal, harmony-driven music into my work. A lot of the lauded, very celebrated pieces that we were given were pieces that were noise-art, experimental, atonal compositions — which are amazing, but are definitely not something that naturally comes to me as a musician. So a lot of time, I was super-imposing these fragmented tonalities into music that really didn’t ask for it, because I felt like that was who I needed to be as a composer.
As I said before, I worry about that a lot less now, and now I just write music that calls to whatever the situation is. Having said that, I like the idea of putting on facades, masks or characters. I don’t think you can completely get away from artificiality, but I am striving to be as creatively authentic as possible.
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I definitely hear indie and folk influences in both your compositions and your music as ghostgirl. Talk to me more about your background in folk…
I cultivated this sad, folk, indie musician aesthetic from a very early point; I’ve just changed the presentation of it slightly. I used to really struggle with that — the impostor syndrome of stepping into a more “classical” space, as somebody who grew up playing in brass bands, going to folk music festivals. It has definitely been an aspect of my creative life that I’ve felt quite weird about when I was trying to compose more “classical”, serious, academic music.
But the piece that changed that was a work that I composed for Psappha Ensemble [ed. as part of the Composing for… scheme], who have unfortunately shut down now. That was a piece for solo clarinet — Dov Goldberg — and I brought in a huge amount of folk influences into that piece. And it’s so silly that it was something that I was insecure about — because classical composers have been doing that for centuries — but it was always presented to me as more of a pedagogical tool, or as a way to archive music, rather than as a means to create something new. I think that’s a piece [where] I was throwing away that particular shackle, and just being accepting of my musical identity.
What sort of material did you bring to the workshops for the Psappha programme?
The sketches didn’t quote anything specific. But I was listening to a lot of traditional vocal music, and how folk would experiment with using that material, in the context [of] writing for a solo instrument, rather than as a means to tell a story. There was lots of Irish lilting, where the melodies are really expanded and ornamented.
At the same time as I was making that piece, I was going to a lot of folk nights that they host in London. I love when music feels like it’s growing organically as you are listening to it. The aspects of collaborative music — how one musician would start a particular melody, and then another would join in and take that music in a different direction — that’s not something you can exactly capture in a type of music that is pre-written, rehearsed and developed. I want[ed] to create that same sense of organic growth that I experienced in those folk nights, and those dingy clubs in the middle of some underpass in London; where one person has a fiddle, another musician has a squeaky accordion, and somehow something beautiful really comes from that. Trying to unapologetically take that energy and thrust it into a space where it wouldn’t necessarily be assumed to “belong”. It was quite liberating.
You are essentially more “at home” with that kind of energy…
I am so grateful for that opportunity, but it was very bittersweet as it was the last of that cohort. I wasn’t initially going to apply — I was very concerned about applying for it, as I thought that it was punching up too high in terms of where I was at. But I managed to get in, and work with some genuinely incredible composers who were all so unbelievably talented.
Strangely, the programme had a similar energy to those folk clubs. It was a bunch of people coming together, bringing disparate musical ideas by sharing and collaborating with it, organically growing a piece of music over those three or four sessions; that doesn’t happen very often. Usually you would write a piece of music (perhaps through a commission) and then get one rehearsal if you are lucky, followed by one performance — afterward, the music disappears into history. So having that kind of experience was a nice union of vibes that I was hoping for.
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Would you say that it was a turning point in some ways where you became more comfortable and confident in your own artistic voice?
Definitely. I don’t think that I would have gotten to the point where I am now as a creator, had it not been for experiences like that — and also vouches of confidence that I had when working on other projects. Composition is such a solitary activity; you spend a lot of time in your own internal world, writing music, orchestrating material, arranging, mixing, mastering, marketing… It’s all such a solo pursuit. So what I’ve tried to do is seek out projects that are super collaborative, because it makes the music feel like it’s connected to a sense of community — and it takes some of the pressure off of myself being the troubled, mysterious, artist who has to be coming up with masterpieces in their bedroom alone. Being collaborative makes the process feel like the work is in conversation with other people other than myself.
On the subject of collaboration, you worked with Echo Vocal Ensemble a few years ago, which stemmed from a piece for solo voice and fixed media. Could you tell me about the original piece and then how it was adapted?
I think it was during the end of covid — like the tail end of the lockdowns — and I had found this text as part of this letter that I really loved the phrases of. I happened to come across this really talented opera singer, Mimi Doulton, who was looking for material to experiment with. At the time, I was combining electronics with a more natural, organic instrument, that was not something that I had done until that point.
When it came [to] arranging the material for multiple voices, I couldn’t have asked for a better group than Echo Vocal Ensemble. They understood that aspect of organic growth so well. It’s essentially a melody line and a drone, but they really understood the idea of passing those notes around the space, ornamenting it, letting it shift key and change intonation slightly. Now it is strange to have these two separate versions of a piece; one that is very controlled, frozen in a moment, and artificial, then another version that feels much more like a living organism. Both versions are the same piece, but two different sides of the same coin.
It’s as though you have made a “studio” version and a “live” version…
Absolutely. That’s something that I bring from the perspective of a songwriter, because that is something that you really notice. The version that I play in front of a crowd of fifty people is very different to the version that I make hunched over whilst recording into the microphone in my bedroom. They are both good and I am proud of them, but they are shining the same object under a different light, and seeing what different shadows it casts.
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Let’s talk a bit about your practice as a songwriter. When you perform your songs live, do you keep the arrangement the same as the recordings?
No matter what I do, I’ll always be a storyteller at heart. So the way a song is structured within the flow of say an evening or in an album, will be based around me telling a story; I will blur two songs together, or I will just come up with new verse whilst I am onstage.
I haven’t performed live as a songwriter in a while, but what I will do is get the audience to act as a choir for a particular passage of a song. I might split the audience up into two, having one side do one part of the harmony and the other half doing another. Creating some sense of an orchestra, but with just myself onstage — that feeling of having those natural evolutions of the songs — is so freeing. I think that it would be so easy to get anxious on stage and just lock down a whole piece of music as it sounds on the recording, and drag some of the life out of it a little bit.
A studio recording can be seen as a document of that time, the song or the piece can always be ever evolving.
That is something that I had to learn. I released two albums when I was 20 that no one is ever going to hear; I basically stripped those songs from the web. Perhaps there’s some random bot site in the middle of the web that still has a record of those songs, but they all got purged from the internet. Looking back on it, I really regret doing that. I think it was because I felt really insecure about them being a time capsule of a particular moment, and I really didn’t want reminders of that — so I just deleted it from the internet. But I think part of the art of being a recording artist, in whatever medium that is, is to accept that whatever work you create is going to age along with you. Some things will continue to have a life beyond that and some won’t — but accepting that something is going to be a record of who you are at a given moment is just part of being an artist.
Do you see older compositions (where you had the academic shackles on) as important markers of your development as an artist?
I remember working on this piece for choir, which was a setting of the seven ages speech by William Shakespeare, where it’s like, “First you’re a child, and then you’re a lover and a soldier” — and then it goes through every stage of your life as if it was a character that you are playing.
Looking back on that work, I am really proud of that piece of music — and would never compose something like that again. That was me really pushing at the boundaries of what I really wanted to be writing in, but very constrained by external expectations with the music that I was going to make. I felt tempted numerous times to just get rid of that piece — make it disappear into history — but I’m not going to do that, because I have already made that mistake. I am proud that I have still managed to create a piece of music like that. For all of the piece’s flaws and the things that I would maybe change now, it exists! And I am proud of it for existing in the capacity that it does. I wouldn’t have been able to tell you that four or five years ago.
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As a singer-songwriter, you operate under the alias ghostgirl. Where did that name come from and what is the meaning behind the name?
Shockingly, I’m trans… -laughs- On a serious note, part of it was a recognition that there was an aspect of my identity that I was actively keeping hidden for an incredibly long period of time. But just because you are keeping something hidden, [it] doesn’t make it disappear. So there was always an aspect of who I am as a person that was existing in this liminal space, where it was very much apparent that I wasn’t addressing it. I was treating it as if it didn’t exist.
The name ghostgirl is a testament to all of the songs that I write and all the music that I make. Even if the music I make isn’t under the name ghostgirl, it communicates the same thing — an apology, or a recognition of the time where I could have been allowed to grow, but was actively repressed. I can’t make up for that time — I can’t go back and I can’t undo decisions that were made — but I can ensure that the music that represents those moments lives on and endures longer than it has.
It was a reference to being in the closet and actively hiding, unfortunately, that just doesn’t work. I don’t think that works in any aspect of your life, whatever aspect that you are trying to hide. If there is a part of you that you are actively in denial of, you’re not really existing; you are just floating through life as a concept… It’s the difference between surviving and living, right? And I was definitely surviving and maybe not living. Maybe that connects back to the whole idea of authenticity in everything that I create.
So the name represents who you are as a person, but also shows you, 100%.
It’s why I don’t feel bad about being like “hey, for this year, I’m writing a book” — that’s a very authentically creative thing that I have decided to commit to working on. I am not worried [about] a specific creative role; I see myself as somebody who composes music, rather than being a “composer”. Similarly, I see myself as someone who writes a book rather than being an author; or somebody who makes songs rather than being a singer-songwriter. I’m not defined by the single function of what I’m being perceived at any given point. I’m just making art that speaks to me at that moment, and that allows me the freedom to operate within any creative sphere that I feel drawn to.
You said that you see yourself as someone who composes, rather than a composer — what restrictions do you feel this lifts from you?
It comes with a bunch of expectations that I’m not hugely drawn to, mostly self-inflicted. I think I would be very worried every minute when I am not composing that I would be artistically failing in some way. I know that there is that whole saying that the rests are as important as the notes, right? And I think that would be quite hard to maintain if my only creative identity was as a “composer” or as a “writer” — because every break that I take from it would feel as though there was a weight hanging of expectation, of what is coming next. Whereas now, I am metaphorically “going back to the studio” and recording a bunch of classical composition works that I have made… I feel really excited by it, and at least I can approach this project with passion rather than with expectation.
Could you tell me about these compositions — what are they like?
It’s early days, but it started with a bunch of piano music that I was writing. I think a lot of the time when I compose music, it tends [to] hang onto some external motive; it’s like Berlioz, where I need to have some kind of story or some kind of character to hang the music off of. With this, I’m really trying to challenge myself to compose music that is self sufficient, without that external context.
So at the moment, we are four pieces into this project. If anything, it’s really embracing that idea of being a time capsule of a given moment. I’ve found it very hard to make music recently for a bunch of different reasons — some very boring, career-related things — but others much more existential, larger emotional weights and burdens that have been playing on my mind. A bunch of the pieces just feel like they are in conversation with a certain moment in time. Each of the works are very piano-driven; slow, meditative pieces that just capture a feeling rather than a specific story — and I’m genuinely excited about this.
I love being a singer-songwriter, and I love making music where the story and the characters and the lyrics are the driving force — but I always push back against the idea that music is a universal language. I don’t necessarily think it is. It’s more sort of a communal experience that’s shared by different interpretations. And this music really allows for that; it allows for music where I am not telling the audience how to listen or feel. I am giving them the tapestry, and then they are allowed to do their own work to piece it together.
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You mentioned that the pieces have been written from a place of passion rather than obligation. Do you think that the material is reflective of that?
There’s a songwriter that I really love named Keaton Henson… People assume that he is depressed all of the time, and he’s really not — it just happens to be how his music ends up sounding. I think that I have a slightly similar curse, in that a lot of this music isn’t sad. If anything, it’s quite celebratory of the fact that I have managed to make it out of a particular moment unscathed or managed to creatively muster a project like this. I think I have a habit for making music that sounds quite tragic and weighty, but that’s really not what my intention is here. There’s the idea that a sad song is happy, because you managed to live long enough to be able to sing — it and I always feel that’s a sort of guiding principle with any of the music that I’ve made. If I have managed to create it and you are listening to it, then it is a testament to a moment of survival or triumph, even if it is quite tragic. So a lot of this music might sound sad, but it [is] contextually not.
You have mentioned to me before that you wanted to discuss how it is to be an artist navigating through late-stage capitalism/this age that we are in…
I think why I went musically silent for at least three or four months is because I was really struggling to see what role my creativity and work played in the broader scheme of what is happening. A lot of the time, we can create pieces that are inherently revolutionary; but our revolution stops at the boundaries of the art that we have created. So we’ll create a piece that really explores a particular sentiment or a particular feeling, but we don’t then carry that out and put into practice beyond the work that we’ve created.
Something I’m a champion of is doing what you preach. If I’ve created a piece of music that is responding to a particular tragedy, or is responding to a particular crisis, that you then do something with that sentiment that you’ve cultivated creatively. Art is such an inherently important part of any form of revolution — it’s an important part of any social activism, because it’s what brings people together. But then when you’ve gathered everybody together, do something with that momentum that you’ve cultivated. That was something that I really struggled with for a while, as I didn’t know what to do with those embers that I was lighting; but I’ve definitely gotten to a place where I feel very comfortable being unapologetically an artist and a creative, as well as a social activist and a political person in a broader space. I see those two things working really symbiotically, rather than as being two completely distinct aspects of who I am.
It’s a natural side effect of being somebody who is inherently politicised. Even if I don’t engage with it, I’m still a very public-facing, publicly-engaged trans person, in a world that is very hostile. If I don’t engage with that as an artist, then I’m doing myself and my community a disservice. But it was a struggle to know how to reconcile those two forces together.
Would you say that your art has come from your activism?
For all of the things that I do, I carry an intense amount of privilege with me. I have a small platform that’s not huge, but I carry some audience — I can use it [my platform] to make statements about things. I don’t know if the art is necessarily coming directly from political activism, because that would be reductionist to the art in and of itself — it is definitely not supposed to be a political manifesto. But I think it is impossible for the art not to be in conversation with the things that are happening right now. Even if you try your absolute hardest for your art to be as apolitical as possible, that in itself is such a political statement — to say “I am creating art that is completely disengaged from this” while operating around it. My work is always going to be in some context, and created within a landscape. I can either choose to accept that, or live in denial of that — and it’s healthier to accept that rather than to reject it.
Embracing the scenario with two arms as best as we can…
What’s so tragic is that there’s such good music out there that I encountered so late, because there were so many political and external obstacles to me engaging with that music. So many different cultures and perspectives on how to create music, but because we approach it from a different angle — in this Westernised, colonialist mindset — there is something other than what we are used to rather it’s something that exists within its own right. I think that’s such a shame. If I can do anything within my capacity as a creative to readdress that balance, or to shout out other musicians and other creatives who are bringing really interesting things to the space, then I should do that, right?
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You described yourself as an intersectional artist, do you see yourself as having similar responsibilities?
I first got told this from a creative first mindset… But that idea of telling people “I’m working on an album right now” feels really good to say, right? “Oh, I’m working on this album and it’s going to be like this, filled with these kinds of themes and messages” — or “I’m working on a novel right now and it’s going to be so good and I’m so excited to tell you”. It gives you the same, if not greater, satisfaction than actually creating the thing sometimes.
It’s very easy to make a statement about a creative project, and quite another thing entirely to bring that creative project to reality. Sometimes social activism or political engagement works in a very similar way. It’s very easy to say “I stand against genocide” or “I really advocate for this”, and for that to be where that ends. Both of those things need to then be taken beyond just the statement and brought to some form of fulfilment. If I’m going to do that creatively, I’m going to do that politically and vice versa.
Maybe it’s because I grew up listening to a lot of Billy Bragg and Bruce Springsteen… -laughs- But a lot of these artists who are very unapologetically creatives, are also people who are political — and that was still true in the world of classical music. So many pieces of music were made in direct conversation with things that were happening around it. I always think of Symphony of Sorrowful Songs by Górecki, where he orchestrated the words that were carved on a cell in a concentration camp… Work has always been a product of its concept, context and its landscape, and we are just denying ourselves an aspect of our art if we ignore that.
As you were saying earlier, the statements in the art and then the political actions taken infiltrate and influence each other.
It’s important to recognise that — and we ignore it to our detriment. One of my favourite composers is Mahler; and [I love] just how engaged he was as a composer who was stuck between two different worlds, trying to drag those together musically. Artwork is always more visceral and impactful when we know that there is something being communicated to us, even if we’re not sure what it is as we listen.
It’s essentially depth and layering. Would you say that there is some escapism and hope in your own work too?
I don’t see the point of directionless misery. It is not something that I have the luxury to feel. There’s a Tolkien quote — “Despair is only for those who know with absolute certainty that there is no hope” — I’m not in that position. There’s even that Leonard Bernstein moment where he said “if you are feeling suicidal, you don’t compose music” — you don’t have that will and that drive to orchestrate an entire hour’s worth of music. That’s just not how it works.
I have a responsibility, not just as a creative and a musician, but as a person, to put stuff out in the world that has an effect beyond myself. And it would be a detriment to that position if I was just putting out misery and despair. I wouldn’t feel comfortable with that, I wouldn’t feel at peace with that. I think that there is still hope, and there is always something to fight for; there is always a light at the horizon, and we can choose to run towards it, or we can choose to give up. I’m not at that point of giving up yet. Even if my music has been sad or pensive, it’s the same thing as “a sad song is happy because you are able to sing it”. If you are able to engage with a piece of sad music, it is because you’ve made it far enough to listen to it.
Things are really bleak right now. The world is perfectly capable of making things depressing without my help as a creative, going in there and making it worse. If the least I can do is give people a space to feel their emotions in a cultivated, controlled environment; and then the curtains can drop, the tissues can be brought out, and then people can leave again or the book can be closed — great! That allows you that space to feel sad without weighing on your soul. I’m a fantasy nerd; I think that all art is some form of escapism, but you can never go totally away from reality. You will always bring a little bit of the world with you — and you might as well bring a bit of the world that you are proud to fight for. We have the privilege to make art, and what an amazing honour that is to spend our time crafting music and making stories. Monetised or not, that’s such an honour to be a part of, to engage with that — let’s at least do something with it. So even in darkness, there will always be a little bit of light. There will be something worth pursuing.
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Learn more about Kay Rowan and her practice:
- https://ghostgirlkayrowan.co.uk/
- https://ghostgirlmusic.bandcamp.com/
- https://kayrowan.bandcamp.com/
- https://www.youtube.com/@kayrowandoesthings4417
- https://www.instagram.com/ghostgirlkayrowan/
References/Links:
- Leonard Bernstein, Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 5: ‘The Twentieth Century Crisis’ (1973)
- Górecki – Symphony No. 3: Symphony of Sorrowful Songs (1976)
