“I’ve tried less to explicitly subvert what I was doing before, and more to just create something and see it as what it is. That’s another reason why I love process-based composition so much: it really detaches itself from expectation.”
Molly Frances Arnuk
Molly Frances Arnuk is a composer from New York, currently based in London. She describes her music as minimal and often process-based. As the 2025 winner of the OpusHER Award, Molly was commissioned by EMPOWER Women Changing Music with performances at King’s Place, the Royal Albert Hall’s Elgar Room, the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, and the Royal Irish Academy of Music, and a publication by Tetractys. Molly’s music has also been performed at St. Mary Le Strand, Kew Gardens’ Sound of Blossom Festival, and in collaboration with the English National Ballet School’s Young Choreographer’s Showcase at The Wallace Collection, with upcoming projects and commissions for the London Contemporary Dance School, Figura Singers, Emily Wishart, and Amber Correa. Molly is currently studying at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama with Laurence Crane and Sylvia Lim, after graduating from the Royal College of Music in 2025, where she studied with Haris Kittos and Catherine Kontz.
In collaboration with EMPOWER Women Changing Music, we spoke with Molly following the conclusion of her 2025 OpusHER Award, discussing braiding patterns, indeterminacy, meditation, moments of subversion, influence from visual art, and more…
header photo: Sisi Burn
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Zyggy/PRXLUDES: Hey Molly! Thanks so much for chatting today. We’re talking following the end of your time as EMPOWER’s 2025 OpusHER awardee; can you tell me a bit about your time collaborating with EMPOWER, and the piece you wrote for them, ‘Abstraction’?
Molly Frances Arnuk: I knew I wanted to do something that was celebratory — not necessarily in sound, but in concept. I was thinking about the women that led me into music, and paying tribute to them. My grandmother is a visual artist, and as a kid I would go a lot of museums; I was lucky to live around New York, so we would go to the Met, the Whitney, MoMA.
I remember in the Whitney — I don’t know if it’s a permanent exhibition — but there’s this wall of Georgia O’Keeffe paintings. My mum and grandma were both big Georgia O’Keeffe fans; and I remember, especially when I was small, I was so drawn to large-scale stuff. The inescapability of it… That feeling of being looked down on by all these colours. That’s what I wanted to convey in the piece. I structured [the piece] off of the same proportions as one of Georgia O’Keeffe’s abstractions, which goes into this big, slightly warped spiral — kind of like, off-kilter Fibonacci. -laughs-
This piece was such a journey to write. That’s one of the reasons I was so grateful for EMPOWER; I really felt like I had so much space and time to try things out, and change them. Originally, I wanted to [use] alternative notation — because colour was so important to the piece, I wanted to convey different musical parameters with colour.
What was your process of translating the Georgia O’Keeffe abstractions into a musical form?
It was a really fun process of engraving, at first. I used oil pastels, and I scanned and overlayed it with the score. I used to do a lot of visual art as a kid, and I feel like I very much left that in the past; it was a nice feeling to reconnect. This idea of colours seeping together, creating these watercolour droplets with different colours meshing, was really evocative of what I wanted the piece to be about.
Originally, when the colours got more intense, you would move in and out of the lid of the piano. This was not a realistic idea — the piece was quite difficult, they had stopwatches, they had big scores that they couldn’t see when they were in a piano — so after a lot of workshopping, the colour came to represent the structure and shape of the piece. Where things would get more intense, and softer. It’s not what I meant it to do, but I think it worked really well. I did make another version without colour because I [thought] the colour wasn’t saying enough to justify its presence in the score; but Hannah Seymour, Sinéad Walsh, and Catriona Mackenzie all wanted to play the version that had colour still! I learned a lot doing that.
Was this more gradual collaborative process with EMPOWER more of a new approach for you, or was it a manner in which you’ve tended to work in the past?
It was quite new! I’m whatever the opposite of a procrastinator is. I get really anxious about a deadline right away, and just compose it really fast. -laughs- But since I’ve started doing more process-based music, I feel like I spend months coming up with a system to make the piece, and then a day actually writing it. Sometimes it feels really fast — the material appears on the page quickly — but it had been in the works for a while.
You mention you’ve recently started having a more process-based approach. Tell me about this shift in your practice; did this happen organically for you?
The one process I think I use for every piece — even if it’s not explicitly process-based — is a braid. I order material in a line to start: it can be pitches, note durations/rhythms, even whole sections of music. Then I move whatever is on the edges into the middle. So first it would be stated forward, and as it folds into itself, it kind of warps and jumbles, and then spits itself out backwards. I first used that for a piece years ago, on a course in Italy — Taverna Maderna — when we were in the woods, and everyone was writing. I remember I didn’t have any manuscript paper, so I was just listing and reordering rows of pitches. Looking back at pictures, I had my hair in a braid that day — which must have been what led me to start doing this — but the moment wasn’t particularly memorable.
I revisited my braids for a piece that I did for [a] choreographer friend, Abigail Fletcher — that was for the English National Ballet School’s Young Choreographer’s Showcase — and then I completely left that in the past and didn’t touch it again for years, until I was writing a piece for brass band this past year…
I get that. So creating this braiding process was a way of spontaneously writing for you, which you then picked back up when you needed to create material quickly…
The deadline was looming, and I had nothing at all. I had been weirdly stuck. I was basically trying anything to generate material. I could not tell you how I came up with this, but I wrote chords vertically on what I think of as a Battleship board… -laughs- So you have two axes with letters and numbers: each note of the chord would have a coordinate — A1, or B5 for instance. I used a five-strand braid for that piece (A1, B1, C1, D1, E1). But [then] when the A came into the middle, it would go from A1 to A2; so that note was taken from the second chord column. And then I would do it backwards — E1 came into the middle and became E2. The first chord is stated forward, and then it created a bunch of jumbly mixes between chord 1 and chord 2, and then chord 2. I then grouped the instruments into five groups of five, each group beginning with a different voicing, so the change would be spread across the ensemble. It created all this material when I initially just had a couple chords.
At the time, it did feel like a lazy cop-out of writing the piece… -laughs- But what really struck me was [how] I found the process of doing it. I had not enjoyed writing music that much since I was probably 16. It was so peaceful; I would get into this cycle, and I would sit there for hours doing it. I found it very meditative, I feel like it definitely helped me personally as well. And so I kept doing pieces like that.
I feel like there’s a kind of unfurling in that braiding process… Tell me a bit about how you developed this kind of process in more recent pieces?
I kept complicating it; different size braids, braids layered over each other. I recently began experimenting with other patterns as well. I’m doing a piece for Amber Correa of the Jasmine Quartet that uses knitting patterns. It’s essentially a binary where you knit and purl, and whenever there’s an affected note, something changes — it either gets longer, shorter, goes up, goes down, or turns into a rest – ordered with a braid. I started with 8 crotchets on D, and it kind of twists itself into a melody. I kept redoing what intervals things would go up or down by, and how often they would change; and I would use other knitting patterns superimposed to determine when there are timbral changes. [I] basically sat, working out these processes, for months — and then wrote the piece down in a day.
With that piece, I became interested in the similarity of the concept and the sound. You can’t hear that ‘How to Choose a Park Bench’ is a braid, but I think you can hear that the piece for Amber is a knitting pattern. I was thinking about the qualities of knitting; how [when] you start, you have nothing, and you’re doing this repetitive motion that goes on and on and on… and something emerges from that. You used the word unfurling — I love that word, that’s my favourite word to describe my music.
When you’re setting out these braids, or grid patterns, is that an intuitive process for you — or do you think more formalistically about these systems and how you use them?
The idea usually is intuitive. I don’t search for things to base patterns off of. I see something, and I think “that would be a good piece”; in the case of Amber, a scarf. But the process of doing it, I would not call intuitive. I know what I want from a piece — I knew the piece for Amber should unfurl itself, start really flat and grow into something warm and pretty-sounding — but I didn’t know how I’d get there. I’ve started to think of it kind of like coding: you try something, it doesn’t work, you try it again a bit differently. You keep changing the parameters to get the outcome you want, instead of just writing the outcome intuitively.
Like the trial and error becomes part of the piece. Or, you mess up one line of code and the whole thing falls apart… -laughs-
Sometimes it does! I have these affected notes, and they’ll either get longer or shorter — but it didn’t occur to me that things could get too short. -laughs- Like, if something keeps getting shorter, it wouldn’t exist anymore! I do have to put in failsafes for things like that: in this case, once a note becomes shorter than a semiquaver, it will be written as a grace note and won’t get any shorter. The important thing for me is if I do have a workaround, it has to be applied consistently. I’ll change the process a lot, but I won’t change the outcome independent of the process.
I do struggle with that, though; sometimes the piece might need something, and I’m resistant to put it in because it’s not in line with the process. Continuing to use Amber’s piece as the example: I did feel the tempo sags a bit in the middle, and raising the tempo in the middle could push it forwards. But I was really resistant to do that, because I wanted the proportions to be really clear, so you could hear which notes are getting longer and shorter; I mean, what is longer and shorter if the durations are all getting longer or shorter at the same time? So maybe sometimes, I’m a bit more resistant to working intuitively than I should be.
I get that — training yourself to be okay with breaking the rules of the system.
Yeah. I definitely adhere more [to the system] in conceptual pieces — if it’s based on a knitting pattern, and it sounds like a scarf — versus if I just use the braiding pattern to order material arbitrarily, I can be flexible. Although I do like when I don’t know what’s gonna happen when I’m working with these processes, and whatever notes come out I accept, if only temporarily.
Is that kind of intederminacy something you’ve thought about giving to other performers, as well? Like, starting a process and allowing them the agency to follow through…
I haven’t extended that to performer choice yet — which could be an interesting route to go down. I do consider similarity of the performers’ experiences to mine — making a piece that feels like a meditation, or the small repetitive motions of knitting — and more openness could take that a step further. So far, I’ve seen it it more as indeterminate on my end than for the performers, who get a piece that’s quite prescriptive, but that may change.
What does that do for you, psychologically, as a composer? Letting go of the decision of “placing notes”, so to speak…
It makes the process a lot more fun. When I was writing music intuitively, I would get so nervous about the end result — I would stay for too long working on one bar, to try to make it perfect. Using these processes feels more like discovering material, and what I find doesn’t have to sound “good” — it’ll certainly sound, and it’ll be interesting. I approach it more experientially. I think it’s quite fun when my music sounds really bad… -laughs-
I guess there’s also something about transparency there, right? Like you mentioned earlier, the juxtapositions between the process itself and how we perceive the sounds it creates.
There is. Sylvia Lim recommended me the visual artist, Ruth Asawa; she was a Japanese-American artist who made these abstract wire sculptures, really organic shapes but with very clear structures. She has these quotations about form being transparent, and revealing itself; you have outer forms, you have inner forms, and you can see all of them.1 I really resonate with that; how structure and content are dependent on each other.
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Speaking of Sylvia Lim — you’re currently studying with her as part of your Masters at Guildhall, which you started this year. How have you found working with her, and what are you both exploring together?
Yes — and Laurence Crane. I really liked that I went [in] and both of them were like “let’s set goals for the year”. It was clarifying; I talked with Laurence a lot about taking the conceptual side further. Sylvia’s given me really helpful reading and listening recommendations to contextualise what I’m doing.
One of the big topics — a goal of mine for this year — is to write more music that doesn’t sound “pretty”. I think I get quite caught up when do[ing] a piece intuitively: it has to sound delicate and slow [with] gradual change. To an extent, I do like that. Part of the idea for ‘How to Choose a Park Bench’ was that the audience doesn’t perceive much change happening; but if you look at the beginning, and you look at the end, the audience [would be] like “well, that was different than the beginning, on reflection”. So I like change being imperceptible, and I like the soft, pretty sounds… But when I listen to other peoples’ music, I hold it to a completely different standard — I love loud, sudden changes, and density. Things I don’t have in my music right now. So I’ve been trying to identify what it is I like and don’t like, and what it is that’s holding me back, so that I can start incorporating more of these sounds into my music.
You’re currently working on a project with London Contemporary Dance School — are you applying this kind of approach to this upcoming collaboration?
I definitely think there’s more sudden, loud noises than in any piece I’ve written before. -laughs- [For] the concept of the piece, the choreographer — Esther Bedeau — and I wanted to do a piece about the experience of playing a game; a board game, or a card game. It’s quite ceremonial, in a way — it’s something people have always done. These feelings of nostalgia, and warmth, while also being somehow ceremonial, even ritualistic. That’s kind of the moodboard for the piece.
I was thinking about when you’re in a pub or someone’s home playing a board game, how there’s the big sounds — people chattering, music maybe — then there’s the small sounds, like dice clicking on a table, cards swiping against each other. I’m interested in isolating the big and small sounds; having huge tam-tam smashes which distort in the overhead speakers, and small sounds, especially the amplification of the live recorder, sent to speakers across the stage. Very localised sounds which [will] appear in the corner of the stage, and then be joined by another. It feels like these tiny, intimate moments. And then there’s a soloist — Larli Beth Davies on tenor recorder! The live part is not start[ing] until a few minutes into the piece; it responds to the tam-tam track, mimics it, and eventually desynchronises itself.
What made you decide on this instrumentation — and was there a particular approach you were employing, process-wise?
I’m so obsessed with tam-tams, the way they permeate everything. I’ve made a reputation for myself at Guildhall as the tam-tam girl, because every time we have a project, I go up to Paul [Newland] and I’m like “so could I feasibly get a tam-tam onto that stage?” -laughs- As for the recorder, I first considered it because Larli is brilliant, but it suits the idea quite well. We’ve looked at ancient games from Mesopotamia alongside new, silly ones like Twister. There’s a similar kind of timelessness to a recorder.
We’re using binary lot throws to determine the rhythm in the live recorder part — flipping three coins. Each outcome corresponds with how the rhythm will mutate: getting longer, shorter (not too short), turning into a rest, or repeating. I wanted the line to get more still and sustained, so I chose an uneven system. Although there are only 4 different outcomes, there are 8 ordered combinations of heads and tails (HHH, HHT, HTH, THH, TTH, THT, HTT, and TTT). When there is two heads and one tails, or two tails and one heads — the more common outcomes — the note gets longer, or turns into a rest. For the less common outcomes of HHH and TTT, notes get shorter or fold into repetitions.
There is me, and what I always do, in that piece. But then there’s a lot of big, dramatic moments — a strike of the tam-tam, the recorder emerging suddenly. It’s not gonna be pretty, I don’t think. -laughs- A little violent and ritualistic maybe. Esther has talked about representing the idea of winning versus losing; growing together and then suddenly falling.
Have you and Esther discussed how the dance will fit into the music?
Yes! For the first few minutes, it’s very simple — the tam-tam rolling up to a big hit, or a sudden strike. We’ve categorised different types of sound: the buildup of the tam-tam, the reverberence of it, and the small sounds of the live recorder. We’ve talked about associating and dissociating, or desynchronising, the sounds and movement. She [Esther] has a limited set of movements — she’s very similar to me, in a lot of ways… -laughs- The dancers’ movements will be triggered by corresponding sounds; and then the sounds will correspond with different movements, eventually they’ll stop corresponding. I think that idea of something mutating, visually, is really impactful. The structure of what they’re doing has a visibility, like the Asawa sculptures; you can see the movement is triggered by the sound. I’m really drawn to that transparency.
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Tell me a bit about how you’ve developed collaborative relationships with performers — how much of the material and transparency of process do you tend to share with performers?
In the past, the line has been quite clear to me: I go through my process, and I give the music to the performers and they play it. I have made efforts — more last year — to give the same experience to the performers that I’ve had; although obviously, it won’t be to the same extent.
For ‘How to Choose a Park Bench’, for example, I wanted it to be very meditative — my experience working out the process made me feel very present, but also absent. I tried to structure it in a way that reflects other kinds of meditation. The one I was thinking about most was going on a really long walk: how at first, you go outside, and you need to decide where you’re going — you’re aware that you’re walking. But after maybe 30 minutes, you’re on autopilot — there’s no more daydreaming, you’re not cueing the next song anymore. Then there’s the point where you break out of your trance, and you realise you have to get home.
That was my structural concept for ‘How to Choose a Park Bench’, it starts out with very slow, rhythmically uneven tones with deep breaths between. Gradually, the notes become even, and then faster, and the breaths between get shorter until they’re barely perceptible. It ends quite abruptly. This was all done with the intention of giving the performers a similar experience, and a similar feeling, that I had and appreciated; but now I think I am more interested in involving performers directly in the process, instead of just trying to “mimic” my process in their performance. I think Guildhall is very conducive for that, because they give you so much workshop time. In the past, I’ve written a piece, and it’s been given to the performers — “here’s your deadline” — and then the performers will learn it. But blurring those lines has been really helpful.
I’m working on songs for organ and voice, for soprano Emily Wishart — she’s a Scottish soprano and she’s really passionate about creating more repertoire for Gaelic and Scots texts. We’re looking at this idea of labour as something you can be present for, instead of being mechanized or forced. I’m using patterns traced from industrial braiding machines used to make fishing line. She suggested some texts, Gaelic waulking and labour songs — a lot of them to do with weaving, a lot of them to do with fishing (which is where the fishing line came in). So much of this was Emily’s idea. It was the most back-and-forth that I’ve had with a project in a while; giving her the freedom to select the text, and surrendering myself to working with a text that I can’t understand. It’s somehow vulnerable.
Another close collaboration you’ve recently embarked on has been with the Jasmine Quartet, who have performed your piece ‘Continuing’ a few times now…
Yes! The first movement is inspired by a Helen Frankenthaler painting — one of her “soak stain” paintings, The Bay. I think it’s my favourite painting of all time, hands down. She would thin paint with turpentine, pour it onto a canvas, and hold it and tilt it. I was really interested in this idea of restraint; holding the bow in a way that Frankenthaler would hold the canvas, with this kind of delicacy — light, not letting the paint go too far in either direction. Another thing I love about Frankenthaler and her “soak stain” paintings is that she would title them after they were done; she would move this paint around, and then say “hey, that kind of looks like a bay!” I love that one in particular, because the bay she refers to is the Long Island Sound, and I grew up spending a lot of time there.
The second movement is based off an Amy Lowell poem — ‘Appuldurcombe Park’. I love how Amy Lowell treats time and space; you can have two paragraphs of the same length, and one feels like it takes an hour to read, and one flies by in a second. I think her grip on perspective is beautiful. What stood out to me was her recurring description of the many beech leaves in the poem: first on trees, then crumbling in the narrator’s hands, then slowly falling. I wanted to have these little leaves crumbling, in a big “forest” of sound. I have these very long, drawn out tones, often harmonics, with tremolo and constant subtle timbral changes.
You’ve also written a very juxtaposing third movement for the piece, as well…
I wrote the second movement in June 2023, and then I wrote the first movement in July 2023. Those were very much written with the same mindset, same musical language, same context. I was doing the Irish Composition Summer School, and I needed to write a short string quartet — I wrote [the first movement], and it almost unintentionally sounded like the sibling of the piece I wrote in June [ed. which became the second movement].
I popped those together, and sent them to my wonderful friends [in] the Jasmine Quartet. I wanted to write a third movement for them, so they had something to premiere — the first movement had been recorded, and the second movement had been played a few times at that point. But I didn’t get to the third until the next Spring — I was in a really different place musically, personally — and was reacting to the reception of the second movement. It’s hard to accept that you’ve made something beautiful, you know? I didn’t mean for it to sound so nice, and I think it frustrated me that it was everyone’s favourite piece of mine, and quickly became my most performed. I think it’s almost easier for me to write something terrible than have to live with it as an incomplete representation of me.
So the third movement — which is my favourite, but everyone else’s least favourite… -laughs- I wanted it to reflect the first movement, so they would frame the long second movement together. I was thinking of the recording practice of folk and pop music in the 1960s and 1970s; how on the B-side of an album, you’ll sometimes have the same song recorded differently. The song I was thinking about was ‘Kathy’s Song’, by Paul Simon — there’s like three versions. When you listen to them, you can’t really put your finger on what’s changed, but it feels different. That really resonated with me.
I wanted to have a B-side version of ‘The Bay’, the first movement. I may have taken this a little bit far… -laughs- I augmented each measure quite extremely — so it really zooms in — and then I crunched it hard. So much overpressure and not enough change elsewhere to take the attention off it. One thing I love to do is overpressure on an artificial harmonic, until the fully fingered note emerges; it just makes these horrible sounds, and they delight me. Especially at the premiere, when after the second movement, people started clapping, and then they had to sit through the third movement… -laughs-
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I guess it’s like an act of subversion. How does creating those moments feel for you — is it like an act of reclamation, maybe?
It feels powerful to take responsibility for something that people don’t necessarily like. I was actually quite nervous anticipating the performance of the piece; I [had] really no idea what was gonna happen. And then I went to the concert, and everyone was being so nice — it was a church lunchtime recital — they were so kind about the first and second movement… -laughs- And then the third movement comes up, and right after that I had to go up and bow! I had never felt like that in my life — it was really affirming, somehow.
I guess there’s something there about pushing against audience expectations…
Something that’s not contingent on being pretty. It’s space to take up.
I think I rode a lot on the validation of people liking my music before last year. But it made me realise that I’m not doing this for the audience to tell me my music is pretty; I’m doing it because I like doing it. It freed me up to enjoy the process of writing a piece more, and it was quite comforting to realise that I could do that — I didn’t have to just write music that would be elegant and delicate and well-received. I could take up space.
And you have the right to take up that space, regardless of the way people perceive you.
Exactly. It really separated my musical practice from its validation by others. I find it quite nice to hear a piece for the first time, and it sounds “weird” or “wrong”. A lot of the time, I will go back and change the process. But when I listen to the outcome and it sounds a little strange, I don’t think “ew, throw it out”, I think “this is interesting” — I still listen to each note. Maybe I listen more, because I’m not sinking into it like I would something very smooth.
I don’t want to subvert just to subvert. I don’t want to do it because everyone expects me to write pretty music, and I don’t want to do what they want — because I do love pretty music and find it really fulfilling to write sometimes. I’m trying not to do anything because I feel like I should, because then it would be the same problem as doing only the pretty music; I’ve tried less to explicitly subvert what I was doing before, and more to just create something and see it as what it is. That’s another reason why I love process-based composition so much: it really detaches itself from expectation. Even if it sounds weird, or bad, it’s still representative of something.
To bring it back to your time with EMPOWER — do you feel like your involvement with them gave you that confidence to detach yourself from those pressures?
I feel like the pressure to write something either very pretty or very subversive is especially present as a female composer. Some opportunities specific to women can make you feel representative of all women, which is a terrifying place to be put — especially being young and still in education. There’s so much pressure to write something that everyone likes, or something that makes a grand statement, and I’ve found that that pressure can ruin a piece. What I really loved about EMPOWER was that they made it clear that I was chosen for me. My piece wasn’t groundbreaking and that was fine, it was still celebrated. They encouraged me to do what I wanted — including taking risks with the notation — and supported me as I did.
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Learn more about Molly Frances Arnuk and her practice:
- https://www.mollyfrancesarnuk.com/
- http://www.youtube.com/@mollyfrancesarnuk
- https://soundcloud.com/mollyfrancesarnuk
- https://www.instagram.com/mollyfrancesarnuk/?hl=en
Learn more about EMPOWER Women Changing Music and their OpusHER Award:
References:
- Helen Frankenthaler – The Bay (1963)
- Amy Lowell – ‘Appuldurcombe Park’ (1918)
Footnotes:
- “forms envelop inner forms, yet all forms are visible”; “the relationship between outside and inside was interdependent, integral” (Ruth Asawa) ↩︎
