Behind the music: “The Body Keeps the Score”
Part of a series exploring each piece on my debut album, Look How Brightly
When I first began sketching what would become The Body Keeps the Score, I was not setting out to make a statement about trauma. The piece began as a dance work created in collaboration with a choreographer at London Contemporary Dance School, and my starting point was to explore the relationship between music, sound, emotion, and the body. Coincidentally, I had recently read Bessel A. van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Transformation of Trauma, and his words were fresh in my mind:
“We have learned that trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body.”
The idea of the imprint, something invisible yet still living within us, became the central concept. I wanted to explore how experience becomes encoded in the body and mind, unconsciously shaping behaviour and emotion long after we think we have moved on.
Imprints and encodings
The idea of imprinting brought to mind other forms of embodied expression I had been exploring, particularly keening traditions such as Romania’s bocete and the Gaelic caoineadh. These rituals have long fascinated me for their purpose as a kind of musical working-through of grief and trauma. I have gathered field recordings of keening from various sources over the years and used them as inspiration for other works, including Three Dirges for the Living, which also features on this album.
For this piece, I wanted to go further by creating actual imprints, distortions, echoes, and shadows of the source material. I began with a short archival recording of a woman keening in Gaelic, made in the early twentieth century. I converted this recording into MIDI (a digital format that translates sound into musical data such as pitch and rhythm) using a basic online transcription tool. The process was deliberately crude, so the inaccuracies would produce something abstract and emotionally detached. What emerged was a complex web of notes, a mechanical impression of the voice, drained of humanity yet still carrying traces of its origin.
From this transcription, I extracted fragments such as single lines and rhythmic cells which became the musical material for viola and percussion. When the material returns later in the piece, it appears simplified and reduced, becoming imprints of imprints. Each repetition drifts further from its source, like a memory fading over time while retaining emotional weight. Alongside these instrumental layers,
I manipulated the original recording, layering and stretching it until it became something ghostly and disembodied, yet another imprint of an imprint.
Debris and distortion
In transforming the field recording, I was aware of being part of a larger conversation with composers who use found material as a way of engaging with memory and history. Edmund Finnis has written about how distortion can be a generative act rather than a destructive one, and how “by making new configurations out of the debris of the past we form a new relationship with it.” Peter Ablinger, meanwhile, describes his Voices and Piano works as commentaries on the original recordings, where the voice, the piano, and the listener’s perception each form distinct yet interrelated entities.
Those ideas resonate with me. The three sound worlds of The Body Keeps the Score — manipulated recording, mechanical percussion, and live viola — each have their own identity, yet all are drawn from the same origin. Together they form a kind of commentary, overlapping and diverging like fragments of memory.
Repetition and ritual
I have long been drawn to the music of Galina Ustvolskaya, whose fierce austerity and uncompromising repetition hold an almost sacred intensity. In the past I sometimes worried that my own use of repetition might be criticised as being overly simplistic. Working on this piece changed that. The repetition in The Body Keeps the Score is stark and intentional; it mirrors the way traumatic experiences are imprinted in the body and repeat until they are worked through.
The music is insistent and stripped to its essentials, creating something both primal and unresolved, like a thought or memory that refuses to release.
Composing this piece helped me let go of my fear of simplicity and repetition. It allowed me to write in a way that feels instinctive and true to the material, pared back, meditative, and searching.
Sound as memory
Although the piece began as a collaboration with dance, the choreography and music developed side by side rather than one following the other. Both shared the idea of imprints and traces — how gestures or sounds can leave behind a shadow of what once was. In one part, the dancers perform an intimate trio, then repeat it missing one performer, which leaves an outline where the third body had been. Later, the trio returns with the dancers isolated in separate spaces, repeating the same material but disembodied from its source.
This feels like a fitting analogy for what the piece is ultimately about: the haunting persistence of what remains unseen. Drawing on van der Kolk’s insights about the body’s imprint of traumatic experience, the music continues to remember what the conscious mind tries to forget.
Below: extracts from the dance interpretation of my piece, The Body Keeps the Score