ABOUT
Anna Murray is a mixed-media composer and artist from Ireland. She has a particular interest in collaboration and improvisation, and creates highly-conceptual work combining text, movement, imagery and sound. Her work explores ideas of scoring, music phenomenology and breaking down the relationships between composer and performer, and is concerned with an examination of meaning and musical communciation. Her work is highly gestural, with unique textures, informed by her close study of Japanese Noh. In 2019 she was awarded the Japanese Government MEXT Scholarship to attend Tokyo University of the Arts as a research student, where she studied Noh with Takeda Takashi 2019-2021.
Graphic scoring is a core part of Murray’s work, which often involves scores based on ink painting; she also creates miniature artwork-scores in her Postcard Pieces series. Murray is also a regular performer of live improvised electronics, using random processes to build longform sound performances from samples and field recordings under the title Rndr. She has released four albums of electronic music, and an album of field recordings with interventions, City Shadows, on Café OTO’s Takuroku label. She curates and hosts the experimental music concert series, Kontakt. As of August 2022, Kontakt is also a monthly radio show on CAMP radio, playing experimental, electronic and improvised music.
Recent works and releases include ‘Both Beaming and Beckoning’ for the Eighth Blackbird Creative Lab 2023;: ‘Aioi’ for Quiet Music Ensemble, performed and recorded in July 2022; The moon sets and birds cry / 月は落ち、鳥が鳴いて, an album of improvisatory piano/electronics reflections inspired by Noh; ‘Crosstalk’, created for Crash Ensemble as part of their Reactions project in 2020 in response to the Covid-19 emergency; ‘my little Force explodes’ (commissioned by Ergodos and performed by Michelle O’Rourke and Lina Andonovska), based on the ‘envelope poems’ of Emily Dickinson and comprised of graphic scores written on envelopes to be opened by the performers; and music for three productions with Yokohama Theatre Group.
Reviews:
Anna Murray walks us through three very different spaces, our gaze tinged by instrumentation and recorded sound that acts as the haze of retrospect. Not once are we forced down a certain path or didactically commanded to think a certain thing. At all times, we are being presented the surroundings alongside a more translucent impression of the place and its aura. Anna steps lightly and deftly avoids manipulation or any act that may disrupt the natural order of things. Throughout, the natural impression of the place and its more intangible spirit vie for supremacy.
Listencorp on City Shadows, Jan 2021
Anna Murray’s Crosstalk reflected her immersion in Japanese culture and the graphic score of the piece inclined the performers towards melodies of long sustained pitches and short rapid figurations that hinted at the kind of melodic lines associated with the Shakuhachi, the traditional Japanese bamboo flute. Towards the latter stages of the piece, when the lines became more jagged and abrasive, this aspect lessened but never disappeared completely.
Adrian Smith on Crosstalk, The Journal of Music, April 2021
…there is a warmness to it; it ensconces you. Not that the music is without a sharper edge; the gong-like sounds are contrasted with buzzing machinery sounds; 'Rndr8 (Shuddering)' in particular sits in this unsettling soundscape… Murray's ability to conjure full, curious, and enthralling sounds is marvellous, and I could very easily walk amongst its looming but somehow reassuring shadowy structures for far longer.
James Camien McGuiggan, The Journal of Music Reader Reviews on Rndr II, March 2020
Murray’s piece, my little Force explodes, demonstrated the subtle influence of Japanese Noh and consisted of a semi-theatrical presentation in which singer Michelle O’Rourke opened envelopes containing each section of the piece. There then ensued a subtle interplay as the flute (Lina Andonovska) picked up on fragments of each of the sung sections and played with them until the opening of another envelope. In one of the sections the vocal line was reduced to sibilant whispering noises which were then taken up and imitated by the flautist like a sort of surreal tennis match. Both O’Rourke and Andonovska managed to convey the hushed drama of the piece with great conviction.
Adrian Smith on my little Force explodes, The Journal of Music, March 2019