Introducing Adina Adina is a composer and multi instrumentalist, originally from Pitesti in Romania. Before focusing on composition, she studied flute and piano performance, and was a backing vocalist in a band. Following her Masters in Composition at the University of Salford, her current focus is writing for film. She likes to base her music around storytelling, not necessarily with words. Musical transformation in the UK Adina has observed that many musicians around her come from families of musicians. Her own story is a little different. “I am the first musician of my family, which is quite odd. My mum wanted to be a pianist when she was little. But she grew up in communist Romania. So there was no way she was going to get a piano in the house. So she kind of pushed it on me, but it was a successful kind of push. I'd say because I liked it. And turns out, I'm good at it now. So it was inherited. Somehow from a non-musical family, I inherited my profession.” Before coming to the UK to study, Adina composed mainly within the rigorous traditional training she had at the Bucharest Conservatoire. When she began her studies in Salford, she was challenged to explore and create music much more freely. “They don't really push a certain aesthetic so whatever you want to do… I have colleagues that were doing electronic music I was doing film scoring other people were doing music for dance. I was a bit scared when I started studying here but then I realised that all the professors want … is that I make the music that I want. So that was great. So it's kind of like, a musical liberation for me. I started composing more instrumental music because I was doing a lot of songs before. So my music shifted from popular music composition to, to instrumental music, film scoring, any kind of music.” Adina found that the community of students at the university enabled her to develop a portfolio of work. She also found a lot of opportunities in the UK more broadly, including a residency with the organisation Brighter Sound, which led her to develop what is now a primary thread in her work, developing the perspective of women. “I had this residency with Brighter Sound, which was amazing. We had one week. It was aimed at the gender equality issue. When it comes to films, film scoring, so female composers … last year, we only had 5% of women scoring the top 100 films. So actually, that kind of opened my eyes a lot. And it's, it took a while until it sunk in. But now this is a main part. This is something that I focus on a lot. That's where my drive to, to do something more with my music started from." "I now take a lot of projects that are focused on women's stories, that are focused on the idea of I don't know, sexual abuse and stuff like that, just to bring some of it to light because I think that's my way of helping. It's hard to help when you're a musician, and we have real issues in a society. So by working on such projects, at least I can make some stories a bit easier to hear.” Looking back towards Romania Adina does not identify as a migrant, this framing has never been something she wished to take on. However, her move from Romania gave new a new perspective on the culture of the country. “I don’t let it be part of my identity so much. Sometimes I can feel it. I like to think that wherever I would go would be the same person. I did Ethnomusicology as part of my MA in Salford and learned to play Romanian flutes. I play the western flute anyway, but I learned to play wooden flutes that shepherds play, used to historically play in Romania, also a big one that sounds very beautiful because it uses a different scale." "I actually bring a lot of that into my music now even into my normal flute performance. Sometimes I find myself playing with the with those ornaments or using the scales of … so yeah, it's influenced me, but in a way that let's say I only discovered my musical heritage once I left the country.” She also found that by living and training in the UK, she became more sought-after in Romania. One of her recent commissions was to create a sound track for an audio essay for a magazine of narrative journalism. “In Romania I don't have much contact with musicians outside of my old friends. However, I've been working with some people in there. Surprisingly, once I left the country and I made a life for myself here, a lot of people in Romania became interested in my services. So I ended up working on a lot of projects that I don't think I would have gotten if I stayed there." "For example, I worked with a narrative journalism publication in Romania that I was a fan of actually, when I lived there. They created this project that was an audio essay,. Someone wrote a very, very long essay and they recorded it, and I scored it. And the audio essay was about sexual abuse. It was written and narrated by the victim 13 years after she had been abused by her father. I was very, very happy to be part of such a project.” The music Adina shares above is a lullaby she wrote and recorded as part of her Masters submission, and is linked to Romania through literature and family experience. “It’s inspired by one of the most popular poems of Romanian poet Mihai Eminescu (Somnoroase Păsărele) and translated into English by Corneliu M. Popescu before dying in the earthquake of 1977 aged 18. The piece features field recordings from my parents’ garden in Pitești and various bird songs, portraying the elemental world at dusk. It’s an exception from my usual work, but I think I like this one best. It’s part of my EP Poems: A Collaboration in Space and Time where I created music responding to and inspired from Eminescu’s poetry.” Creative processes Despite all her studies, she taught herself many of the technical skills she now uses in her work, such as audio processing. Her fascination with unusual sounds, and an interest in transforming orchestral soundscapes, has stimulated her to be inventive. “I use creative sound design in my work sometimes. I love playing around with sounds that I recorded or that I found on the internet, and turning them into something completely different. With granular synthesis, I have a plugin now that does that. And it turns a sound into 1000 different things. So it's so amazing to experiment with it." "I actually released a film soundtrack now for a film that I worked on at the start of last year. I finished in the first half of 2020. It's an independent feature film, a psychological thriller, I would say, that follows the story of … it’s quite dark. It's a failing writer who turns to his homicidal fantasies to cope with failure. Yeah, it's not my ideal kind of project. But I love the brief because I got to experiment with all these weird sounds and get away from orchestral writing.” In the audio essay discussed above, Adina blended quite conventional classical music sounds with processed sounds, to support the narrative. She composed exclusively with sound libraries rather than live musicians. “She was blending instances of memories of her childhood when she was still innocent and happy. And then going back to the present and going back to the past, and there was some bits that were very quiet nostalgic and beautiful, there I wrote very tonal strings. I'm used to writing for orchestra, but now I don't do it exclusively for orchestra, I always use something more to add some texture. To synthesise instruments, all kinds of audio processing techniques that take away from the orchestral sound or shine a modern light on it. I think no on there was written exclusively for acoustic instruments. So it was more like studio composition, which is mostly what I do, especially now in a pandemic.” One other major influence recently has been the opportunity to play in the Adelphi Contemporary Music Group led by Alan Williams at the University of Salford. The group is a facilitator of free improvisation, and Adina was too timid to join while a student, but started attending after graduating. “Unfortunately now, we're not rehearsing, I've heard that they might have rehearsed with the students. But I'm still, well, part of it spiritually. It actually helped me a lot integrate into into the overall Salford community. And it also helped me rediscover my flute playing because I hadn't been really doing it for years. I really like that. I miss our rehearsals." "I have a lot of performance anxiety. Oddly. I used to be on stage before I moved here. I worked as a stage performer for a quite popular pop music artist in Romania. We gave a lot of concerts with full audiences, big audiences, and I was okay with that. But as soon as I go into a small group, I just shut in. Yeah. That helped me a lot. “