Choral Compose
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Blogs: Anna Disley-Simpson

About Anna…

Anna is a Composer and Singer who has just finished her undergraduate degree in Composition at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester. This year, she is continuing to forge a portfolio career alongside her role as the Graduate Musician in Residence at Radley College in Oxfordshire. Her side projects include working as a freelance composer, including a year-long residency as the Composer in Residence for the London Oriana Singers, singing professionally in the London Contemporary Voices, adding to her own series of works for solo instrument and electronics, and even a self-produced podcast is in the pipeline.

Her choral music background has instilled in her a love of Benjamin Britten, Jonathan Dove, and Judith Weir, and a particular penchant for delicate, sparkling soundworlds such as those created by Hans Abrahamsen and Emily Hall. She also particularly admires work considered to be 'cross-genre' that often includes electronic elements by artists such as Björk, Imogen Heap and Anna Meredith.

Utilising her platform as a composer, performer, educator, and mentor, Anna hopes to pass on her brimming enthusiasm for music and art that challenges, intrigues and excites an audience.

Exploring Graphic Scores

Author: Blogger in Residence, Anna Disley-Simpson

Author: Blogger in Residence, Anna Disley-Simpson

Unlike conventional notation, graphic scores can be a way of notating a piece that can incorporate many more elements of freedom. It can be a really good way to break away from the components that traditional notation favours such as strict pitches, specific rhythms, and the concept of a mono-dimensional timeline of events. Perhaps you’d like to compose a piece that isn’t quite so linear and rigid in its directions with a score that gives more importance to elements such as texture, shape/form, and theatrics.

Whilst having the potential to look super beautiful and interesting, graphic scores can also be a great way to notate music for more inexperienced performers, especially vocalists. Even looking at Cathy Berberian’s mega-virtuosic piece Stripsody, a piece for solo voice made up of onomatopoeic sounds from comic-strips, one can interpret the score without being all that familiar with conventional notation at all. It’s really exciting that a graphic score can be interpreted by anyone, regardless of experience level or technical ability, especially in the context of the often very esoteric contemporary music landscape.

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For me, seeing examples of this type of scoring really inspired me creatively when I found myself writing a piece for Juice Vocal Ensemble and beat boxer MaJiKer a few years ago. I loved that there could be so much flexibility with regards to the performers’ interpretation, and it was liberating to write a piece that for once wasn't confined within strict bar lines. I explored creating a soundscape for the first time through the first part of the piece which was fully graphically scored, and I went on to include elements of this in the beat boxer’s part in the more conventionally-notated latter part of the piece.

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Through this new approach I found myself with a dynamic piece that was far more rhythmically exploratory and pop-inspired than my earlier works, and my understanding of that which could be done with the human voice had been exponentially broadened over the course of the compositional process. Despite being over six years old now, it’s one of my favourite pieces I’ve ever written, even though I would definitely refine the score presentation if I was to revise it! Even nowadays, though, I’m finding that techniques I learnt during that process are still very much wangling their way into my vocal writing.

Have a listen to the piece here. Juice and MaJiKer are fabulous and represent the absolute pinnacle of contemporary vocal music performance. As well as writing a lot of their own repertoire, they also regularly work with a variety of exceptional composers such as Anna Meredith, Gabriel Prokofiev, and Roxanna Panufnik, to name a few. Entitled Underneath, my piece for them is a setting of words I wrote myself as a comfort to someone with a fear of the sea.

If you’re interested in exploring more of these weird and wonderful types of notation, Dr Eva Moreda Rodríguez, Lecturer in Musicology at the University of Glasgow, runs a fabulous Twitter account called @NotationIsGreat. The account’s content isn’t solely graphic scores, but there are tonnes of fascinating posts exemplifying beautiful and unusual musical notation! This article also includes some of my favourite examples including Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise, a graphic score comprising of a combination of abstract shapes and symbols written in the mid 1960s…

Written by Anna Disley-Simpson

ORA Singers