“Most of the time when I start writing, I’m always kind of disappointed because what I’m hearing is not exactly translated. Sometimes the more I rewrite the sonic idea I have in the beginning, the closer I get to finding those initial feelings within the sounds I am writing. I think it’s a lot of training and understanding from inside yourself as a composer as to where you want the sound to move.”
Corie Rose Soumah
Corie Rose Soumah is a composer from Canada (QC), currently based in Chicago. Her work explores ideas of multiplicity, interweaving, and connecting through ideas of hyper-collages, temporality and afro-diasporic geologies. Coming from an acousmatic background, Corie Rose Soumah explores texture on a variety of sonic levels, utilising both electronic and acoustic soundscapes and technologies. Corie has had works featured at Darmstadt Summer Course, Klangspuren, TIME:SPANS, Gaudeamus, Wigmore Hall, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, MaerzMusik, Barbican Centre, Fontainebleau Schools of Music and Fine Arts and Festival Musica. She has also received the Prix de composition 2025 as part of the Prix d’Europe, and multiple awards from SOCAN Foundation; her works have been performed by the likes of the International Contemporary Ensemble, Bozzini Quartet, Ensemble Itinéraire, Longleash, Hypercube, Ekmeles, Paramirabo, Sixtrum, Contemporary Insight, New Music Concerts, and Wet Ink. She is currently working as Assistant Professor of Composition at the University of Chicago, after studying at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal for a BMus in Composition followed by a DMA in Composition at Columbia University.
The UK premiere of Corie’s piece ‘Tossed Parachutes of Lilacs and Lungs’ will be performed on Saturday 24 October, as part of Always, Already There at the Barbican Centre, curated by vocalist and composer Elaine Mitchener. Ahead of the concert show, Georgie sat down with Corie to discuss ideas of multiplicity, acousmatic processes, exploring limpidité, and vibrating shells…
header photo by Edward Gaona-Lopata
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Georgie/PRXLUDES: Hi Corie! Your work explores a multitude of fascinating musical ideologies; can you tell me more about what makes you excited about working with sonic material?
Corie Rose Soumah: It’s an interesting question. I think when one starts composing, you don’t think about it necessarily in that way, right? You often think more about parameters and how you can combine them together in order to make something. I think that way works for certain types of music that are still local in the way they think about the evolution of material. But for me, thinking firstly about sonic material almost puts me a step back, as I tend to think of the whole idea first alongside the physical aspect of sounds or how I imagine the music is going to exist.
It’s also interesting because sound is such an abstract thing. Most of the time when I start writing, I’m always kind of disappointed because what I’m hearing is not exactly translated. Sometimes the more I rewrite the sonic idea I have in the beginning, the closer I get to finding those initial feelings within the sounds I am writing. I think it’s a lot of training and understanding from inside yourself as a composer as to where you want the sound to move. It’s also about being flexible enough to realise that the final product, or even the initial workshop, is never going to be exactly how you heard it in your head at first, and that’s okay.
How do you treat your extramusical influences in the writing process?
I do work a lot with extramusical ideas, but sometimes these actually arise after the fact. When I have finished writing the music, I often take time to sit and think, “What is this piece about?” in the latter stages of the process. I know people often work the other way round — but for me, it’s quite hard to come in and know exactly what the ideas and the inspirations are and only stick to that. It’s more of a natural reflection of where my head was at the time of writing.
Personally, I think it loses the magic of the writing process if I have too much pressure from thinking about the meaning of any external influences. I find focusing on a narrative idea too much a bit counterintuitive, especially because a lot of works and conversations these days are focused on being present in the moment and understanding how the sound is evolving. Even if you do have an idea at the beginning of the process, I think it changes so much from the original phrase that, to me, it doesn’t matter how you get to the point you are at; it’s nice just to be open. To be able to describe how an idea has changed throughout the process is a nice thing to be able to do, too — but being less analytical in the early stages makes things more fun!
You talk about an interest in shaping fractured and reconstructed sonic material, specifically through hyper-collages — how does this manifest in your work?
When I started composing, I was under the impression that ideas needed to be continuous, or they needed to have some sort of trend that was very clear. I don’t think there are trends in my music. But when I was writing, I found it very difficult to understand that continuity is not the only necessity: on a larger scale, but also on a smaller scale, within pieces where there is a pressure for every idea to follow on nicely from one another in order to create a “perfect form”. I like to have different entities that exist together, but they don’t necessarily have to blend — this is where hypercollage comes from. When you have multiple ideas that exist together without pressure, you get a kind of sonic world that is maybe more anonymous and sparse, but it allows me to think about sound in different ways, and not having to force it to be anything it’s not in order to create more movement in a work.
This idea of multiple ideas existing, with no pressure for narrative or form to dictate, is so freeing, and I guess plays into what you mentioned earlier about being flexible about your sonic ideas and their outputs?
It’s just a natural aspect of sound being so different every time it’s played that it is multiple, even if you don’t want it to be multiple. -laughs- Even if you write simple, whole notes, the score often looks so bare and silly — but in person, it’s always so much more than that! The sympathetic resonance from how the air molecules move around and carry the sound will be different for every room or space. So it makes sense that sound is never something singular. The idea of multiplicity comes into play in both a physical and musical way. I try not to lock things into place too hard so a flexibility of multiple things can occur.
There’s a great sense of collectivity and a focus on community-oriented working in your practice, specifically through the lens of Afro-diasporic geologies. Can you tell me more about what that looks like for you as a composer?
The term is one that I came upon after reading A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None by Kathryn Yusoff, which is a book about how the language of geology was used to kind of mark black bodies throughout the history of slavery. The difference between thinking of those people as material, rather than personhood. That book was really fascinating to me because it did point out some historical, sociological, and environmental ways of thinking about those issues — which I kind of was already aware of — but really summed up the thoughts I was having. In her book, she describes a sort of “White Geologies”, and I was wondering what the opposite of that would be and how you begin to think outside of that. This is where afro-diasporic geologies came from, as I felt that pertained to my own practice. I wanted it to be an inclusive term even though it’s quite specific. It’s all encompassed for me by ideas of ephemerality. Thinking about these things really helped me understand more about people, movement, and our environment.
I do touch a little bit on environmental topics in my work, but not necessarily in direct contact with the natural world — in that you need to go to a forest to be connected to trees in a visceral way (even though I think everyone should be doing that anyway, I’m just much more of a city person!). It’s more about the different connections between cities and people: what makes an ecosystem, and how those relationships are reflected in a concert setting between composers, performers, and the music. Everything is intertwined; the fact of living on this planet pertains to everything being connected to each other in some way or another.
You have also created your own instrument, creating and exploring the sound of shells on vibrating plates. This is an incredibly unique sound world and such an exciting concept, which also often involves you as a performer. Can you tell me about where this idea stemmed from?
So the shells themselves are called Cowry Shells — which is kind of a running gag, as it’s like having lots of mini-mes on stage! Individually, they are made from a slab of plexiglass which has a transducer attached in order to emphasise the lower frequencies. Most of the time they will be vibrating between 30-70Hz, because otherwise you start hearing pitch. But I wanted it to be more of a subtle, textural layer [rather] than [a] pitch-based one. They are then connected to an amplifier and then to a Max patch, where I have my controller that sends volume so I can be in control of the mapping and velocity. The first piece I did with my shells was for a live electronics set with the shells. I wanted to also see what that sounds with instruments, so the first instrument I tried it with was a piece for saxophones — saxophonists Antonin Bourgault and Erin Rogers were so willing to work with multiphonics and weird stuff so it was a perfect first instrument to begin the series. The original project was to have way more across the stage, but it’s really hard to move them around with different groups’ setups, etc.
What I really like about them is that they tend to emit similar sounds, but in different spaces, this sound is transformed. I recently had the saxophone piece performed in a church, and it amplified them in a totally different way. I think it’s fun because you can really think about movement and how the plates will geographically fit across the space as well. I really want to do something where there are a lot more of them to see how sonically harsh you can make it and subsequently what sensations that creates in the body of the audience. It’s my first built-in instrument, so it was fun and different, almost electronic-y – what with the organic rattling that comes with it – so it’s nice to have them as my musical partners in a way!
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Would you say that frequenting a few different musical institutions helped shape your composing toolkit or the way you approach music in a broader way?
In Quebec, we have this schooling system where you have to do two years of “pre-university”, and I studied classical piano and composition there. Then also in Montreal, there is a very strong acousmatic scene: a lot of going into rooms, playing music in the dark, and analysing how it is diffused in the space with different speakers. I did two years of that before doing any writing for acoustic instruments, so that’s where my initial training lies. I think it was interesting because I connected very easily with that medium, but I always wanted to write for instruments, so that desire led me to further my studies in acoustic music. Those two practices felt very separated for me at the beginning — especially with such a hard switch from acousmatic writing to concert hall settings. Then, when I came to Columbia, I had missed acousmatic music by that time and wanted to explore the two together.
I learnt a lot from the acousmatic process of transforming sounds in a static way, learning about recording processes, experimenting with synthesisers, and generating sound from basic sound waves that don’t need to be manipulated in different software. MaxMSP has been a great tool for me to kind of combine all those things to give me freedom within my sonic elements. All my recent works have been mostly for both acoustic instruments and electronic media. It’s just second nature for me to put them together and they can talk to each other, but also it’s ok if they don’t talk to each other. I like the electronics to have their own place in some form that is very audible — I’m not interested in amplifying the instrumentation, but want the electronics to be a separate and audible player in my pieces.
My scores often depend on the performers I’m working with. My piece for Elaine Mitchener involved a lot of electronics with her voice, and because she is so great — and also a composer — we were able to work in a more open, graphic score process based more on shared information and guidance. For my saxophone and shell piece, the performers were also composers, so I felt content giving them the space to help shape the gestures I provided. I always like to know how I am writing before I start the piece, just in case people aren’t comfortable with anything. I do like being flexible and writing across the spectrum — from fully notated to more graphic work — it allows me to explore different things. I like to draw the sounds as my first step, so I can see them and then think about how I can translate that sonically. With electronics, I always try to have a tape or some kind of visual guide that inspires me too.
Your ‘Limpidités’ series is ever increasing and involves a vast number of different forces and performers — can you tell me about your inspirations for these pieces and about the most recent iteration, ‘Limpidités VII’, which was performed by Elaine Mitchener at Wigmore Hall in January earlier this year?
So it has been inspired by the premise of Berio’s Sequenzas. It started with me writing a solo double bass piece, and then other solo instruments joined the pile, and I did a couple of miniatures, so I got to the point where I felt I had to explore every instrument! It’s fun because you get to work so specifically with performers and their instruments, and I get to explore what limpidité means for me. Looking specifically at transparency and what that word entails sonically, through form and other conceptual processes. The piece for Elaine was on the more conceptual end, but the saxophone piece took a more sonic approach, thinking about how you find identities of two of the same instrument when the sound is sometimes indistinguishable.
It’s a global term that I can explore in a plethora of ways. Writing for a singular instrument is scary and hard as it is so empty and is just one person — but it’s really fun at the same time! If I do use electronics in some iterations of the Limpidité series, the material has come from the performer and instrument itself. So the sound isn’t coming out of nowhere; there is a connection with whoever is performing, rather than it being multiple different instruments having their say.
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We are all very excited for the upcoming UK premiere of ‘Tossed Parachutes of Lilacs and Lungs’ (first premiered in 2025 at Darmstadt Summer Course) for the 2026 Always Already There festival. Your list of inspirations, including the poetry of Nicky Beer, the taste of clementines on the tongue and faded light on green leaves, are so visually evocative; how do you translate these images sonically?
At the time of the commission, I was really delving into how I think about form, time, and my relationship with my materials. I had a bunch of stuff going on, but then I had to sit down and write the piece and have all those scary feelings like “oh, this is going to be played at Darmstadt!” After some time, I started to understand that the main thing was to tune in — focus on the sounds and be there for the love of the sound. A lot of the ideas at first came from the physical need to write music and be connected with music. I was thinking a lot about the room and the way the light would come in through the window. I was reading Nicky Beer, which is where the title comes from — although I have changed it slightly in my own words — and also exploring lots surrounding my dissertation too. So there were an abundance of influences for this piece — or at least things that influenced me at the time of writing.
The piece is structured in lots of different movements, which is something I’ve been loving playing with recently. I think providing a piece in different movements allows time to be experienced in a different way, so I just cut it all up and let the title describe each movement. I am being more and more adventurous with this idea. I just finished a fourteen-movement piece in sixteen minutes for saxophone — with the movements ranging from very short to very long. Sometimes they are attacca, and sometimes the performers need to take a break; the treatment of that has to be very precise for me. I have also made visuals before where the title for the next movement shows later than the start of the movement, so the audience has to experience the sound and figure out what it’s meant to mean on their own before I allow them to know the title for the individual movement. The electronics help to show where we are in space too.
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The UK premiere of Corie Rose Soumah’s ‘Tossed Parachutes of Lilacs and Lungs’ takes place on Saturday 24 October at Always, Already There at the Barbican Centre, alongside work by Marisse Cato and Pamela Z – learn more and buy tickets:
- https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2026/event/always-already-there-the-ensemble-and-pamela-z
- https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/series/always-already-there
Learn more about Corie Rose Soumah and her practice:
- https://www.corierosesoumah.com/homepage
- https://www.instagram.com/corie_soumah/
- https://soundcloud.com/coriesoumah
References / Links:
- Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (University of Minnesota Press, 2018)
- Flora Willson, ‘Are ‘Friends’ Electric? review – Elaine Mitchener redefines what singing means in virtuoso tour-de-force’ (2026), The Guardian
- Nicky Beer, https://www.nickybeer.com/poetry-online
- Luciano Berio – Sequenzas I-XIV (1958-2002)
- Corie Rose Soumah, New Sonic Endisms: An Analysis of Sound Making Practices Through Entangled Temporalities and Endings (2026), doctoral thesis, Columbia University
