“Closer to the world through the process of composing:" A Conversation with Ayanna Woods
“Closer to the world through the process of composing”
a conversation with composer Ayanna Woods
by Matthew Brown, 2026 summer associate @ The Crossing
The Crossing spent July of 2026 rehearsing and recording How to Survive, a multimedia project conceived, written, and designed by Suzanne Bocanegra with new music by Julia Wolfe, Hildur Guðnadóttir, Shara Nova, and Ayanna Woods. Each of the four movements prescribes memorable steps to survive a different natural disaster: hurricane, earthquake, tornado, and wildfire. On the sidelines of the July filming sessions, I had the opportunity to interview Shara Nova and Ayanna Woods, composers of the tornado and wildfire movements respectively. Keep reading for my conversation with Ayanna about composition as a path to learning beyond music, the unique challenges of this project, and some throughlines through her many collaborations with The Crossing.
Donald shared that he thought of you for the wildfire movement because of your past work with prairie advocacy, and you've written a piece on that subject that the Crossing performed in 2024. Can you tell me about that background?
My first choir commission as an adult was about climate change. I think it's been something choirs have been really interested in incorporating into their programs for a long time. And so one challenge for me is to not write the same piece over and over, and as I've been writing these climate focused pieces, it's turned into a really valuable portal for me to learn about the climates of specific regions of these choirs that I'm waiting for.
And so the prairie project was for Chicago Chamber Choir, and I also had prior to that project worked for a few years with the Field Museum in Chicago with a family friend, Rob Telfer…I learned through him about an ancient prairie not far from Chicago, in Rockford, Illinois, called Bell Bowl Prairie. At the same time as I was writing this commission, there was a grassroots movement happening in Rockford to save this prairie, which the airport was planning to build a cargo road cutting directly through in order to make themselves more attractive to Amazon cargo coming through that airport and all that kind of stuff…So over the course of a year that I had to write this piece, I was attending these community meetings with the group in Rockford over Zoom, and I was reading more about the prairie, learning about the Rusty Patch Bumblebee—which is an endangered bee that was one of the things we were able to use to stall this construction. And it was challenging for me to try to encapsulate everything I was learning into a three minute piece…
I didn't know where the text was coming from. I started looking up all these specific flower species and looking at photos of them, and this one flower I totally fell in love with is called “Prairie Smoke,” which became the name of the piece, and it has these three knotting flowerheads that when it blooms, it opens up into this cotton candy swirl that just looks so perfect. And when they all boom together up this slope of the prairie, it looks like smoke that's rising up off the prairie. It was the most beautiful flower I've ever seen. And there was a shift that happened internally for me from this broad [idea] of we should save nature…to this specific flower. I want to save this specific thing. And I want that shift to also happen with the people hearing the piece…
That piece, “Prairie Smoke,” actually had a positive association with fire because of the tradition of indigenous peoples doing controlled burns to maintain. There's this long history of a positive impact of humans on the Earth that we forget and pretend doesn't exist and is impossible for us anymore. But in the text of “Prairie Smoke,” there's a positive association of setting fire as us tapping into our ability to be in a positive relationship of stewardship with Earth.
You mentioned you went to a year's worth of these meetings about conservation and then it became a three-minute piece. But that kind of immersive research must be important to you in getting your emotions and your craft behind something. Can you tell me about that process in your life?
I think that's really one of the things that makes me feel that I'm doing something impactful with my time when I'm writing choir pieces. I try not to frame things always in a way that everything has to have a utility to it, but I'm convinced more by what I'm doing when I can feel that shift within myself and try to fractal that out to other people. I think if a piece can do that, then I've done something. And even with [“Wildfire”], even if this piece never gets performed again, I understand what happened to me over the course of writing this piece. And so now I know that I did what I was supposed to do.
It's a really special thing to be able to have the freedom with these creative projects and the trust from the conductors and the ensembles to say, “Here's the program theme or the season theme, and you can decide what to focus in on,” and then I get to spend several months or however long just sort of triangulating and learning. I’m grateful for that opportunity to get closer to the world through the process of composing, which can otherwise feel like a pretty isolated, solitary thing.
You mentioned you don't want to worry about everything having a utility, and in fact, you've written a piece about that for the Crossing. In Infinite Body there's that kind of satirical movement about “maximize your energy, maximize your productivity.” And what I see in your process is that it's not just about maximizing productivity and the number of notes on the page, the work is to understand the world and give that time of learning and research and immersion. And when you do put pen to paper, that act has more authenticity in it.
Thank you for reflecting that. It's really nice to hear.
You often write your own texts, but in this project, you've worked with another artist, Suzanne, and set her words. Can you tell me about how that changes your musical process? It was really, really challenging. And I'm really in love with how it turned out. I know I made very different musical choices because of the way the text was. It's much, much longer than the text I usually write for a piece of this length. And it also is very direct and not flowery. It's not trying to paint you a picture or anything. It's a list of instructions, and also has the repetitions built over of, “If you are trapped inside—A, if you are trapped inside—B.” And because of how intentional that structure felt, I was like, "Oh, OK, I really have to honor this order of operations and where the repetitions are.”
When I write a text for myself, it might start out a few paragraphs long and then as I'm putting it to music I'm cutting things, I'm rearranging things, I'm adding repetitions, I'm taking them back away…So I feel a lot of flexibility with the text, and I don't necessarily feel precious about throwing away something that I wrote myself…But I think the phrasing of Wildfire is much more interesting because of the length of sentences and things that I couldn't force into the shape I wanted them to be.
I was also trying to think of ways to cram in all these words, which led to the sort of fast whispering that has the fire sound…And then that became the gibberish at the beginning as well…So it led to a lot of interesting experiments that I wouldn't necessarily have reached for with my own text.
“Wildfire” does contain a lot of these aleatoric elements, these textures. I'm curious how you conceptualize these techniques and how you decide to notate them. Is it a matter of finding something in your own voice and exploding that to the ensemble? Or hearing a sound on the big level and figuring out how to make it happen on the individual?
I think a little bit of both…One thing I always do is play around by recording and layering my own voice and trying different things that way, but I also was listening on YouTube to recordings of alarm systems or actual fire or different types of sirens, pulling those samples directly into the DAW, and then trying to imitate them with my voice in different ways.
When it comes to the notation, fortunately, I've been experimenting with trying to bridge aleatory and more through-composed stuff for some years now. So I had some stuff in my back pocket, but also it was really helpful in the workshop to see, for example, the way Shara notated her long glisses for the sirens…We talked about the different degrees of prescriptiveness versus freedom or flexibility for the individual singers and how much space is helpful versus how much instruction is helpful.
You mentioned you do a lot of recording of your own voice and layering. Is that where you start?
I think the first couple things I did were reading and watching and getting materials into my head about wildfires in general—both the sound world of it and the lived experience of it. Looking at the text, I'm marking up where the different linguistic parallels are but also thematic or imagery parallels. I will latch on to anything that even is kind of close to a rhyme. If it's the same sequence of vowels together, even if the continents don't match, or if just the spoken rhythm of a couple phrases are similar, even if the vowels and consonants have nothing to do with each other, I'll go with color pencil and just mark all that stuff up. So I have a sense of the possibilities of where to connect things to each other. Those are probably my very first steps and then I'll start trying to experiment with things with my voice.
So it does sound like you're a bit of a planner...
I am a bit of a planner. (laughs) There's a lot of planning and then a lot of abandoning the plans and then maybe later on I'll be like, “Oh, I actually did end up doing the thing I started with…”.
I enjoy the work you've done with Third Coast Percussion. And I hear that experience between the intricate rhythmic layering and the way that you transition between different textures in the choir. What are some lessons you learned from the percussion world and how do you find that translating into your vocal writing?
I know in my first piece I wrote for Third Coast, I was very singularly focused on rhythm and displacement and playing around in that space. But really, there's so much color and playfulness. I feel like percussionists are just very game to experiment…I felt able to be a little more playful the more I started to write for percussion.
And I have a comfort level that's different with vocal music since I've been singing in choirs my whole life. I feel a little bit like I had to earn that more with the percussion music…It's been a progression of making what in my mind started as a separation between the two languages, kind of making that boundary a little more permeable…
A group like the Crossing is very comfortable with rhythmically complex things. I think there's a kind of shady risk conception for some people who don't think singers can handle rhythm. And so that's been exciting for me to play in really intense rhythmic spaces in choral music as well.
Staying with texture, in “Bound,” which we performed on this year’s Month of Moderns 1, “Golden Hour” from Infinite Body, and “Wildfire”, these works have sections of long drones in parts of the choir or murmuring ostinatos behind something a little bit more constantly changing in the front. Can you tell me about how you’ve found that juxtaposition in your work?
I often find working with rhythm to be a thing that will jog me out of a creative block. But everything doesn’t have to like “bang.” (laughs) I remember specifically in “Bound”, I was really liking the placidness of the beginning, and getting from there to where I knew I wanted to end up in a driving rhythmic place was very challenging. And once I went up the repeating scale [at “for the transformation”], that broke it open for me, and it was very easy to come up with a melody from there. Now that that’s a thing I know about myself, I think that's something I will reach for. It's one of the challenges of finding a balance of not overcrowding, and being really intentional about how much texture is necessary to get an effect across…
In Wildfire, there are a couple of solo moments where one of the tenors comes to the front on “if you are outside.” There are some wonderful short solos in “Bound” proclaiming “right now!” And then longer stretches in “Infinite Body”. Can you tell me a little bit more about what the solo voice carries for you in a choir piece?
I think it in part will have to do with whatever extent I consider to be like…“I'm putting an individual in this situation in the text. I think in that section of “Wildfire”—and I think Hildur mentioned this too in her performance notes—you're outside, it's very loud, and you're yelling. So there's both the solo voice that maybe is a little harder to hear over the chaos and then also people yelling within the chord in the homophonic chorus part that I felt like lent itself well to the context.
In Infinite Body—that whole piece was very personal to my experience at the time. In “Do Be Do” for example, the solo is where the piece kind of pivoted into being a little bit more like a direct address, which Aryssa did so fantastically…
Sometimes it's a textural thing. Sometimes it's a math of the amount of people thing. And I also think there's a different impact, a different type of intimacy maybe a solo voice can carry versus that chorus. And so I find it effective to be able to kaleidoscope between those.
As a composer-performer, how does writing for other groups impact your writing for yourself, and how does performing fuel that creative energy?
Performing's been on the backseat probably for like five or six years for a lot of different reasons…As I've not been performing, I think the songwriting has been sneaking into the choir music a little bit more, like the last couple of pieces I wrote for Chanticleer were similar to “Do Be Do” which is kind of a solo the whole time that has a textural accompaniment around it. I find that really, really fun to do…I think I learned so much about ensemble singing and form in the last several years of primarily just composing that I'm very excited to apply in small group singing or in my band or in other projects that are not necessarily “concert music” projects. That is still an open question, but I'm excited.