Anna Disley-Simpson: Chrysalis

Available for over a year

Anna is 19 and from Bath. She is a singer and bassist in the band, Lunar, who have recently been featured on BBC Introducing. She is also a composer with the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, who have performed her music at the Sage Gateshead, the Royal Festival Hall, Aldeburgh, Birmingham Symphony Hall and the Tate Britain. In 2014 Anna was selected as a Senior winner of the Proms Inspire Young Composers’ Competition. As part of her prize, Anna received a BBC commission to write a short piece for chamber ensemble of BBC Symphony Orchestra musicians, taking ideas of memory, nature and freedom as a starting point. Developed over a series of workshops with composer Martin Suckling, conductor Rumon Gamba and BBC Symphony Orchestra musicians, the final piece, Chrysalis, received its world-premiere at a Proms Extra event at the Royal College of Music on 8 August 2015. “For my piece, Chrysalis, I took a lot of inspiration from the core words given in our brief for the commission: 'freedom', 'nature', and 'memory'. I decided to try and evoke what it might feel like to be placed into the body of a caterpillar on its journey from spinning into a cocoon to emerging as a butterfly. I tried to capture a sense of loneliness and isolation at first, as well as a feeling of apprehension towards the new and unfamiliar, the task of coming to terms with a life that will never be the same again. The further the caterpillar metamorphoses, the greater the feeling of doubt. There is a particularly percussive section in the piece to emulate this feeling of discomfort and worry. However, as the caterpillar surfaces as a butterfly, although its way of life has drastically altered, there is a realisation that its surroundings are still as comforting and familiar as the life remembered before the cocoon.”