Open Call is an initiative which supports highly talented, emerging composers from backgrounds under-represented in the industry, to develop and challenge their compositional practice in laboratory-style commissions. This year, they will be sharing their work in progress at Spitalfields Music Festival in June, in collaboration with Rich Mix, giving us an insight into their creative journey and response to the 2020 Festival theme – Metamorphosis and Transformation.
We’re very excited to announce this year’s artists: Chisara Agor, Anna Pool and Lola de la Mata. Find out more about the artists and their project ideas below.
Lola de la Mata
Lola de la Mata is a London based composer, artist and musician who is currently associate composer at nonclassical. Her work ranges from monotypes and graphic scores, to installations and compositions for movement, voice, electronics and classical instruments. Lola’s electroacoustic music has been broadcasted on BBC Radio 3 and Resonance FM, and her feminist concept album REMISE EN BOUCHE (palate cleanser) was released in 2018 with Chicago net label Pan y Rosas Discos. Her recent works focus on her experiences of the female body, research based on artificial intelligence, and the appropriation of female voices in corporate products.
Project preview:
“Collaborating with a ‘feminist choir’, I will develop a sound installation to celebrate difference and raise awareness on the diversity of voices who are often labelled as ‘other’ and silenced, to make audible and visible women, trans women and non-binary voices.”
Anna Pool
Anna Pool is a director, composer and writer of opera, music theatre and plays. She makes work for adventurous artists and curious audiences, inspired by history, faith, myth and magic in the every day. Anna has also created and directed new music theatre work for the Barbican, English National Opera, English Touring Opera, Hall for Cornwall, Mahogany Opera Group and Wigmore Hall. She originally studied composition at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, winning the Edmund Rubbra Prize in 2015.
Project preview:
“I will create a massed choral work involving community choir and electronics, which explores the transformative power of faith on people and place… I hope the work will explore (the questions) of where do our belief systems, rituals and transformative experiences differ, but more importantly, where are they the same?”
Chisara Agor
Chisara Agor is an inter-disciplinary artist from Peckham, London. Her works spans music, theatre and art, grounded in her philosophical practice and desire to create work that speaks and engages with the wider community and human condition. As a singer-songwriter she has performed in the UK and abroad, and has appeared on stages including Southbank Centre, Jazz Café and Roundhouse. Her most recent EP In-Between sheds light on feeling both powerful and powerless in our current political climate, and showcases her eclectic soundscape of folk and jazz.
Project preview:
“My Open Call project will centre around people’s stories of being/feeling unseen and seen in daily life. It asks us to explore what we experience when we sit between two states of being. By asking these questions, I will investigate the ways in which people feel they are recognised and denied visibility.”
——————————————————————————————————————
Open Call is a collaboration with Rich Mix, and is generously supported by Help Musicians UK’s National Grants Programme and Spitalfields Music’s New Music Commission Fund.
Participant Call Out – Lola de la Mata