From Trauma to Music: Jessica Currys Journey with Shielding Songs

In the midst of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, many of us have found solace in the memories of a time before the lockdowns. For others, like award-winning composer Jessica Curry, the pandemic has been a difficult and painful experience. Diagnosed with a degenerative disease in her mid-20s, she has been seriously immunocompromised and has spent the past five years largely isolated at home. Curry's world began to collapse as she was unable to work or write, and she found herself in a mental crisis. "I wasn't even feeding or dressing myself," she says. But one day last year, she made the decision to start listening to her music again. The result is Shielding Songs, an album featuring new versions of her favourite pieces arranged as ethereal choral works with the acclaimed London Voices choir. The album is a kind of gathering together, almost like a manifesto for Curry as a composer. She wanted it to be her last work and to say the things that she feels are important. Among the tracks on the album are four pieces from Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, a game about the apocalypse from the point of view of a tiny English village that won Curry a Bafta for her soundtrack. The game has stuck with people, and Curry wanted to reimagine the music. She says, "The Mourning Tree is not the most played track on the score, but it’s the one that people write to me about. Lots of people have played it at funerals." Curry sees parallels between the story of Rapture and the experience of the COVID years. "The game is about what it means to be human, what does it mean to love? And interestingly it has a lot of tie-in with a global event like a pandemic and how we cope with that." Shielding Songs is an exploration of what it means to love and grieve in isolation, but it is also a hopeful study of human endurance. Four of the tracks come from her anti-war requiem Perpetual Light, first performed in 2011 – a response to the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, undercut with a sense of hope for the future. Curry and her husband Dan Pinchbeck sold The Chinese Room to Sumo Digital in 2018, but they have formed a small new studio and are working on fresh concepts. "Maybe we’re insane," says Curry. "But I think we are good at making games, me and Dan. We have things to say." Despite her illness and concerns about going out, Curry is composing again. "This is the first time in a long time that I can hear music properly, in my head," she says. "I didn't think it would happen again, and I think it is going to be something new. It will be Jessica Curry, but I’m not the same person that I was." Trauma is messy and exhausting, but music will come from it. And with Shielding Songs, Curry has created a beautiful and hopeful work that reflects on the human experience during difficult times.