From Improvisation to Composition

Photo of Simone Seales. Photo Credit Beth Chambers

My piece we have cried for so long is my first “proper” composition. I have made sketches of my improvisations, and have recorded improvised performances for theatre and film, however, not until now have I written music for others to interpret and perform. 
 
The process of creating this piece was extremely slow and started mainly with me trying to figure out how to translate the music in my head into notation for others to read. For some context, I’ve spent the last 6 years developing my improvisational practice, focusing on sound creation and finding joy in playing the cello after years of seriously studying classical music. Improvisation helped me to remove the barrier of “it must be perfect”, and allowed me to create a new foundation of thinking centred around curiosity and playfulness. Improvisation has changed the entire way I play my instrument, from feeling stiff and stuck, to relaxed and fluid. I no longer care about creating the “most beautiful” tone, and am deeply interested in all the gnarly sounds that can be made to express the complex feelings we all experience. And I wanted to translate this sense of freedom into musical notation, a medium which as often caused some mild level of anxiety. 
 
So, I decided to incorporate the elements of my improvisational style that make me feel the freest: poetry and weird little sounds.

​Dearest, a poem I wrote and an improvised music response 

​Blush Bloom (music by Rylan Gleave, poetry by Simone Seales)
 
When I received the prompt for this commission, to write something relating to Scottish folklore, I had a quick google search of Scottish tales and ‘monsters’. The one which instantly grabbed my attention was the caoineag, a banshee in the Scottish Highlands who cries for death to come. I found myself enthralled with the idea that they, like us, can see beyond the Highlands and are crying for all the tragedy we are inflicting on one another through our action and inaction. We are constantly exposed to horrific images of death and destruction through our phone screens, and sometimes it feels like too much to bear, but these creatures, they are the ones whose duty it is to bear witness and weep. 
 
This inspired me to write a poem from the perspective of the caoineag, imagining how tired they must be of constantly crying, and that we humans must surely know their song so well by now. I set the poem (below) to a soundscape and wrote a lament to represent their cries. The music accompanying the poem is more textural and soundscape-y to create the atmosphere of tension and grief. The sounds are there to enhance and highlight the text rather than overpower it. The music for the lament is from an improvisation I recorded after the results of the US election; I then transcribed it using notation software and wrote the soprano line to complement that cello. 

I feel that, after this piece is premiered, I can properly allow myself to say I’m a composer. 

​A blog by Simone Seales