Maggie Nicols

Maggie Nicols is a composer, musician, vocalist, activist and actor who uses music-making in community settings to empower the powerless. As a singer and composer she has been involved with improvisation for much of her career, joining Spontaneous Music Ensemble in the late 1960s. She has collaborated widely, performing in duos (with Julie Tippetts, Peter Nu), trios (Transitions, Les Diaboliques), and larger ensembles like Centipede and Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra. She also co-founded the international free improvising and experimental music ensemble Feminist Improvising Group in 1977.

Improvisation is central to Nicols’ practice, offering moments of discovery and allowing her to embrace vulnerability. Her biggest compositional influence is free improvisation, and the resulting compositions seek to empower performers to explore new areas by creating springboards for their imagination, provoking them to improvise freely.

Nicols honed her vocal skills singing the Great American Songbook and continues to ground herself through daily songwriting, inspired by the practice of Lemn Sissay. A key part of her creative process is her daily audio diary in which she practices improvisations, compositions and records herself talking through her processes and inspirations. She has most recently been working on a song called Transient Eternal Being, and Nicols aims to develop the songs created through her daily practice into a standalone album.

Setting words to music is another core part of her process, such as poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke, Rumi, Refaat Alareer, words by Brecht, and anarchist texts, alongside her own words. Recent influences include surrealism and Serena Roney-Dougal’s writing on the subliminal mind, which has inspired her use of collective composition and randomness. For example, her piece Wits About Us, commissioned by the London Contemporary Music Festival, contained collective storytelling in which the performers in the orchestra each improvised a line of a story one after another.