Claire Cope's 'Every Journey' and Women Who Dared to Explore

British composer and pianist Claire Cope has spent the better part of a decade swimming in the evenly flowing waters of contemporary classical music and jazz improvisation. Her musical education encompassed formal classical training and an irrepressible attraction to popular music, jazz, and improvisation. Cope began as a trained pianist at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, where she won both the John Ireland Prize and the Principal's Prize for Improvisation, and her early work included performances at the Manchester Jazz Festival and the London Jazz Festival, as well as appearances as part of the BBC Proms Plus Series. Yet it wasn't until her thirties that she fully embraced the identity of composer, a transformation that would prove to be one of several pivotal moments in her artistic career.

By 2020, Cope had formed Ensemble C, initially as a septet, and released the critically acclaimed debut album Small World. Critics praised her ability to create music that revealed "a deep sense of communication and musical community," establishing her as a composer worth watching.

In the interval between Small World and her latest release, Every Journey, Cope became a mother, an experience that deepened her empathy and expanded her emotional interests. She also made the bold decision to expand Ensemble C from seven to eleven pieces, creating new textural possibilities and allowing for more ambitious compositional structures.

Released in March 2025 to coincide with International Women's Day, Every Journey draws inspiration from the stories of pioneering female explorers and adventurers—figures like Isabella Godin, the first known woman to travel the full length of the Amazon, and Kate Marsden, the Victorian nurse who traveled alone across Siberia in search of a leprosy cure. The album is Cope's most assured and expansive work, featuring extended compositions that unfold with the scope and grandeur of musical expeditions. With Ensemble C now featuring eleven of the UK's finest musicians, including the wordless vocals of Brigitte Beraha and the guitar work of Ant Law, Every Journey is a celebration of female pioneers and a bold statement of Cope's own artistic ambitions. The music celebrates the courage required to embark on any meaningful venture, whether geographic, artistic, or personal.

Claire Cope recently joined host Lawrence Peryer on the Spotlight On podcast. In their conversation, Cope discusses her philosophical views on the relationship between improvisation and composition, the challenges of writing for an expanded ensemble, and her discovery of storytelling through music. You can listen to the whole conversation in the Spotlight On player below. The transcript has been edited for length, flow, and clarity.

Everything Opened Up

Lawrence Peryer: I wanted to ask about your formative training. I understand you began your training with piano performance, and composition came later. When did you first start composing?

Claire Cope: Early on, although I didn't start to think of myself as a composer until about the age of 30, which was five years ago. But when I was growing up, learning the piano and playing the flute, I always wanted to play things by ear. I learned loads of music by ear, so I trained classically while taking formal piano lessons. But I was so interested in pop music and rock, and I played in bands, and I think my first composing was writing songs.

Around halfway through my studies at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, I began improvising, getting into jazz more and more, and that's when I started composing for a piano trio that I had at the time. So definitely in the contemporary jazz realm. And then that kind of continued through my twenties.

However, it wasn’t until recently that I realized I could open up the possibilities of what I was composing, because classical music is just as important to me as jazz. Then, everything opened up, and I started writing for loads of different ensembles, which was really an amazing moment and realization.

Lawrence: How do you have a philosophical view or a perspective on improvisation? I've had some conversations where artists tell me they're one and the same. It's just time or notation that's different, but it's the same functional process.

Claire: It's such an interesting topic. I'm doing a one-year postgraduate diploma at the moment, in contemporary classical composition, at the Royal Northern College of Music. We just had a two-hour discussion in a seminar about where composition begins and improvisation ends.

I use improvisation as an important tool in my compositional process. Sometimes I will transcribe myself improvising, which I’ve done quite a lot this year. If I'm improvising at the piano, it liberates me a bit more than if I'm on Sibelius and thinking about how I need something to look notation-wise. In a way, that is quite liberating compositionally.

I mean, I agree that improvisation is composing. It's hard to distinguish at times, but I’m definitely interested in music that incorporates elements of improvisation and performer choice. I see it as a tool in composition during the process and as something that can guide what you might write or give to a performer. I feel lucky to have experience with improvisation as a composer because I think it's an essential part of how you ultimately find your ideas.

Lawrence: Transcribing your improvisations versus having to sit there and look at Sibelius—one strikes me as a bit more intuitive, and the other a bit more intellectual.

Claire: Yeah. I wrote this flute and piano piece this year, which I had heard in my head as a texture I wanted, and I improvised something based on what I was playing. It took me ages to transcribe it because it was quite complex. And I just know that I would not have written that had I gone the other way around and tried to figure it out through notation. It would've limited me, is what I'm trying to say. So I think it opens up more possibilities.

So, intuitive, I guess, is a good word for it. It depends. It's so different with each piece or whatever you're writing. Sometimes it's sitting at the computer that allows notation to come quite quickly, and other times it’s not. I'm very interested in compositional process, obviously.

Lawrence: Have you encountered any dogma on this topic? Are there people who sort of stake the claim on the hill that these things are dramatically different?

Claire: What came through in that seminar discussion was how improvisation is important to most composers now because there's so much more cross-genre collaboration. I think especially when we talk about contemporary classical music, and then like myself, who is in jazz as well, I think it's much more liberated.

There's so much music out there that, even though it can be heavily notated, the composer gives the performer a lot of choice. It’s still a way of improvising, even if they have limited choice, but they're still making decisions in the moment.

There was a range of opinions about the language of improvisation, and whether there is any such thing as real, true free improvisation that's free of learned language and process. I was thinking about Wadada Leo Smith, who I think quite famously got frustrated with the free jazz scene, and that's how he tried to go into making his more graphic scores. We had quite a big discussion about that, about language and what freedom of improvisation means.

Lawrence: It strikes me that the only two groups of people that can be completely free in that regard are the transcendent masters and the complete fools who have no training whatsoever. Everybody else is struggling to transcend technique and learning.

Claire: Fascinating. I agree.

All These Stories Are Journeys

Lawrence: Tell me about the new album, Every Journey. The release date, March 7th, was International Women's Day. I take it that’s not a coincidence.

Claire: Yes. The album is heavily inspired by the stories of women, especially female explorers and adventurers, some of whom are not well-known because their stories have not been historically documented in the same way as those of male explorers. And many of these stories I discovered through the work of author Jacki Hill-Murphy, a British author and explorer who has also led expeditions herself.

She has retraced the journeys of some of these incredible women and written the story alongside her own journey. She wrote a book called Adventuresses, which focuses on Isabella Godin, who is the first known woman to have traveled the full length of the Amazon. And there’s Mary Kingsley, who climbed Mount Cameroon. I focused on a few of the stories. Another one of her books is titled The Extraordinary Tale of Kate Marsden, which tells the story of a Victorian nurse who traveled alone across Siberia in the winter. She was determined to find a cure for leprosy, and she had heard about a plant rumored to be found somewhere in Siberia.

All of these stories are unimaginable and super dramatic, but it’s the courage and determination that stand out. I drew a great deal of inspiration from those stories as I began thinking about this album and what I wanted to write, and it all came together in that way. And then it made so much sense to release it for International Women's Day.

Lawrence: Is there something you could point to in the music where these influences are apparent?

Claire: The big thing is it's a lengthy album, and the tracks are long. I wanted them all to have quite big arcs, and it was vital that not only the overall album feels like a journey, but that each track does as well. That's how I feel when I listen to Maria Schneider's music. She takes you through so many moments, and the shape of it is quite complex. And so musically, that's where I was coming from. I wanted it to feel like a journey in the way that all these stories are journeys.

I tried hard to think about big structures, and I had a larger band, an 11-piece band, which offered many more textural possibilities and colors. So I think there's a lot of contrast in all of the pieces, and I've tried to think about interesting ways to use the band in all of the tracks. The second track is called "Flight," and that is inspired by Bessie Coleman, who was the first woman of African and Native American descent to get a pilot's license in the US in the early 1900s.

I wanted that to feel like, especially at the end, there's kind of a big electric guitar solo that gets quite rocky. I wanted it to feel like it was taking off at the end. Certain aspects were inherently programmatic to what I was trying to achieve. But I think the most important things were the shaping and structure, as well as the sense of journey throughout the whole thing.

Lawrence: You used the word programmatic. Did you mean it in the context of the tradition of program music?

Claire: I guess it's that thing of, when you say a piece of music is about something, then thinking, but how is that about something? What in that music is making it about something? Obviously, there was a whole debate about this in the late 19th century. I guess there are certain things musically, like small things you can pinpoint, where you can see how that might inspire that. However, it's still a contemporary jazz album, but of course, there’s also loads of musical inspiration.

There’s a track called “Amboseli,” which is all about the vast open space of Amboseli National Park in Kenya. It's a place where you can see so far away, you can see Mount Kilimanjaro in the distance. And so that's like a huge piece. It's more like a through-composed thing, and it's got this big structure, but I tried to make it feel spacious in how it builds.

Lawrence: I love the concept of program music. But it's always been interesting that we have a term for that. It strikes me as part of the artistic process of integrating your experience and other works to create something new.

Claire: It's been an enjoyable process because I have realized through doing this how much I love storytelling in music, which might sound like such an obvious thing, but I'm very interested in the narrative. And as you said, being guided by literature as well.

Lawrence: In reading about this album, you forced me to go back and listen to the Michael Brecker Wide Angles album. I hear the lineage from your record. The things that I felt were the scope, the grandeur of the music, and the power of the size of the ensemble. There's a bombast to it, a power to it, a driving force, but I also feel that there's a narrative scope to that record.

Claire: Oh, it's so good, right? It's not casual listening. I think that was the first album I discovered when I was younger that made me fall in love with the bass clarinet in particular. Some of the textures on the album are so interesting, and I listened to that so much to guide me when I was figuring out how to write for this size ensemble, where the horns could be a little bit overpowering.

There are just some tracks where the bass clarinet does something you wouldn't expect it to do. It doesn't play with the bass; it has this line on its own, and it's not with the other horns. So I learned some really intricate arrangement things from that album. But the harmony on the album is just so interesting all the time. And then obviously the space for him to play was important to me as well, for it to still feel like there was space for everyone to play and contribute to the form of the music. The strings on there are just that other color. It's fabulous.

Lawrence: This brings me to the expansion of Ensemble C to an 11-piece group. That's pretty ambitious in scope. How did you arrive at that?

Claire: As soon as I'd made a septet album in 2020, literally the minute I finished that, I knew I wanted to do something bigger because I enjoyed thinking about arranging the horns on that. I just wanted it to be in between that and big band. The Brecker album we were just talking about is around that size. I'm a big fan of the early Pat Metheny Group stuff, so I wanted more percussion. I felt like I found this size that might be just interesting enough before it got into big band territory, and which hopefully works arrangement-wise, which I think it does.

Size and Scope

Lawrence: What aspect of making Every Journey would you say took you furthest from your comfort zone or pushed you the hardest?

Claire: I think from a compositional technical perspective, the size of the ensemble, writing for that size ensemble, and figuring out how to arrange it well. How am I gonna make these arrangements interesting? I did it in quite a traditional way, like I've got the tunes, I've got the harmony, and then I started thinking about how to arrange it. So that was a big learning curve for me because I hadn't written for something this big before. And then also, I pushed myself in terms of structure.

Because the tracks are lengthy, I wanted to open up the possibility of thinking about structure in a different way. So there are a number of tracks where I've tried to through-compose a bit more and think about how I can do something different at the end. So yes, those two things in particular, for sure.

Lawrence: Do you demo the compositions? Is it your first hearing them when the ensemble fires up?

Claire: Yeah, I do use Sibelius, and NotePerformer on Sibelius is pretty good. So I do listen to MIDI a lot. But, oh my goodness, when you first actually get to play it, I mean, all those awful MIDI sounds go right outta your brain and that's great. (laughter)

I learned a lot after two full rehearsals, quite spaced apart, before we recorded. There was some revising after that for sure—things that needed changing balance-wise and such that you can only figure out when you're doing it live. Practical stuff about where the horns probably need to not play anymore for a bit because they all need to breathe. Those kinds of things. So there's only so much you can learn from being at a computer.

Lawrence: As a composer and leader, how conscious are you of creating lanes for everybody? How do you create an environment where it's satisfying for everyone?

Claire: I would be writing some pieces, and it would be very clear who would be featuring on that based on the style. I know these people well, and I wanted each piece to feel like a bit more of a feature. So there isn't a tune where there are five different solos. Like the first tune, "Every Journey Has a Beginning,” is a guitar feature.

Some things occurred in rehearsal that came about from us playing. The final track is called "Home." It's quite a slow track, and I thought there would probably be a vocal solo on that because it's quite a spacious piece. And then we tried doing this duet, like an improvised duet with voice and flugelhorn. And it was just so much better than anything I had thought of.

One of the more heavily notated pieces, “Amboseli,” has one tenor sax solo, part of the piece’s structure. Again, I’ve taken this from what Maria Schneider does a lot. She will often have an improvised section, which is part of the build of the piece. So it's not just, here's what's happened and here's a solo. It's like she’s thought about going into that and where it will go after that. And I learned a lot from that in writing that piece.

Lawrence: You've mentioned Maria a few times. She's sort of a towering figure. How long has she been in your consciousness?

Claire: Not that long, actually. I didn't properly go back and really listen to everything until a few years ago, particularly around the time she released Data Lords. It's music that just grows on me, even though I already love it. I still hear new things in it. I think it's the size and scope of her ideas that I'm so drawn to.

She's not afraid to do what she wants the music to do. There is no limitation, but it's also never too much. It's never unmusical. There are 20-minute tracks, but you believe they need to be 20 minutes because she's so good at that. I have such sincere respect and admiration for her as an artist who is adamant about how we should value music. I think she is a really important composer. I hope to meet her one day.

Visit Claire Cope’s official website at clairecopemusic.com. Listen to Claire Cope’s Ensemble C on Bandcamp, Qobuz, and your streaming platform of choice. Every Journey is out now on Adhyâropa Records.