Immediate Pieces
immediate pieces: scores to pick up and play is an anthology of 20 scores suitable for any ensemble. The collection introduces repertoire that can be performance-ready with less than an hour of rehearsal to be used by amateurs, students, teachers, professionals and anyone else looking for a quick way to get involved in making contemporary music.
The composers are Simon Belshaw, Noah Caborn, Stephen Chase, Leon Clowes, Rob Hughes, Colin Johnson, Bridget Sijie Li, Emily Linane, Rodney Lister, Dan Mayfield, Anna Middleton, Fintan O’Hare, Janet Oates, Amber Priestley, Pedro Rebelo, Taylor Schultz, Adam Soper, Sophie Stone, Louise Vincent and Helena Zyskowska.
The anthology contains works specifically for vocal ensembles, and instrumental ensembles, as well as pieces that work for any ensemble.
You can read more about the project at the link here
Works for any instrumental or vocal ensemble
Rayuela – Stephen Chase
This focuses on the idea of moving through a space and making sounds as you move. It creates beautiful soundscapes for any number of performers.
postcard-sized pieces – Sophie L. Stone
This piece centres around a series of postcard-sized prompts for any instrument or voice. There is a mixture of text-based and notation-based prompts, but you are free to use as many postcards as you want.
Entropy – Taylor Schultz
Entropy uses repetition and structured improvisation to build a piece full of depth and grounded in drones and tension. The score should be treated more as a set of guidelines than as strict instructions, allowing performers to express their interpretation of the piece.
“Can we have an A please?” – Louise Vincent
This tongue-in-cheek text score is a great way to start any concert, and get your ensemble interested in improvisation and contemporary music. It can fit well into any programme as it can last as long as needed.
Glockwork – Dan Mayfield
Glockwork is an aleatoric composition exploring the intersection of rhythm, chance, and collective timing. Within a fixed temporal framework, unpredictable patterns arise from individual dice rolls, producing an evolving mosaic of metallic tones and timbral shifts.
Cipher Series – Pedro Rebelo
This graphic score consists of 8 pages of evocative images for you to interpret. The scores should be visible to the audience, so they can try and understand the musicians’ interpretations.
Seashells – Emily Linane
This work is for any number of players and any instrumentation. Performers travel between depictions of shells, singing their songs. When you sing the shell’s song, sing it beautifully, timidly or calmly. The ‘journeying’ between each object can be represented as either repetitive or long, continuous drones. The piece ends once you feel as if the songs have all been sung.
Music Machine 1 – Simon Belshaw
This piece is a computer programme that alternates between showing green and red screens (black-and-white version included) and can be performed from any screen. It creates a unique experience each time it is performed, focusing on group improvisation and learning to communicate within an ensemble.
Bleakish Thud – Adam Soper
This graphic text score incorporates texts written by Julian of Norwich to create a winding exploration of her work, Revelations of Divine Love. The text has been mixed with strings of musical notes to encourage performers to interpret the piece intuitively, however they choose to do so.
Celebration – Janet Oates
This text score is a celebration of our instruments and the relationship we have with them, rather than the music that we perform on them. It is a physical piece, acknowledging the physicality of performance. It is a quiet piece, contemplating the process of playing, rather than judging results. It is a celebration of the warmth, joy and sharing that creates a community of musicians.
Musca Domestica Linnaeus – Noah Isaac Caborn
Musca Domestic Linnaeus is a graphic score that requires players to use their acting skills and imagination to bring the piece to life. Performers are encouraged to think of their instrument as the voice of the fly, exploring its full range of techniques to capture the buzzing, darting, and unpredictable qualities of the insect.
Secure/Insecure – Colin Johnson
Secure/Insecure is a text score and improvisation framework, allowing musicians to move freely through a space whilst understanding their role within an ensemble.
Works for vocal ensemble
Invisible Wounds, Invisible Cure – Bridget Sijie Li
This graphic score is a personal song cycle in six short movements written in new ways, recording the thoughts, the healing of the past few years, looking back, and looking into the future. It uses selections of Chinese and English text to explore and raise awareness of psychological injuries that are not physically visible.
Group Manifestation – Leon Clowes
Focussing on collective meditation, this piece invites musicians to explore their inner voice and become in touch with themselves and their place within an ensemble. This piece invites musical reflection, and singers can be accompanied by instruments.
They was all nice pictures I reckon, but they always give me the fantods. – Amber Priestley
This piece, for any number of pairs of voices explores storytelling through movement, objects, and voice. It encourages creating a social music that is powerful and poetic, drawing in voices from all walks of life.
Works for instrumental ensemble
Sestina – Rodney Lister
This piece is a musicalization of the poetic form sestina. This French verse form consists of six stanzas of six lines each with a three-line envoi, or refrain. In this piece, the music builds on itself to create interesting improvisatory experiments within fixed short cells of time.
Psithurism – Helena Zyskowska
This beautifully shaped score resembles a tree for performers to explore. The piece evokes psithurism – the sound of wind rustling through leaves. Cells represent the foliage at rest; transitions represent gusts passing through the ensemble like wind through a tree canopy.
Gridwork I – Fintan O’Hare
Gridwork I features graphic semi-improvisational symbolic notation where pitch is indicated by the shape of the line, but what each line sounds like is up to the performers to decide. It provides space for creative play within an ensemble to create unique sounds.
Crop Marks – Anna Middleton
This piece is inspired by the phenomenon where, in periods of drought, the shapes and foundations of ancient buildings appear in fields, marked by the stunted growth of crops under which stonework lies buried. The score consists of three rings of notation for performers to interpret, focussing on listening and responding to the other members of the ensemble.
Convergence 1 – Rob Hughes
Designed not to be rehearsed at all, this piece encourages performers to listen to each other. Each player is only given a set of musical fragments, and some instructions. The rest is an experiment in listening and musical communication.
Add the following codes to receive a discount
Up to 5 pieces: 5% discount with code IMMEDIATE5
5-10 pieces: 10% discount with code IMMEDIATE10
10-15 pieces: 15% discount with code IMMEDIATE15
15-20 pieces: 20% discount with code IMMEDIATE20
About the scores
The scores were selected from a call for pieces in December 2025 and chosen to represent the variety received across the submission. In responding to the call, composers were asked to bear the following criteria in mind:
1. Performance-ready in one hour
Pieces should have a very limited setup time from the start of the session, with no advance preparation needed. Instructions and notation should be straightforward to understand, and the pieces should be technically simple, or with a range of optional requirements. Duration must be short enough to play through more than once, or the principle clear enough to establish familiarity in a single run irrespective of duration.
2. Flexible numbers
The pieces should be useable by groups with a minimum of three players and potentially scalable to larger ensemble sizes, or have a set range of players (e.g. 10-20 people).
3. Available resources
There should be no specific instrument or voice requirements, and the pieces should be useable with any resources and materials, or with broad categories (e.g. any pitched instruments). No other specialist equipment should be required, such as elaborate technical setups. Pieces should be accessible for participants with disabilities.
4. Accessible Notation
The anthology must include accessible pieces that do not require stave-reading skills to participate. All scores need to be accessible to participants with disabilities (especially anyone with vision or hearing impairment).
The scores were selected with CoMA’s DEI policy as a fundamental guiding principle to ensure greater representation of composers from backgrounds that are underrepresented across contemporary music in the anthology. This aligns with CoMA’s belief that musicians of all abilities and backgrounds should have access to, and be able to participate in, all aspects of contemporary musicmaking.
This project was supported by funding from the Bath Spa University AHRC Impact Accelerator Award and Arts Council England.
