About Jenni
Testimonial, by Alex Ingram, conductor.
“I‘ve known Jenni as a composer and performer for many years. It was an extended period of development work on her extraordinary opera “Innana” – that intoxicating, vibrant opera with its unabashed mixture of rawness, beauty and accessibility – that introduced me to her unique creative world. Jenni is someone who is patently in touch with her own creative centre and through a mixture of abundant generosity of spirit and penetrating insight into the highways and byways of human expressivity, has helped countless singers both amateur and professional to find unsuspected depths in their own performative practice.
If any musical practice could be said to cross genre and cultural borders it’s Jenni’s mix of composition and improvisation, the latter being a field in which she is clearly a leader-expert. I’ve observed her working with TIC, The Improviser’s Choir – to witness them in performance mode is a viscerally exciting experience. Singers from a completely disparate range of ethnic and cultural backgrounds work together under her subtle leadership to create an ever-evolving tapestry of organised musical sound seemingly out of thin air.
Her compositional practice, while always managing to steer clear of pastiche, has always deftly mixed folk and even pop influences with more obviously sophisticated post-minimalist, Ivesian and post-tonal high-art techniques. This produces a fresh and original – very personal – flavour whose rich and attractive harmonic and contrapuntal vocabulary instantly appeals to both lay listeners and the professional ear. At the same time her many years of personal practice as a singer ensures that every vocal line she writes is eminently singable and often searingly expressive.“
Alexander Ingram. Opera Conductor and Vocal Coach. Music Staff ENO 1987-2003. Staff Conductor ENO 1998-2003 . Guest Coach : National Opera Studio, Guildhall School of Music, Jette Parker Young Artists Programme.
“Her forty-year career demonstrates a relentless commitment to vocal innovation, to community, and a blending of tradition with contemporary exploration, establishing her as a distinctive figure in modern composition and new vocal leadership.”
Angharad Cooper, EU/UK Arts Consultant, 2025.
A little more biography, 2002 – 2011
See the composer page for an outline of Jenni’s earlier years, 1985 – 2001.
For two years, 2001-2002, Jenni stopped composing and most of her other music-making. The première of Siddhartha Spirit Child went ahead at Ocean Night Club in Hackney in May 2001, so there were rehearsals and three performances. However, the ages 41 and 42 were a difficult couple of years. One of the ‘endings’ during this period, which included several bereavements, separations, and other stresses, was the relationship with Lontano, which after eleven fruitful years, ended.
As 2003 began, Jenni found inspiration and solace in the poem Wild Geese by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver. Wild Geese for voice and piano was the piece that broke the silence of the previous two years, followed quickly by The Poet, both setting Oliver’s poetry for voice and piano. Jenni composed a corpus of piano-vocal music that she performed in various small-scale settings and culminated in a public performance at Kings Place Hall One in 2009 in a half-evening set of her Long Songs. Please check the scores for the complete list of works for voice and piano during this time.
As the noughties wore on, she was invited to present her opera The Descent of Inanna at the Grimeborn Opera Festival 2009. Other concerts and recordings continued, including the concert at Kings Place.
Jenni stepped back from freelance life in 2010 – 2011 for a ‘reset’. She began a one-year full-time MMus in Twenty-First Century Music at Brunel University. She passed with distinction in 2011. During her studies, she composed two new works –
2010, I Was Going to Tell You My Story – for brass quintet, organ, and choir.
2011, Between the Octaves, a piano duo in seven movements. Revised 2024.
Vocal Tai Chi and Choirs, 2012 – 2022
Following her Masters degree in January 2012, Jenni founded Vocal Tai Chi, a practice of intuitive vocal improvisation and ‘a voice-life practice for the whole self’. It developed out of her previous work in therapeutic voicework and her studies with several Indian classical vocal music teachers. (See writer for more).
Jenni conceived of TIC! The Improvisers’ Choir and sister community choirs – TIOC! The Improvisers’ Open Choir and TIEC! The Improvisers’ Essence Choir in 2014. TIC launched in May 2015 (TIOC and TIEC in 2016 and 2017) with a début performance in December 2015 at Vortex Jazz Club in Dalston. All choirs use signals, or ‘conduction’, to produce improvised music. TIC is a professional choir, and TIOC and TIEC are community projects.
She performed extensively and recorded with her choirs between 2015 and 2020. TIC performed several times in the South Bank Centre foyer, at Vortex Jazz Club, twice, at Koç University in Istanbul and in a series of three concerts titled Club Vocalé at Earl Haig Hall, an old British Legion social club in Crouch End. TOC played many local gigs around the Crouch End area between 2016 and 2019, and TEC sang together in Jenni’s flat for two years in that period and has not performed as yet. TIC stayed in her heart through the lockdowns as she wrote about the practice, its techniques, principles and vision and worked on the music film Land Mass in 2021.
Lockdowns 2020 – 2021 – Chapter and Land Mass Film
During lockdown number one, Jenni spent her time writing the chapter on musical leadership, titled Beyond Music Workshops, – A Composer and a Community, published in August 2024 in The Routledge Global Companion to Women and Musical Leadership – The Nineteenth Century and Beyond.
The curators of the book, Helen Julia Minors (York University) and Laura Hamer (Open University) run the International Conference for Women in Musical Leadership, to which Jenni was invited to give the keynote speech in 2019, at Senate House, central London, and from which the idea to compile the Companion was seeded. See the writer section for more.
Jenni is the artistic director of the film Land Mass, sung by TIC! The Improvisers’ Choir. The soundtrack was recorded in July 2019 with funds from the PRS Foundation and a private donor. Through the autumn and winter of 2019, Jenni worked with the recording producer Asier Leatxe Ibañez d’Opakoa, editing the improvisations, bringing out the best musical result as a single journey across an extended duration, exposing a bigger vision behind the original recording. During the later lockdowns in 2020, Jenni compiled a running order and gave titles that described a narrative line with Sara Pozin, who made the videos for each piece. The whole lot was then shared with director Simon McBurney, who, in one brilliant stroke, came up with the title Land Mass, saying, “It’s as if the voices are rising from the land itself.” Once the title was there, the idea of following a seasonal year gave a natural flow through the improvised music: Plough, Sow, Seed, Root, Birds, Sap, Bud, Seed, Stem, Birds, Sprout, Reap, Seed, Husk, Yield, Birds, Orb.
The film (running for a total of 48 minutes) was presented online in early 2022 and submitted to various festivals. It includes the track Orb, a solo vocal improvised piece by Jenni to Bach’s Prelude No. 1 in C major, performed by Cassie Yukawa McBurney. The film has won the ‘Best Sound’ laurel for the 2023 ‘Sound on Screen’ Film Festival in their Feature Film category.
Land Mass is available to watch [unlisted] on YouTube.
Beyond Lockdowns, 2022 – 2025, Unlocking the Composer
From September 2022, Jenni was conceiving of the possibility of the first Vocal Tai Chi Apprenticeship. She put out the call and in March 2023, the first cohort gathered in Crouch End to start a three-module process. This culminated in a shared performance in July 2023, demonstrations in front of Jenni of their VTC work with private clients, each apprentice leading a public VTC workshop, a solo vocal recording of VTC from each apprentice, and a 6000-word essay from everyone on the subject. Five practitioners were given certificates of accomplishment in Vocal Tai Chi in October 2023.
In June 2023 Jenni began a new journey with her composing, moving on from a nine-year composing silence. Other projects vied for her attention during that ‘silent’ time, and out of this period came the choirs. However, compositionally, she was blocked. In October 2022, at a friends-of-the-family dinner, she began to face her situation. One of the guests at the dinner table asked her, ‘..and what do you do?’ To her surprise, she answered, ‘I was a composer.’ The grammar landed heavily in her heart. The guest replied kindly, ‘Surely, once a composer, always a composer?’
A few weeks later by a lucky chance, Jenni saw a call in the Arts Jobs listing for a course in the Pyrenees mountains titled ‘Modern Composition’ with Gavin Bryars. Without blinking, she signed up and decided to travel by train through France to get there.
Composing The Brimming Stone, a new score (2024) commended to BBC.
Jenni left the residency in early June 2023, returning to London to run the third module of the Vocal Tai Chi Apprenticeship. She had a ten-minute sketch of the poem in her notebook set to music. She continued to work on the piece through the autumn and winter of 2023. By January 2024, the piece was done. The process of composing it – inspired by Gavin Bryars and his open-minded approach- was liberating and joyful. After nine years, a lot had germinated internally, and it was pointed out to her that her work as a leader with the choirs had helped the composing. The piece also creates possible spaces for improvisation, which connects naturally with the voice projects she had focused on in the previous seven years. The scoring is SATB chamber choir, chamber string orchestra, piano, organ, and gong.
For more background on how the piece arose, see the blog post Brimming Stone for chamber choir.