Interview with Simone Seales
Talking with the cellist and composer about improvising as a classical musician, the vulnerability in their new album, and weird words.
Originally from Florida, Simone Seales is a Glasgow-based cellist and performance artist. They focus on free improvisation, live looping, poetry, and devising music for theatre. Through their collaborative and creative process, they prioritize play, silliness, and connection.
Simone is passionate about exploring sound, how sound can reflect emotional states of being and how emotions are embodied. Their creative influences come from Black feminist leaders such as Audre Lorde, Assata Shakur and bell hooks. Within Simone's creative work, they centre Blackness, sexuality, intersectional feminism and anti-racism. They believe Western Classical musicians are capable of making meaningful social change.
Recently, Simone was commissioned by the Edinburgh International Book Festival to create a live performance of their poetry-music album Dearest for the 2025 festival season. Simone is currently a Musician in Residence for Paraorchestra, and is a recipient Paraorchestra’s Modulate Ideas Fund, the Innovation Studio Fund, Sphinx MPower Artist Grant 2022 and former Young Artist in Residence for Chamber Music Scotland. Learn more about Simone on their website.
Eli Thayer: You’ve written on your website about rediscovering aspects of yourself that you’d neglected during your classical music studies, one of which was a love of improvising. Where did that love originate?
Simone Seales: It came from a summer camp that I attended back in the states, with the Sphinx Performance Academy. It was all about ensembles and string quartets, and there was an hour session where we learned about improvisation and improvising within a group. That’s where I was first properly introduced to it, and I just loved it. I loved making up sounds and live composition. I had never been interested in composition — notating things — but I liked this idea of having jam sessions, which doesn’t really happen in classical music. You’re always practicing or rehearsing. With improvisation, we could just play and have fun, a bit like being in a band.
That’s how I found out about improv, and it’s been in my life ever since. I was sixteen when I was introduced to it, and over the last seven years since I moved to Scotland it’s become my whole practice.
ET: So, was there a period where you ‘lost’ improvising? Or was it always factored into your practice?
SS: I wouldn’t say I ever lost it, but I also wouldn’t say it was always factored in. Studying classically meant that I was learning concertos, learning sonatas, doing string quartets, and I always had that desire to improvise and to make things up, and to play with other people, really. I was more into improvising within ensembles. Since moving to Scotland and studying at the Royal Conservatoire, I was introduced more and more to improvisation. But then lockdown happened and I couldn’t play with other people, and that’s really when I started improvising more and more on my own and developing my own ideas. It was sort of happening a bit before that — I would make up tunes and try these solo improvisation things — but once lockdown hit, I was like, “I can’t play with others, so what else can I do? I still want to express myself.” So I decided to just go all in on improvisation. I started making things up for friends and using emotion words, which I still do now in shows.
ET: And that led to your master’s study?
SS: At RCS, you can focus on pretty much anything you want, which is a blessing and a curse. I was still in my first year, 2018-19, focusing on classical music, and I’d taken some improv classes because they were offered. In the second year of my master’s, I got to go to the METRIC Intensive Programme conference in Estonia, which was this thing where different European Union schools can go and improvise. That was my first time seeing people that improvise for a living. I was like, “Oh! I don’t have to do all this classical music stuff.” It was during that last half of my master’s when I locked into it.
ET: At that conference, what sort of backgrounds did the other participants have? Was it mostly classical musicians?
SS: Hard to say! It was a wide variety, I think. People that had trained as dancers and were improvising, people that had different research backgrounds and improvised in that way, people that were classically trained musicians… just all sorts of people that were very skilled at their instruments and skilled at communicating through sound. Whichever way they came about it, they were just good at communicating. That was amazing to experience.
ET: You said you weren’t interested in composing before you started improvising. It seems like that has since changed.
SS: Um, a bit. I have composed, by which I mean I have written music down. What I usually say is that I “make music” for theater and dance, which in some ways is composition. I don’t often notate music. It takes a long time to do, and sometimes I just want to play. But I recently was commissioned to make a piece of music for cello and voice, and that was my first real time sitting on Sibelius and figuring out what all the buttons do. I recorded an improvisation and used a notation tool to import that into Sibelius, and then I edited it so that it was legible, because they always add weird, like, thirty-second notes that aren’t there because the software doesn’t understand what’s happening. So I edited it to make it closer to what I actually played, and then added a vocal line on top. I found that interesting, in terms of composition.
When I was studying for my bachelor’s, you couldn’t really just import sound in. Now that’s possible, which makes it more accessible to me as my compositions are just direct from my brain to the instrument. So having that technology has helped. It’s eased me into composition, but I still would say that I’m an improviser first.
ET: Sure. You’re from Florida, right?
SS: Mmhm.
ET: Why Scotland?
SS: Why Scotland… Really, the honest answer is that I wanted to leave the States. I found out about RCS, learned it was quite like a ‘you could do whatever’ program. Because I studied at a university for my bachelor’s, I focused a lot on academics as well as performance. I was tired of doing academics and wanted to just play, and RCS offered that. It was the only place I auditioned for, cause I was also a bit burnt out at the end of my bachelor’s. I got in, and was like, “Fine. I guess that’s where I’m going.”
ET: And now, seven years on, it’s still where you want to be?
SS: I mean, for now. I feel that it’s a place of convenience. I’ve only ever moved for studies, so to move for any other reason is a bit scary. So right now I’m still in Scotland until something else comes up.
ET: It seems like you’ve found a strong musical community there.
SS: For sure, there’s so many great people in Scotland. There are amazing improvisers, especially the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra. Everyone who’s a part of that is really cool. So yeah, it’s nice.
ET: I gather that the improvisers in and surrounding GIO are, for the most part, not classically trained. How do you see those experiential differences manifest in improvising?
SS: I think it’s mainly that I still tend to gear toward melodic sounds. As much as I love all the harsh, weird, and crunchy sounds — and they are very much a part of my improvisation — I don’t always instantly go to them. I like the balance between melodic and crunchy sounds, and blending those. Any time I’ve improvised with people who aren’t classically trained and instead come from a ‘sound making’ background, people don’t always think in the same way. Of course, from playing in orchestras where the cellos have these sweeping lines and play sonatas, it’s more ingrained in me to be melodic. Whatever that sounds like is still my natural way. When I’m wanting to express something else, or something of me, that’s when it starts getting a little nitty-gritty. I find that the way that we all naturally express is different.
ET: I’ve noticed that. I work with classical students who are learning to improvise for the purposes of workshop leading and community music. There is a real tendency to stick to a solid key center. They typically want something that’s somewhat known and safe, which I find interesting because, as incredible classical musicians, they’re used to playing music that is ridiculously complex and goes harmonically all over the place. But when they sit down to improvise, they want to be in one key. I find that interesting as someone not from that background.
SS: Yeah, I do workshops as well, introducing improvisation to people, and I’ve done it a few times with people who have had some classical training. Improvisation is such a vulnerable thing, so I always have us start in a key that we know. Then we branch out, and we make really nice, beautiful sounds. From what I’ve observed, most classical musicians fear that they’re going to sound bad. The worst thing that could possibly happen is that you’re on stage and you squeak, even though those things don’t really matter. It’s a part of life. But in the way that classical music has historically been taught, it’s very rigorous and you have to be perfect. In improvisation, it’s about being imperfect. That’s terrifying to people for whom sounding good is attached to their identities.
Often when I do workshops we start in a key, but by the end we play games. Really, to learn to have fun with an instrument is my unsaid goal. So like, “How about we try to sound like a bassoon?” That’s actually something I did in Estonia. Everyone was on different instruments, and we had to try to make the same sound as, like, a saxophone. You have to really think about how you would make the sound. I say, “What is the essence of the sound?” Because it’s not always the pitch, and it’s not always possible to recreate the pitch. But maybe it’s the attack, or how it decays. Trying to recreate those things always becomes quite fun, and then you can get into just making noise, because you’ve just been making noise for a bit already. Sounding like a washing machine, or whatever. You’re definitely right; classical musicians like to feel safe in a key. But I think it’s possible to push them out of it, for sure.
ET: You said that as a cellist, you’re drawn to certain sounds, like sweeping melodic statements. I’ve also noticed those different tendencies in different instruments. Some tend to play it safer, but in particular the flutes and the harps will jump so much further out in terms of extended techniques and making sounds, even if they themselves don’t have improvising backgrounds. There seems to be something to those instruments — and to others, I’m sure — that encourages more weirdness.
SS: Yeah, there’s so much cool extended technique for flute. I’m not as familiar with harp, but I know flute has loads. And I don’t know why that is. Why don’t violins have loads of extended techniques or experiment in the same ways? I think it’s particularly a personality. Like, percussionists will go way out there. But I think that has a lot to do with the fact that you can bang on anything and it makes a sound. I guess there’s so many different kinds of flutes as well. You can start fiddling around with blowing into things and seeing what happens.
ET: When you were first getting into improvising — and now, too — are there other improvising cellists whom you look to for inspiration?
SS: I actually don’t listen to a lot of other cellists. I don’t listen to a lot of string music anymore. I used to, when I was first learning and when I was studying classical music. But I tend to listen to all different kinds of music now and focus on that, and then I turn to string music every once in a while. I think I don’t listen to it as much because when I do, I then just want to play the cello. If I listen to other cellists, I want to figure out how they did that.
Recently, I’d just finished recording my album and I was watching the new season of Black Mirror. There’s an episode that Lucinda Chua composed the music for. When I hear cello music, I tend to be like, “Oh hey, I can do that. How do I do something like that?” This was the first time in a while where I listened to something and was like, “Oh, I could do something like that, and I want to try.” It actually helped unlock something, because there was a track on my album that I was really struggling to figure out the music for. I heard this track from Black Mirror and I listened to some of her other stuff, and I remembered, because my album is all solo cello and loop pedals, that I could just have cello sounds. Like a bed of sound. There’s that thing as an improviser where you feel like you have to keep doing stuff. Like you always have to make sounds and keep moving. Then I heard her stuff and was reminded that you can just have long lines that last a while, like an ambient music vibe. Then I thought I should listen to more cello stuff to hear these other ideas, so I’m not always stuck in my own world just listening to rock and rap.
ET: You sort of answered this already, but I don’t see the problem with hearing something and thinking, “that sounds cool, I want that sound.” I feel like that’s how I learn a lot of things; by hearing something and wanting to figure out how it works.
SS: Yeah, for sure. I mean, isn’t that what inspires us all the time? You’re like, “I hear a sound that I’ve never heard before. How do I make it?”
ET: What can you tell me about your new album?
SS: It is called Dearest, and it is a poetry-music album. It’s the first poetry and music work that I’ve done. It’s about queer first love: the warmth, the nostalgia, and the tension and complexity of it. It’s about a relationship I had ten years ago, and I finally feel in a place to be, “Oh, there were nice things, and I can also express safely the bad things and what I felt at the same time.” It’s called Dearest because it’s essentially an ode to my favorite film, Carol, by Todd Haynes. There’s a letter that Carol leaves to Therese, and she starts off with, “Dearest, there are no accidents.” The album tracks are all quotes taken from that letter, and I have absolute love for Patricia Highsmith, who wrote the novel. It’s the film that helped me come out and showed me what soft queer love could look like.
Mele Broomes is reading the poetry; I’m not performing it myself, because that’s a step too far. It’s already a vulnerable thing! I’ll do the music, but reading the poetry is a bit too much. For me, it’s sort of a spoken word album, but I feel that the music is what tells the story and the poetry contextualizes it. Whereas usually with spoken word, the spoken word is the story and the music provides rhythm and vibes. But for me, the cello is my voice, and I wanted to use it to express all these thoughts and feelings. Really, I love poetry on the page; how it can look, and how meaning can change based off the way you decide to read a line or where spaces are. So I’m also releasing the poetry as a zine, so that people can interact with the text.
ET: Why do you find it less vulnerable to have your poetry read by someone else?
SS: I think because it has that distance. And also, it still needs to be performed. I don’t like hearing my own voice that much, and when you’re in the studio listening to things back over and over again… I can listen to my cello playing and I can articulate what I like and don’t like. I know I’d find it a lot harder to do the music and then read the poetry, and have to isolate what I like and don’t like. Whereas having someone else perform it, I found it a lot easier to direct them and say, “This is what I want you to feel. This is what I want to be expressed.” And have them then embody and express that. It also just adds a nice dimension, to have somebody else’s voice on it. And Mele is such an amazing person, and her voice is great.
ET: Yeah, I was gonna say that you must have found someone who you really trust with your words.
SS: Yeah. I think that what she found challenging at times was to not express too much. It was this fine balance: there’s so much happening musically that the text can’t also be that emotive. So even though we discussed what each poem was based on and what the history was, she still had to find restraint while the music was happening in her headphones. That was a fun challenge.
ET: When did you start writing poetry?
SS: I’d always sort of dabbled in it, from when I was in high school. I’ve always been interested in words, I guess. How words can make you feel, in the same way that sounds can. Certain orders of words can have such evocative imagery or movement. I’ve read a lot more poetry than I’ve written. In my solo shows, I’ll curate a collection of poems and improvise in response to them. It’s always picking poems that are quite provocative, but also evocative of different scenes, emotions, or sensations in the body.
For this album, ‘Dearest’ is actually the first poem that I wrote. I don’t even know where I was when I wrote it, but I was thinking about this one thing that happened with the person that this album is about. I had to write it down, and then I realized that it was a poem. I was using poetry to really process a lot of that relationship, and to process all of these complex, tense feelings that I had. And a lot of the poetry was really bad. Like, really bad, emo, no one should read this. I have actually shared some of those poems with someone, and I was like, “Oh god, how did I do that?” It’s so cringey, I guess. That was maybe four years ago.
Then I started writing the rest of the poetry a year and a half ago, working with a mentor, Victoria Adukwei Bulley. She wrote the poetry collection Quiet. That was the first time I’d had poetry lessons since high school, where I was like, “Here. Please tell me how to improve. Read my poetry.” And then we’d talk about it. I found it super helpful to find my own voice within poetry. I was encouraged to be weird, and strange; to use strange words instead of clichés and typical things in language. Similar to what you were saying about finding weird sounds, or “how do I do that”, with words it was like, “How do I describe this thing in an atypical way so that people are interested and can come up with their own image?”
ET: What are some of your favorite weird words?
SS: One of the poems on the album is referencing religion; the person I dated, her parents were extremely religious, which was not great because we were gay. I grew up Catholic, and have all this weird Catholic guilt that comes with that. I was trying to figure out how to reference religion without being quite so specific that that’s what it was. And suddenly I remembered “ought”, like what you ought to do and ought not to do. Oughts and ought nots. Mele particularly had a fun time saying those words.
A lot of the image references I used have to do with music. So instead of someone’s touch, it’s the ‘tune of their palm’, or the ‘song of their tongue’, or whatever. It’s using this more musical language to describe quite basic things. I had fun finding that. Another one is that my partner loves that I use the word ‘slippy’. Slippy and cold. So yeah, those things that you don’t often say. It’s nice to hear them and remember that that’s a word.
ET: I was thinking about improvising based on text. Your solo record from several years ago, I believe in living, responds to ‘Affirmation’ by Assata Shakur. What is your approach or objective when musically responding to written work?
SS: For me, it’s really about giving people another way of getting into the poetry. Or just sharing my own thoughts about it. For ‘Affirmation’, it’s such a moving poem and has so much imagery that I instantly wanted to know what that would sound like. One especially is, “bloodthirsty maggots”. So it’s picking all these quite intense words within a poem that describes the horrors of the world but is centered around this affirmation. The final line is “I believe in living”. I really wanted to make those sounds.
It’s also part of what I do in improvisation, trying to hold these multiple truths: the world can be really bad, and there are beautiful things; the cello can sound really beautiful, and it can sound awful. Those things can happen at the same time. So when interpreting poetry in text, it’s about making that real for people because not everyone processes words really well, or processes text or poetry when they receive it. But they might understand it more if they feel it through a different medium, such as music. My goal is just to engage people with poetry and sound in a way that isn’t me telling them what they should think or how they should feel, but is a doorway for them to experience it in whatever way.
ET: You said that some of the poetry on your album is from last year and was intensively workshopped, while some was from several years prior. How does it feel to have those side by side on the same work?
SS: It feels good, I guess. It’s telling a story, or at least it’s all about the same series of events. The ones from years ago were written about specific things, and with the newer ones it was a task to write poems about other specific things. So they still tie into each other, but there are some poems I’m more attached to because of where I was or how I was feeling when I wrote it. Whereas with some of the others, it was a task or I had to write them for the album. So there are some that I find easier to get into, especially musically, because it was for myself. With some of the other tracks, I was like, “Ooh. How do I get into that?” I wanted to tell this part of the story, but it didn’t come as naturally to me.
ET: Are the more recent ones generally easier to musically reconnect with?
SS: Maybe not, because I’ve just recently recorded them. Like, yes, but in the process of making music for them, I found the ones which were more positive in feeling easier to make music for. ‘Dearest’ was the first poem, but it was also the first one where I was messing about with a loop pedal. Any time I come up with something I usually make a voice memo on my phone, called like, “Use for later, maybe”. That music has been set for like two years. I’ve known what that poem sounds like. Whereas with some of the more recent ones, I’ve been like, “What does that sound like?” Especially with only a cello, cause for some of them I was hearing other instruments. But that’s not what- there’s not a budget for that. It’s only solo cello, and I wanted it to be only cello to have that cohesive sound throughout. But there were some for which I was hearing other things that I found harder to express solely on the cello. Those tended to be the more recent ones.
ET: You mentioned things that are more positive. I’m thinking about ‘60s protest jazz, which often conveys so much anger. It’s not negative, necessarily, but it can be forceful, angry music. In reading Maya Angelou’s ‘Caged Bird’, another poem you’ve responded to, I felt a great deal of hope and dreaming, but it also mentions “bars of rage”, entrapment, and the anger that comes from that state. Is anger a part of your writing and performance? And can it contribute to positive feelings?
SS: Yeah, anger is very much a part of my process and performance. Anger is such an important feeling, and you do see it a lot in ‘60s protest music and in my favorite black authors and performers. Like, Nina Simone is very explicit about anger. I find that incredibly empowering. I think I find it hard sometimes performing more aggressive music solo. It’s definitely my own presumptions about how people feel about those sounds. I don’t want people to feel unsafe, or like it hurts, in terms of the sounds and textures that can come out when I play angrily. But I think that is also tied up in my own presumptions about how people feel about anger.
When I’m recording and improvising with other people, I have no problem going to those places. When it’s with others, I think it can also be seen as joy. This excitement that happens with getting really aggressive and letting go, when it’s with other musicians, is so fun, and I think people then feel that. However, when it’s only me, I think it’s harder to express that release and fun in the same way, probably from all our presumptions about what it means to see someone be angry and alone. But I generally don’t have a problem going to those places.
ET: There can be such joy and catharsis in sharing anger, and being surrounded by other people who are all angry at the same thing.
SS: Yeah.
ET: You mentioned budgetary issues; is that the primary reason for making a strictly solo cello album?
SS: The main reason, really, is that the album is so personal. The cello is my voice, and I wanted that to tell the story. Having that restriction was fun and challenging. It also was cool to hear other things — piano, drums, percussion. Particularly, there was one track that took ages for me to figure out, because I wanted it to express a particular feeling that I only ever heard with other instruments, and I had no idea how to do that with the cello. I ended up reworking it and finding that feeling from a different lens. That process, while agonizing at times with nothing ever quite working, when I got there it was really cool. I think it’s really great that the whole album is cello, with some vocals here and there. It’s a diverse range of sounds.
ET: How did you start playing cello? And when did it become your “voice”?
SS: I started playing the cello when I was about twelve. We had an orchestra program in middle school. The long story is that I was really into Linkin Park at the time, and I really wanted their album Meteora. I begged my mom to take me to Walmart to buy the album, and I ended up buying this Vitamin String Quartet tribute version instead of the actual album. I remember being like, “Oh my gosh, no, I don’t want Vitamin String Quartet. That’s not cool.” My mom refused to take it back. She was like, “I don’t want to go back to Walmart. You’re just going to have to deal.” My friend, back when we had thirty-second samples online, listened to it and was like, “Oh my gosh it sounds just like it, you should keep it”, so I listened to it for the whole summer leading up to middle school. Then I was in orchestra, and I picked the cello ‘cause I could sit down. The teacher told a story about having to stand and play the violin in front of people, and I thought that sounded terrible. I haven’t stopped playing it since. That was seventeen years ago.
ET: What a great story! It’s amazing how something that starts so innocuously can evolve into a conduit for your self.
SS: My mom likes that story, because she can say that she had a hand in it.
Simone Seales and Mele Broom are performing Dearest live at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Wednesday 13 August, and Mele Broom’s through warm temperatures at Dancebase from 12-24 August. Simone’s album Dearest releases in November 2025. You can further explore their work at https://www.simoneseales.com/.
