To celebrate the selection of this year’s New Voices cohort, we caught up with all the selected artists and composers for a quick chat.

Here, we speak to New Voices 2020 composer Shirley Tetteh.

Can you tell us about your musical influences?

My musical influences range from bits of italo disco and post punk to bluegrass, jazz, folk, ‘pop’music (which could be anything haha!), so called ‘singer-songwriters’, gospel music, RnB, blues, choral music and all sorts of things!

What are you working on at the moment?

I’m working on improving my voiceleading when it comes to improvising on guitar, as well as writing songs for others. I’m also about to begin studying Brice Wassy’s ‘Flip Swing’ (or ‘Flip Stories’ depending on what album you hear first) in closer detail than I have already. And I’ll continue composing without particularly forcing anything I’m studying to appear in my compositions, but my experience is that whatever you study finds its way in even if the influence isn’t immediately obvious.

What are you looking forward to most about New Voices?