To celebrate the selection of this year’s New Voices cohort, we caught up with all the selected artists and composers for a quick chat.

Here, we speak to New Voices 2020 composer Georgia Denham.

Can you tell us about your musical influences?

Delicate and gentle sounds definitely speak to my more introverted side; I love Morton Feldman, Meredith Monk’s instrumental writing, Laurence Crane, Unsuk Chin, Alex Somers. Understanding the relationship between their music and how they created it has had a significant influence on my practice.

There is something very empowering and exciting for me about diving into the specificity of music; a few years ago, I got into transcribing pop and free-improvised jazz, alongside studying orchestration and instrumentation. Having learnt to read music in my late teens, I fell in love with the power of notation as a language, and how much it can communicate in the world.

What are you working on at the moment?

I tend to work intensely in focused bursts, so nothing in particular right now. Having said this, I try to come up with a sketch most days; this might be a scribbled shape of a piece, a vocal idea, sometimes chords that I like. When I decide to work on something specific, I become very absorbed and protective of my material; it’s healthier for me to be a little distant until I want to take something further.

What are you looking forward to most about New Voices?