“Whilst a lot of my ideas come through improvising, the planning of the structure is very important to me. I want to tell a story that makes sense as a listening experience.”
Claire Cope
Claire Cope is an award-winning British composer, pianist and bandleader based in Cheshire, whose work spans contemporary classical, jazz, and improvised music. Concerned primarily with emotional connectivity and story-telling, Claire’s music has a strong sense of narrative and “journeying”, with focused melodic and rhythmic impetus. Claire’s music has been performed in Europe and the United States by groups such as the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, The Carice Singers, the Hallé Orchestra, saxophonists Andy Scott and Rob Buckland, and trumpeter Lucy Humphris; she has performed at the Manchester Jazz Festival, the London Jazz Festival and as part of the BBC Proms Plus Series, broadcast on BBC Radio 3. Claire is bandleader of 11-piece contemporary jazz ensemble Ensemble C, receiving an Arts Council England Developing Your Creative Practice grant for their latest album Every Journey in 2025. Claire studied composition at the Royal Northern College of Music with Gary Carpenter and Emily Howard, with generous support from SJM Concerts Bursary.
During the 2025-26 season, Claire will be working with the Philharmonia as part of the Philharmonia Composers’ Academy; as well as a new commission for Bones Apart Trombone Quartet and Foden’s Brass Band as part of RNCM International Brass Festival on 23rd January 2026. Ahead of her new commissions for RNCM and the Philharmonia, we caught up with Claire to discuss orchestration, working with groove, emotional connections, becoming a mother, and “writing from the heart”…
.
Zyggy/PRXLUDES: Thanks for chatting with me today, Claire! One of your most recent pieces is your orchestral work ‘Agita’, which received its premiere performance with the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra at Princeton University last year — how did that project came out?
This orchestral piece came about from going back to study at the Royal Northern College of Music. I did a one-year PgDip in Composition, which was my first time studying composition — at the age of 35. I was a mature student. A big motivating factor behind going back was [that] I wanted to learn about orchestration; when I started veering more into “classical”, or “contemporary” composition, a few years ago, I realised how passionate I was about orchestral writing.
I was very lucky to study with Gary Carpenter and Emily Howard. I had this opportunity, quite early in the year, to do a workshop with the Hallé Orchestra. I’d started writing some orchestral music on my own the year before; and that’s how this piece developed. Because it was only a four-minute opportunity, I looked at it like: how would I approach writing an in-your-face concert opener, if ever that was an opportunity?
I’d describe it [‘Agita’] as an intense orchestral dance. I’m quite interested in grooves that are quite uneven, and a bit odd. That’s how that piece started: it plays between compound and simple a lot, but it’s built on not a great deal of material, and I wanted to see how I could keep the excitement and energy for this short space of time. Through writing it, I was trying to develop my skills as an orchestrator; it was my first term at RNCM, I was listening to so much more new music, and my ears were opening up. I discovered Kurtàg’s ‘Stele’… I got obsessed with this piece, the way it builds, the intensity of it. That shaped it in the end.
Tell me a bit about the experience of bringing it over to the States with the NJSO…
I got this opportunity to take it to Princeton in the summer, working with Steven Mackey. That was a really amazing experience. Not least because we had four rehearsals with the orchestra — it was unbelievable. It was not just “do a workshop and have a performance”, they really gave you a lot of time. We had some feedback sessions from the orchestral musicians, as well; again, you don’t often get to talk to the musicians within the orchestra. The conductor was fantastic; it was Christopher Rountree, who runs Wild Up in LA.
Working with Steven was amazing. He was such an interesting person: his music is really inspiring, but also his route into composition resonates with me quite a lot — he came from being a rock guitarist, he didn’t even read music until he was 19 or 20. He has this interesting relationship with his instrument, and composition — the performer-composer mentality — which is a lot more of a thing at the moment, which is awesome. Someone who’s not coming at composition from a theoretical standpoint, basically… I found that very inspiring.
You’ve mentioned orchestration being a driving factor behind your recent pivot into composition. Can you tell me a bit about your musical background — and how orchestration fits into that?
I studied classical performance in piano at RNCM — that was my undergrad. When I was growing up, I loved everything; I played jazz, I played classical music, I played in bands. I wanted to be a singer-songwriter at one point. I did really like trying to make things up, but I never thought composition was an option for me. I didn’t have anyone who would have known that was a possibility — which sounds a little bit odd now — but I always saw it as a separate thing. Meanwhile, I had done a musicology masters, just because I liked writing about music.
I was playing a lot more jazz, I was really interested in improvising — but the composing started because I wanted to be able bring new music to ensembles I was playing with. When I was exposing myself to more new jazz, I was always way more interested in compositional choices; I was not really wanting to sit at home, practice for eight hours, and transcribe loads of solos. I realise that now — I don’t think I knew that at the time.
So I had a trio early on. And then I formed Ensemble C as a septet, and made an album with them. I was around 30 [then]; I did that, and then my friend Andy Scott asked me to write a piece for his sax quartet — and that was the turning point. I cannot describe to you how much I enjoyed it… It was like realising who I was. Like, what have I been doing for ten years? I don’t totally love performing, I never have; I always felt like there was something wrong with me, because I didn’t completely love it like other people did. When I realised that I could actually write, and composing — in a “classical” sense — was something I could aspire to… It blew everything open. It was a really amazing moment for me.
So I just started writing, as much as I could — trying to teach myself about different instruments. I was enjoying exploring beyond jazz, which is where it started; but I knew that was not all I wanted to do. I’ll always be grateful that that’s the music that led me to writing, but I knew I didn’t want to limit myself.
.
Do you feel like a lot of the jazz traditions you grew up performing still impact your work today?
Yes, 100%. You know, sometimes I have those moments of thinking “oh, god, why didn’t I figure this out when I was 20, rather than when I was 30?” — but I would be a different musicians if I hadn’t had all of those experiences as an improviser. I improvise loads: I bank loads of ideas through improvising on the piano. We all record ideas in different ways — whether notating or not — and I have reams and reams of voice memos on my phone.
I sometimes compose through transcribing. That’s a skill that takes some time to develop, I think; I’ve done many hours sitting at a piano trying to transcribe solos, [and] improvisation. I guess my writing early on — when it was more for jazz ensembles — was so heavily harmony-based, or harmony-led; so an exploration of harmony really interests me. Now, it’s much bigger harmonic structures [and] narratives… But I don’t know if I’d have that instinct without my understanding of harmony through jazz. Rhythmically, as well. I absolutely love to play around with grooves in classical music — weird and odd grooves. It’s something that Steven Mackey does a lot. I’m very drawn to music like that.
Tell me a bit more about how groove informs your work — how has that manifested in your works for ensembles, orchestras, even choirs?
I’m quite interested in dense layering at the moment. I was listening recently to Gary Carpenter’s orchestral piece ‘Dadaville’ — it was a Proms commission [in 2015] — the way this rhythmic density builds… It never goes back in a circle. Something new always happens; he kind of shifts it, it goes up a level, it never goes back to [where] you think it’s gonna go. He gave me a great lesson on that piece when I was at RNCM. It’s something I’m trying to do a little bit more: push myself with rhythmic density, and being more imaginative with a groove — having it do more than just be a “groove”.
What do you mean by that — do you mean groove not necessarily as “the thing everyone locks into”, and more “things that evolve and transform”?
Yes, that. And things that were not previously groove-based, and becoming more groove-based. That’s what I’m experimenting with. How can I use this weird groove to make you feel unsettled? To talk more about ‘Agita’: I was playing around with compound and simple time — always cutting away from where you think it should be. That was a really hard piece for writing time signatures; I went through so many versions of that piece with different time signature changes, trying to imagine how a conductor would feel it — [and] how the players would most easily read it. That was a challenge.
.
A lot of your work, structurally, has a kind of narrative quality to it — what relationship do you feel your work has to narrative themes and structures?
I was really struggling with how to describe my music. It took me a while to realise that storytelling is really important to me — and having a sense of narrative, journeying. So much of the listening experience, the pacing of the listening experience… How I want someone to feel along the way. I do think of it as this journey.
I love thinking about structure — I really, really love planning. I love thinking about it in quite a traditional way, in terms of: what’s going to return? How am I going to develop this? Will somebody need to hear this again — or how am I going to fragment this? Whilst a lot of my ideas come through improvising, the planning of the structure is very important to me. I want to tell a story that makes sense as a listening experience; and I’m not gonna be dishonest [about that]… Yes, I’m trying to develop my understanding of detailed sound, [and] be much more detailed in my writing, but that’s not the most honest thing about my music.
I love writing melodies; I love thinking about the journey of a melody. Pat Metheny has been a big influence for me in that — he’s one of my favourite composers. He is a jazz guitarist, I went to see him [play] in Birmingham solo, and the breadth of his music-making is unbelievable. You hear the way he treats a melody, and the journey of it over the course of a piece… How it evolves. Thinking about music in that sense has been very important to me.
One piece of yours I loved was ‘In This Light’, which was performed by The Carice Singers at Spitalfields Festival last year…
Yes! That was my first time setting text, actually — and I loved that experience. It’s difficult when you’re setting text, because you’re trying to emotionally have a relationship with the text yourself, and make it make sense musically. The poem wasn’t that long — two stanzas by Du Fu — but I really enjoyed thinking in detail about [it]: how does this lift off the page in different colours, what do I want to stand out more? I liked doing that because it fell into the way I write very naturally. I do tend to have this emotional or extramusical starting point in my mind before I start writing.
Thinking about my orchestral piece, ‘Agita’… That didn’t have a programmatic thing — it was just wanting to be this crazy orchestral dance — but I was always thinking: how will someone feel by the end of it, when they listen to it? How am I gonna keep shifting something up a gear without introducing two much material?
I really love that idea. I think video game developer Kan Gao said something similar once — that he pictures the audience at the exact moment that the credits roll, and then works to try and create that feeling.
That really resonates; I like that a lot, for sure. How is someone going to come away from that experience, and feel changed — different? Like they connected with something? Or not — feel the complete opposite of that, which is also a completely justified experience when listening to something.
In terms of what you’re working on now: you’re currently working on a large ensemble piece as part of the Philharmonia Composers’ Academy for 2025/26 — which I understand is inspired by Sarah Moss’ novel Cold Earth…
Her writing is so full of tension, and anxiety — it’s really unbelievable. This novel is set in Greenland; it was written way before covid, but it has this backdrop setting of a pandemic that’s going on in the world, [while] these archaeologists are stuck in Greenland on a dig. And this mass hysteria sets in… It’s very scary. I had read this and thought immediately “I want to write a piece that’s inspired by this”, as I was so drawn into it. And when I got the Philharmonia opportunity, I thought: this might be the time that I get to write this piece. With it being that 14-piece, slightly strange ensemble — it isn’t an orchestra, but has a lot of colour — it’s a unique opportunity.
How did you go about channeling this inspiration in the concept for the piece?
I was thinking about how I’m going to write the programme note, and what I’m going to talk about. I’m not rewriting the novel in the music. But it’s really that social anxiety thing: what happened with covid, [and] how we all lived this ordeal… How horrific it was. But where is the learning from that? I was thinking about [the] climate crisis — and how that’s the same anxiety, but nothing’s happening… Like, what was the point of covid? It’s kind of become about that, because of all the tension and anxiety that occurs in this book. How we have this collective grief, at the moment, for so much stuff in the world… We all kind of feel it, right?
.
When you’re pulling from texts such as Cold Earth, do you see them as something allegorical — or trying to create, or build, a world outside of the “real” world? You mentioned that you tend to look for an emotional starting point in your process…
I struggle without a really emotional starting point. When I first read it [Cold Earth], I did have some quite immediate musical ideas — and some of them were related to themes in the book. One of them is a folky, quite melancholic thing, that I knew would be something [with] solo strings. It’s about being in this place that was so connected to history — and even years later, I’ve kept that, because it was a strong emotional starting point.
Then it’s about me building my emotional, or musical, world away from that [source material]. Now that I’m a bit away from the book, and I know more what I’m trying to say with this piece… Some of it is grief [for example], but it’s looser than that. I know what harmonic world I want this to be.
Do you feel like the inspiration then becomes internal — you kind of “lock away” into your own musical world — or would you say you more deliberately channel external musical inspirations as well?
I don’t know if you’re the same — but I’m often so heavily into something, musically, at the same time that I’m writing something. There’ll be several pieces that I’m really drawn to that are in that “world” of what I’m trying to convey — or there’s something in them that’s really inspiring me at that time.
I know some composers don’t listen to music when they’re writing. I think it was Anna Meredith I heard once say something like: I don’t listen to anything when I’m in the midst of something, because I need to know that my ideas are strong. Which I totally get — but I think I’m quite the opposite [to] that: I need to be immersed in other music to find my way. So when I’d been at Princeton, [I] heard one of Steven’s orchestral pieces, ‘Tonic’ — and it has this tension, this anxiety, this doom-feeling, that really resonated with me because I was thinking about Cold Earth.
I get that. I’m someone who sometimes does listen to a lot of music around the time I’m writing something — but I’ve noticed I’ll never listen to music in the same medium, genre, or sound world, as what I’m composing. Maybe because it’s too close to home…
That’s really interesting. You know, emotional connection is the most important thing to me — I don’t care that obvious that sounds, because sometimes it’s not clear. -laughs- So I would often go back to albums that mean a lot to me. One of my favourite albums of all time is Jeff Buckley’s Grace… I don’t know how many times I’ve listened to it — it’s definitely the music I’ve listened to the most in my life. I purely connect with it emotionally, and I hear something new in it all the time. So needing to remember the reason, the purpose — the why am I writing this? Making sure it has an emotional purpose is what I always try and come back to.
It’s connecting with the feeling, right? I feel so much of composition pedagogy is about the abstract — playing with the forms, the materials — and for me, it’s absolutely paramount to never lose touch with the emotional core of why I’m composing in the first place.
Yeah. And because I don’t come from that — maybe you’re the same, if you haven’t grown up with classical music… I did, but I didn’t grow up with much music analysis — and I didn’t study composition at 18 from a really theoretical [perspective]. It comes from wanting to write something for emotion, for feeling, for trying to convey a story — rather than so much “I want to explore this musical thing because I’m interested in that”. That does happen, but that’s not normally the starting point.
Anna Clyne is someone I look up to quite a lot. I find her music very honest. I think she’s very skilled, but she really writes from the heart, as well. She was someone I discovered when I was “veering” into more classical music, and I discovered some of her orchestral music — that was an important discovery for me.
I’d love to ask you about your latest album with Ensemble C, Every Journey — tell me about how the album materialised, and its significance to your compositional practice?
That was five years in the making. I started writing it in 2020, then I had a baby in 2021 — so I didn’t do anything about it for maybe a year, a year and a half. And then 2022 was when I got the Developing Your Creative Practice grant from the Arts Council; so I knew I could definitely rehearse the music with eleven musicians enough that we could record it.
I’d made this other album, called Small World, as a septet — and I knew immediately that I wanted to do [something with] a bigger band. Around that time, I’d been reading about a lot of historical female pioneers; there’s a great book by Jacki Hill-Murphy called Adventuresses, and that’s where I discovered the stories of Isabel Godin des Odonais, and Kate Marsden… All these amazing stories I didn’t know. As a woman, I know why we don’t know these stories; but it’s horrific that we don’t know these stories. And it formed in my mind that I would have this album that was based on journeys — this huge aspiration to do something that’s way beyond what you really could be doing at that time. It was insane what some of these women were doing; they had no means to do any of this stuff, and they were still doing it.
I was able to get together a really great band of contemporary jazz musicians from around the country that I love. I tried to not be London-based, and not just north-west based — I was trying to celebrate what was happening across the UK.
Though Every Journey released last year, a lot of the material was written quite a long time ago — how did working on this project for such a length of time impact how you view the work?
It’s weird for me, compositionally. I started writing this music so long ago — some of it before I had my epiphany moment of wanting to be a composer in a more “contemporary classical” way, or notated way. I’m very proud of it, but it’s also a little bit separate from what I’m doing at the moment. It’s the same for a lot of musicians; you often release something so long after you’ve had the initial idea for it. So I feel this strange musical disonnect from it at the moment — but it was music I had to get out.
Is there anything in particular you feel this album taught you about your practice?
It taught me a lot about longform structure. I really pushed myself to not try and do the same thing over and over again; trying to be more imaginative with texture, with how I was arranging for the band. It’s a bit of an odd-sized band: it’s not quite a big band — so you don’t get all that rich sonority in a full line of saxophones, or all of the brass — so it’s a little bit awkward to write for sometimes, in terms of not being overpowering [while] being interesting textually. That was all good, challenging stuff for me.
You mentioned you had a baby in 2021. How has being a mother impacted the way you view music, and composition — especially as I understand it pretty much coincided with your decision to become a composer…
Yes, it did. And I wouldn’t recommend that… -laughs- But that’s how it happened. I wanted to have a baby, and was lucky enough to have a baby at the same time I realised I wanted to be a composer. Who knows why that happened in my life, but it did. It’s very challenging; I don’t think you can balance it — that word is very difficult. Being a parent is so intense — my time isn’t my own anymore like it used to be, and you have to really get used to that. And that means you have to see your time as a gift. My time to myself, to write, is a gift that I appreciate — if it’s an hour, if it’s two hours, if it’s a morning — I have to be very focused on what I’m trying to do in that time. I think that’s the biggest change. I want to be present with her [my daughter], and not fretting about something. I’m allowed this time, and she gets my other time.
I didn’t do anything much for about a year, but when she was about 1, I remember suddenly having a ton of ideas, and needing to write loads. That’s when the ‘Motherness Suite’ happened — which was very [much] this emotional outpouring. There’s a lot of things in them that aren’t very sophisticated, musically, but they are these very honest pieces, because they were this outpouring of this crazy journey I’d just been on for a year and nine months.
I think I am very inspired by it [motherhood] a lot. You go through so many emotional changes that I can’t put into words, that I think it’s gonna find a way to come out musically without me intending to. There’s so much emotion, and up and down — everything all at once. I think she did play into my motivation of me wanting to do what I wanted to do, because I want to be a good role model for her. So I thought: am I gonna sit around being annoyed that I hadn’t studied composition? No, let’s try and actually make that happen for a year… So there is an inspiration there. She helps me be proactive, I think; I’ll do it, and she’ll know that it doesn’t matter about age, doesn’t matter about anything…
Showing it is possible, right? It doesn’t have to be a choice.
Maybe this is always gonna be something women have to worry about — I don’t know. It’s very difficult. Often, it does coincide with things maybe finally going well, or taking off — I totally get that. Composition is such a slow journey: you may be late 30s, early 40s [when things start going well] — and for women, that’s a really challenging time when you have to actually think about what you want. It can be very difficult to let go — to feel like you have to say “no” to things, I completely understand that.
I think it’s important that people see it’s possible. It’s getting better [with] people, institutions, organisations — but I still lost out on stuff when I was pregnant, and [when] I knew I was going to be breastfeeding. And it really hurts, it really sucks; this wouldn’t happen to someone else, I shouldn’t miss out because I’m choosing to do this. But it is getting better. When I was at RNCM, they were very supportive of me having extra responsibilities; and Philharmonia are great, I think I’m the second mum who’s done [the scheme] now. Visibility is very important, and I’m very happy to be open and honest about it — the way I like to be in my music.
.
Alongside your piece for the Philharmonia — what else are you exploring musically at the moment? I understand you have a premiere with RNCM coming up…
January 23rd — that weekend — is the RNCM Brass Festival, which is quite a big event. They’re very good at commissioning new music. David Thornton, who’s the head of that festival, heard a brass band piece I had the opportunity to write when I was studying; so he gave me the opportunity to write something for Foden’s Brass Band and Bones Apart — an all-female trombone quartet. At first, I was quite nervous about this — brass band plus trombone quartet — [as] I’d only ever written one brass band piece. But I really tried to push myself with this piece; it’s been a great experience. It’s in three movements, about fifteen minutes. It was interesting trying to approach it like a mini-concerto for [the] trombone quartet; it was challenging, how to make them feel like the soloists — have enough interest in their parts, as a quartet — and have it make sense with, and against, the band.
It’s called ‘The Green Chapel’. I live in the same town where Foden’s Brass Band originates from; I live in Sandbach, in Cheshire. I was trying to think about place, plus the RNCM’s musical theme this year — myths and legends. There’s a place on the edge of the Peak District called Lud’s Church; I go walking quite a lot in the Peak District, and it’s basically this massive mossy cavern which you have to walk a few miles to get to. And there’s loads of history there — supposedly it’s where the Knights of the Round Table met, and [there’s] all these stories of Robin Hood being there. The interesting one is the Lollard Christian group using it as a secret meeting place; they were being hunted down the Catholic establishment — they were a pre-Protestant group — [and] there’s a story about the daughter of the leader being killed when they were finally found out. That’s what the piece became about. It’s a story about this secret, mossy, cave-like place — and about [the] girl and how she haunts this place.
–
Claire’s new work ‘The Green Chapel’ is being premiered by Bones Apart and Foden’s Brass Band on 23rd January 2026 at the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester – learn more and buy tickets:
Learn more about Claire and her practice:
- https://clairecopemusic.com/
- https://soundcloud.com/claire-cope-music
- http://instagram.com/claireecope
Learn more about Claire’s contemporary jazz ensemble, Ensemble C:
References/Links:
- György Kurtág – ‘Stele’ (1994)
- Gary Carpenter – ‘Dadaville’ (2015)
- Tristan Donovan, ‘Kan Gao: To The Moon and Back’ (2012), Eurogamer
- Jeff Buckley – Grace (1994)
- Jacki Hill-Murphy, Adventuresses, Rediscovering Daring Voyages Into the Unknown (2014)
