“When it comes to environmentalism, I think there is a specific capacity of art to explore, deepen and enhance your relationship with the environment — especially because we live in a society that’s so disconnected from nature.”
CJ Brooke
CJ Brooke is a composer, field recordist, and performer from Norfolk, currently based in London. Their work explores nature and the environment from a multitude of avenues, ranging from furthering their connection with landscape and location, through to reimagining local folklore; using found-material within fragile, unstable and quiet soundscapes, as well as highlighting the importance of play within compositional settings. CJ’s work ‘Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park in 9 fleeting moments’ was performed in Barbican Hall by the London Schools Symphony Orchestra in January 2026, commissioned as part of their This is London series; their work has also been commissioned and performed by Birds of Poole Harbour, players of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Ben Smith, and Guildhall New Music Society. CJ currently studies at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where they are co-curator of the Guildhall New Music Society; they are studying composition with Amber Priestley and Paul Whitmarsh, sonic arts with Emily Peasgood, and bassoon with Helen Storey.
CJ is about to enter their fourth year on the BMus Composition course at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. As the new term at Guildhall begins, Georgie sat down with CJ to discuss fenland, field recording, lantern men, and finding embodied care in environmental action…
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Georgie/PRXLUDES: Hi CJ! I know that in your practice everything is interconnected, so I’d like to start by discussing the piece you just wrote for The Cumnock Tryst International Summer School for Composers in Scotland — what inspired the piece?
CJ Brooke: My piece for Scotland, ‘of willow and warblers’, was inspired by a creaking willow tree. I’ve written pieces with tree creaks in before, but this willow tree was unlike anything I’d ever heard in my life — like a chattering or screeching kind of sound. I found it in an RSPB [ed. Royal Society for the Protection of Birds] nature reserve that I have been going to since I was very young called Strumpshaw Fen, in Norfolk — I’m a big fen fan! They are a landscape that I feel particularly affiliated with, or at home in.
A fen is a type of wetland habitat called a peatland, which just means it generates or accumulates peat. With peatlands you have fens, bogs, and swamps: swamps feature trees and woody shrubs; bogs are acidic and fed by precipitation, featuring species like sphagnum moss; and fens are generally alkaline and mineral rich, fed by groundwater and surface runoff, are very deep (up to 4 or 5 metres), and feature reed beds. So Strumpshaw Fen is this glorious nature reserve: it has woodland areas and a meadow, but also this expanse of reed beds with areas of willow coppice (where they cut the willow trees down to the bottom so they sprout lots of new growth), which is where this willow tree I recorded was. And so I was sat there with my shotgun mic, shielding it with my coat from the wind — because they’re windy places, fens! — and recording this whole organism creaking, this interplay of different chatters and creaks and chittering things. It was so startling to walk past, I had to stop and double take to figure out what it was.
This is one of these instances, which I find so often in my practice, where I am inspired by locations and their soundscapes. I have a practice, of sorts, of deep listening to these places that I love; I’ve lived in Norfolk all my life so there are lots of places I’ve frequented over many years and built up a relationship with. The willow tree was an example of still finding new and exciting sounds in these very familiar places.
Moving to study in London really made me realise how important a lot of these places are for me, and how grounded they make me feel. A lot of my practice now is about reconnecting with them — further exploring and deepening my knowledge of and relationship with them.
What did the piece end up looking like on the page, and what was the sonic world like in the end?
There are so many different levels of transformation you can go down when you transcribe things creatively. There’s a whole history of people doing all sorts of stuff with it. I was looking at Carola Bauckholt’s Doppelbelichtung before going to Scotland, and was amazed by the precision and accuracy in the way she transcribes things. My original intention was to do something on the same level of detail, but after 3 seconds of transcription took me 30 minutes, I quickly realised I would have to be a little more savvy with my approach to meet the deadline.
So I transcribed the tree gestures individually and then divvied them up between the strings. I ended up devising some kind of proportional notation system where pitch and rhythm are represented spatially on the page.
A key feature in all my pieces is that I use character markings to describe things on a precise level. Here, for each transcription there would be one or two character markings. These might suggest [a] manner like “secretive” or “feverish” — or maybe something more timbral like “gritty”. I think oftentimes when you do this kind of notation, it can look a bit bleak on the page; and so the words provide something for the performer to latch onto. Along a similar vein, spending time listening to the recording was a major part of getting the character and sound quality of the tree creaks right in rehearsal. This way you can almost tap into the performers’ embodied knowledge of how their instruments make sound, rather than weighing down the notation with technical minutiae.
In terms of then organising these little isolated gestures in time: I chunked up the recording and dissolved each section into little games, or different kinds of social situations. For example, maybe in one part of the piece the violins are having an awkward discussion, and they have to contribute with these gestures. They’re instructed to include uncomfortable silences, and moments where they play over each other. So it’s this approach to transcription that leans much more into play and the social dynamics of the ensemble, that hopefully mimics the organic nature of the tree creaking, but almost humanises it to make it a performable thing. It’s different with the Bauckholt, because with birdsong you really can get that photographic level of mimicry on the violin, and it serves the piece to be so precise. With the tree that isn’t possible, the transcription is necessarily more transformative, and so I think it makes more sense to lean into that and extrapolate from there.
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Using field recordings as original material every time must be so exciting. Do you find new approaches to working with them every time, or do you stick to one method?
When you are transcribing, you have so many options of different ways to go about it. I often find the situation I’m in or the recording itself will lead me towards a specific method of transcription and notation.
My orchestral piece for the LSSO [London Schools Symphony Orchestra] — ‘Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park in 9 fleeting moments’ — was nine miniatures, which are all different sections of field recording from the park. Quite a lot of them were done similarly, but others have different degrees of freedom in them. For example, some are very strictly in 4/4 at 120 beats per minute, and a minim is a second; some have particularly tricky bird transcriptions, so I’ve given those players some flexibility about how fast they need to play. In others, segments of recording are dissolved into “soup” and played in any order between two rehearsal marks — so the general linearity of the recording is preserved, but it gives them more freedom and time to engage with the material. This kind of solves the problem with putting the transcriptions in 4/4, where [the players] will get really hung up on rhythm and coming in on time, which isn’t always the priority. So just in that one piece, there were so many different ways I could’ve done it, even within the singular approach of trying to represent the recording as honestly as I could.
Then, with other pieces, I’ve gone to a location, I’ve listened, and then I’ve taken specific sounds that I really liked as material in a more abstract sense. Thus the music has a more tangential relationship with location than with the more direct transcription stuff that I do.
Part of my plethora of approaches is that I am still working out what I’m doing. I’m still exploring my options, learning about what’s been done previously; I am so inspired by so many people. The piece that always springs to mind is Cassandra Miller’s ‘Warblework’, which is a holy grail for me in so many ways, but takes a very transformative approach to its source material. But, zooming out from composition, I’m quite interested in this thing of honesty of representation, or some kind of ecological sensitivity. For example in the LSSO piece, it was really about the young performers being able to see the line between the recording and what they’re being asked to do on their instruments.
How does the wider context of environmentalism play into your practice? Do you think there’s an element of being careful to honour nature and its protection, or is it more of a subjective utilisation of material?
When I was researching for my dissertation, I read a lot of interviews by Robert Macfarlane, who is this incredible nature writer. In one such interview with Anna Stenning in 2013 he talks about the potential responsibilities of an environmental artist, and he talks about “a disinclination to epiphanize for its own sake” and a “readiness to pluralise, diffuse or abolish altogether the watching lyric eye/I”. What he’s talking about, to me, is this disinclination to narrativise — make it all about us — there’s a desire to represent the thing in its most objective sense, because that creates the most direct relationship between the observer (the audience) and the observed (the music).
It’s about the honesty of the connection and not trying to dress anything up, because you are saying that these things are beautiful and worthy of being art on their own. It’s tough to grapple with that because obviously everything is transformative — even using that specific microphone to record the willow tree earlier. So there are all these complications to it, but it’s about trying to get as close as possible to the thing without projecting yourself onto it (as far as that’s even possible).
I’m really drawn to that because I think that’s what art’s really good at. It’s the reframing and exploring your relationships — yes, with each other, through collaborative processes and play — but also with the world around you. When it comes to environmentalism, I think there is a specific capacity of art to explore, deepen and enhance your relationship with the environment — especially because we live in a society that’s so disconnected from nature. It’s obvious that if you’re someone who’s interested in making environmental art, it’s got to be in your head that we’re in the middle of ecological crisis. In Reuben Esterhuizen’s article, he mentioned The Art Kettle by Sinead Murphy, which really stuck with me on this. It’s a position that’s very sceptical of art’s ability to be politically effective — and rightly so, in my opinion. It makes a lot of intuitive sense: if I’m going to write a piece about wildfires is it going to change the world? No. And obviously that’s facetious, but on the other hand I still really believe in this capacity of art to be radical and political — perhaps naively! — but in this situation I think it needs a different approach.
Someone who I think addresses this really well in her work is Kathy Hinde, who led a project called ‘Listen to the Voices of the Fen’ in 2025 at Wicken Fen in Cambridgeshire, in celebration of the site’s 125th year as a National Trust Nature Reserve. It’s an incredibly special place, being one of the last remaining areas of undrained fenland in the East of England. Her project was all about the unearthing of hidden sounds and voices of the fen, using hydrophones, contact mics, etc. to bring to light the hidden activity in the environment in this Oliveros-style deep listening approach. Across a trail of site-specific installations you’d hear sounds like the peat reabsorbing water, or the decay of the compost heap (in a nod to conservation efforts on the site too). So it’s kind of using those things as a way to deepen your engagement with the landscape, and heighten your awareness of all its different features.
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There is a research group in the University of Derby called the Nature Connectedness Research Group, who have research that demonstrates positive correlations between nature connectedness and pro-environmental behaviours. Circling back to The Art Kettle, this to me is where art has the capacity to be proactive in an environmentalist context, because I think it can help us deepen and explore our relationships with the world around us. So here it’s not about raising awareness, it’s about cultivating this sense of connectedness that results in this embodied desire to care for the environment. My ambition is to make art that does that. I do have pieces that touch on it, but that’s what I am really inspired by looking forward.
And I don’t think all my art needs to do that, but when I have these zoom-out moments and I think about what I’m doing in life… You look outside and everywhere is parched; the other side of the city the heath is burning; there’s a data centre being built next to the nature reserve you’ve been visiting since you were a child. All of this intensely harrowing stuff is happening and it feels like there’s no impetus to stop it. And you sit and you go: “okay! now I’ll transcribe my willow tree.” It’s like, what’s the point? I think it’s here that nature connectedness is part of the picture if you feel strongly that we should be doing more. You can’t expect people to prioritise the environment without first having a relationship with it, and being able to form that relationship.
This of course links to really pressing issues of accessibility and inclusivity, and the challenge of environmentalism sometimes being touted as a middle-class issue. In lots of ways it’s a privilege to be able to worry about these things. But also, the environment is the fundamental issue in lots of ways, just because of the existential nature of the threat it poses — it’s all kind of intersectional.
That sounds really exciting! Can you tell me more about the pieces that touch on this idea of nature connectedness and how you have and are trying to cultivate this instinctual, embodied respect and desire to protect in your work?
I think the most significant piece to talk about here is my piece for the LSSO, ‘Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park in 9 fleeting moments’. I feel so privileged to have worked with that orchestra, because they were so receptive. It’s a recurring theme that I get accepted on a project, and I’m the experimentalist that has to kind of reel people in and get them on board with my wacky ideas: turning up and saying “Right! We’re gonna be a magpie today.” -laughs- They were young, between 14 and 19, and hadn’t seen music like my piece before so it was amazing that they were so receptive.
The main focus of the piece was that they got to engage with the sounds of the park. The brief was to write a piece that addresses a social or environmental issue that is relevant to you — or young people in general — in London today, and [to also] involve yourself in the performance. At the time, I lived just across from Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park, which is one of the magnificent seven Victorian cemeteries. It has this amazing history, being bombed in WW2, then almost cleared and made into a flat grassy park, which was abandoned due to local backlash. In the 90s, it was taken on by Friends of Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park, and turned into a nature reserve. I think it’s the most densely wooded area within Zone 2, or something, and is really like a little haven that I felt was so beautiful, because it’s an example of this harmonious relationship between urban living and natural spaces.
And the soundscape I thought was so emblematic of that: you have this glorious mishmash of birdsong and the wind in the trees, but also blaring sirens, traffic noise, and planes overhead. The idea is really celebrating the coexistence of these things, and saying that nature can’t be something that is be hived off and distant; it has to be integrated and connected to our everyday lives. It can’t be viewed as something that is separate from us — we are nature as well.
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The aim was to be able to celebrate London’s amazing green spaces — places like Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park — by getting the students to engage with the fact that these sounds of the wildlife and the urban are in harmony with each other. I gave them all QR codes in the parts so they could scan and listen to all the different sounds they were mimicking. It’s about them having this direct relationship with the sounds and being able to creatively engage with them, and hopefully in doing so learn a bit more about their own relationship with their instruments and technique. I was so lucky to go to sectionals with them and talk to them, play with them, and get feedback from them too about noticing things they wouldn’t have noticed before.
I found that particularly fulfilling, as in the society we live in we are taught to tune out the sounds around us, to focus on going to school or work and being productive, rather than stopping and listening to our surroundings. I can’t say how many of them this resonated with, but there were a couple of people that said they’d started listening to the world in a slightly different way after playing my piece. So that’s part of these seeds of connectedness, and of this appreciation of the everyday that I hope to explore and encourage more in my practice.
It’s great that you’re introducing these young people to everything you’ve spoken about in relation to this idea of nature connectedness — do you think the audience can be affected in the same way?
The side of the listener is a little different and slightly harder. I feel quite strongly that there is a hard cap on how much you can say that I am connecting people to nature by playing them this soundscape through an orchestra. I don’t think that the concert hall is the right place for that, and I don’t think it has that capacity to connect people with the environment. Especially compared with the Kathy Hinde — where you’re onsite, and standing on a boardwalk, listening to the peat 6 metres underneath you that’s been forming for 4000 years. So, there’s something of that site-specificity and direct contact that is so important to it. The NCRG has these pathways for nature connectedness — with contact being one of them — and research to say that contact-based activities are specifically important in cultivating this connectedness. So the concert hall is dubious in this way. I do think there’s still something interesting in bringing the recordings to the concert hall, there’s just a limitation on how well you could say it advocates for environmentalist views.
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Folklore also plays a big narrative role in your pieces, and acts as an extension to all the environmental discussions you have been talking about — how does the folkloric inspire you?
I think my interest in folklore is just another facet of my efforts to reconnect with places around Norfolk. Norfolk, and East Anglia more broadly, is one of these hubs of folk resurgence/revival at the moment. I think it’s this search for identity in a world that is so faceless (with social media and etc.), or for some British/local identity that you could be proud of post-brexit. It appears in my practice because it pertains to the heritage and history of these locations, the stories of the people that have lived in them.
My piece ‘The Lantern Man and other instances of fenland trickery’, for large ensemble and fixed media engages with the East Anglian folklore surrounding the now-extinct natural phenomenon of will-o’-the-wisps, or ignis fatuus. They are these mysterious flickering lights that were documented to appear above marshes, cemeteries, bogs, swamps, or anywhere where there is decaying matter. In modern times, we’re piecing together a scientific explanation — but in times gone by, a whole host of other explanations were imagined. In Norfolk and other areas of East Anglia, they are attributed to the Lantern Men or Jack-o’-Lantern: cloaked figures with lanterns that roam the fens at night looking to lure weary travellers off the path and to a watery demise, such that you might replace them and free their trapped spirit by becoming a lantern person yourself.
The thing that draws me to this folklore specifically is that it falls into this category of the cautionary tale — which I think is so deeply intertwined with landscape. It makes so much sense because in the 18th century the fens were an incredibly dangerous place. If you lived then, you wouldn’t want your kids to go out into them at night, because they could get lost and potentially drown — and so therefore you make up the tale of the lantern man to scare them into listening to you. It tells this story of people’s past relationship to the landscape, but in this fantastical and evocative way. So, on one side of the coin it had a really tangible purpose, to keep people out of danger. But then also, there really were mysterious flashing lights over the fens that we still can’t explain today, and I think that’s so cool.
The piece itself runs with the fantastical and folkloric aspects of the story, it has evocations of will-o’-the-wisp and flashing lights. But there’s also a lot of material derived from my own listening to fenland soundscapes at dusk, in the locations these lantern men were recorded: the plopping of insects diving underwater, the rustle of the wind in the reeds, the church bells off in the distance. The percussion has a pale of water and pebbles to drop into it, or the brass shake bundles of reed grass, etc. This was one of the pieces where it’s less on the objective representation side, and more on the material to play with and transform side of my practice. There’s a sense of place that’s imbued in the material of the piece, but with no specific aim to be environmentalist, per se.
A lot of the pieces you’ve talked about with me involve the performers exploring with sounds in their own way and making their own connection — how much would you say play is a factor in your practice?
I love play! My thing with play is that I usually still have quite a specific sonic result in mind. The goal for me is often where the performers get to experience openness and playfulness and enjoy the collaborative aspects of that, but the listener’s experience is something still salient, focused, and evocative. Sometimes that’s the goal. Sometimes I want to throw ink at Debussy and see what a pianist does with it…! Letting playfulness be part of the sonic result too. But for example in ‘of willow and warblers’ the play is to make it organic, approachable, and interesting for the performers, yet the tree itself is not playful inherently. The result of the play being the material pinpoints what I’m trying to do often more eloquently than more determinate styles of notation might do.
A lot of the text instructions I write fall under playing with your relationship with each other as performers in this kind of social way, or playing with technique responding to your instrument, perhaps as though it has autonomy itself.. I have a piece called ‘mimicry’ that I did with Maria O’Dea, which takes that approach to multiphonics on the bassoon. It’s two bassoonists doing the same thing at the same time — the game is that you have a list of multiphonic fingerings, and you try to play them as quietly and as short as possible. You gradually increase your airflow until it just speaks, and then you drop out, so there’s this battle of control in an inherently fragile and unpredictable space on the instrument. The idea is that playing within that is generative and unpredictable, and that responding to the instrument in that context becomes the material.
There’s this short essay by Juliet Fraser that I’ve been particularly excited about with regards to play, called ‘The Practice of Play’. There are a couple of ideas that have really stuck with me from it. One of them is that play and the act of playing can be material in itself. Another is that she talks about unlearning, and the idea of play as unlearning perfectionism. As someone with chronic ADHD, perfectionism is definitely very sedimented in my process, and I’ve had to do a lot of work to unpick that. I usually still have some outlet in my pieces that allows me to be meticulous, but I’ve learned to love and really be excited by the idea of being surprised in performances of my work and not knowing exactly what is going to happen.
This feeds into this idea of unlearning the premiere, which Fraser also discusses. I’ve found it quite helpful to think about deconstructing the idea that a piece is a singular perfect object to be strived towards, rather than just one manifestation of the piece in its current state with those current people. So that’s part of the role that play has within my practice. Anyone who has seen me compose knows that I have a lot of trouble making decisions… -laughs- And play is, in a way, a solution to that. Overall, I just feel that if you’re choosing to make music your life, and it’s such an inherently social discipline — why not just have fun and enjoy being together in this way?
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Learn more about CJ Brooke and their practice:
References/Links:
- Carola Bauckholt – ‘Doppelbelichtung’ (2016)
- Cassandra Miller – ‘Warblework’ (2011)
- Anna Stenning, ‘An interview with Robert Macfarlane’ (2013), Studies in Ecocriticism, 17.1
- Georgie West, ‘A Different Way of Being Together: interview with composer Reuben Esterhuizen’ (2025), PRXLUDES
- Sinead Murphy, The Art Kettle (Zer0 Books, 2012)
- Kathy Hinde – ‘Listen to the Voices of the Fen’ (2024-25)
- Leanne Martin et al., ‘Nature contact, nature connectedness and associations with health, wellbeing and pro-environmental behaviours’ (2020), Journal of Environmental Psychology, 68
- Juliet Fraser, ‘The Practice of Play’ (2024), Notes on Flying
