Deciding to take a year out from her working life as a primary school teacher 25 years ago proved a game-changing step for Liz Dilnot Johnson. As she neared the end of a composition Master's degree at Birmingham Conservatoire, a tongue-in-cheek remark from her tutor Philip Cashian - You don't have to go back to the day job, Liz’ - led to a part-time doctorate and a total career change. ‘The PhD allowed me the time, space and support to find my composing voice,’ Johnson recalls, admitting that her inspiration for new pieces often comes from setting herself seemingly impossible tasks. ‘I found the [extended narrative] poem Sky Burial by Kathleen Jamie, describing a woman's journey from life to death.’ With no idea how she would set the text, Johnson experimented with forces including large chorus and orchestra with live electronics, but eventually settled on just solo voice and string quartet, the latter a medium she often returns to.

Following her studies, Johnson taught at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire (RBC) and continued her own development. ‘My musical motivations are different now. I experienced the power of music to shift people's perceptions through musical work I had done in hospitals, care homes and schools. Music has a capacity to draw people together and create positive memories in a way that other media don't seem to. My attitude to musical complexity has really changed too.’ Johnson is currently writing a new basset horn commission for RBC Professor Ronald Woodley. ‘I had all kinds of abstract and complex ideas about what it should be, then I started transcribing Hildegard chant and adding more ephemeral elements into that calm space. As a composer, I found embracing simplicity a difficult thing because of the pressure to appear intellectual and write complex music.’ She admires fellow composer Howard Skempton's ability to do this with great confidence. ‘That has helped me to set aside those judgmental internal voices that ask, “Is that enough?"'

When a Child is a Witness - requiem for refugees won the community and participation category in the 2022 Ivors Composer Awards. It forms a much expanded version of a 2017 Requiem for her local church choir in Herefordshire. At the time the Syrian war and destruction ofthe city of Aleppo was all over the media and I wanted to create something that has a social purpose beyond the music on the page’ There was a capacity audience including, unbeknown to Johnson, Ex Cathedra founder and director Jeffrey Skidmore. ‘He showed great enthusiasm for the Requiem and commissioned some carols and choral pieces from me. At one performance in Coventry Cathedral, I was talking to the Dean, John Witcombe, about a vision I had for the Requiem to be done on a larger scale.’ That conversation led to its new incarnation by 2019, when Covid intervened and the cathedral premiere was postponed twice until 26 February 2022.

Premiered by Ex Cathedra directed by Jeffrey Skidmore, with The Academy of Vocal Music/Ravensdale Primary School Choir directed by Rebecca Ledgard, plus other performers, Johnson describes the work as ‘a seamless patchwork of music. Lasting 90 minutes, it is scored for mezzo-soprano solo, choir, children's choir, various percussion instruments, violin solo, piano, organ and community groups. These groups (including west African kora, spoken word, and communal singing) perform their own meditations, on the theme of seeking and finding refuge, in a sequence of interludes termed ‘windows’ which are set within the framework of the larger score. Johnson took a leap of faith there. How were these performers assembled?

‘Ex Cathedra has a brilliant participation and engagement team which contacted many organisations across Coventry’ City of Culture 2021-25, Coventry is one of a growing network of UK cities of sanctuary, offering support, dignity and welcome to refugees. ‘Four diverse charities, representing people with lived experience of seeking refuge, expressed an interest in participating in the Requiem. There were young people from the European Youth Music Refugee Choir; they were around 17 years old, with enthusiasm to join in but little or no previous experience of performing or singing.’ Groups were introduced into the work strategically: mothers and toddlers at the start so they could go home early if desired; the young people's group, who found the environment completely alien, were on later so they could grow accustomed to what was happening around them. Johnson is interested in shared authorship and describes herselfas a co-muser: ‘Someone who imagines musical ideas alongside others, musing collaboratively and experimenting with sound in playful ways. I strongly believe that it is normal for everyone to sing, dance, create - it's natural for children to do these things, but sadly we have it rather beaten out of us, not least by the commercialisation of music.'

Jeffrey Skidmore has said that Johnson has ‘an extraordinary intuition for what works. That's crucial when writing improvised segments, and her score contains frames (boxes of melodic fragments or pitch sequences) as a starting point for cued improvisations. Scanning the opening pages, and struggling to hear in my mind's ear how these would coalesce, made me uncomfortable - until I played a recording of the premiere and heard all this carefully curated expression fall into place. Johnson credits composer Paul Patterson with the technique also used by Lutoslawski: ‘He uses boxes [indicating improvised elements] to control the sound environment; you can give very clear instructions as to the velocity of things, the placement of objects; it's a wonderful way of creating a different kind of temporal framework. On first look it does seem [disconcerting], but it's actually a subtle way of empowering the performer, rather than the composer dictating every single note.'

Intricate Web: Music by Liz JohnsonFitzwilliam String Quartet, Heather Tuach, Loré Lixenberg, Ronald WoodleyMetier MSV 77206Choral music by Liz Dilnot JohnsonEx Cathedra/Jeffrey Skidmore (dir)Due for release autumn 2023Rain, a setting for the Hereford Chamber Choir of Edward Thomas's poem, commissioned by Ledbury Poetry Festival (2023) with support from the Three Choirs Festival (2024)

Ex Cathedra is a professional 10-voice consort which expands into a 40-voice choir with auditioned semiprofessional singers. Johnson has been composer-in residence since 2020. Two choral works were recently commissioned from her and will feature on a new recording of her music in the autumn. The Windhover (to the poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins) was commissioned with support from the April Trust in memory ofthe judge Sir Nicholas Wall: ‘Setting it was the most amazing adventure!’ It is scored for unaccompanied choir (of at least eight parts) and solo baritone. ‘It's a piece I'm proud of, on the esoteric side of choral writing, it makes use of everything Ex Cathedra has to offer.’ Blake Reimagined uses the second verse of ‘Jerusalem'. ‘Just as the first verse contains four questions, so the second stanza summons four things. Writing during the pandemic, I thought, wouldn't this be a way to ask what people might want right now, what they might do, what they might build? It was a way of diversifying the experience of creating. I also wanted it to exemplify the breadth of work that Ex Cathedra does in using the voice as a force for healing and for education’

The Libera me from When a Child is a Witness includes boxes allowing the performers to sing or play in free rhythm © LIZ DILNOT JOHNSON 2022

The Windhover for unaccompanied choir and baritone solo: ‘Setting it was the most amazing adventure!’ © LIZ DILNOT JOHNSON 2022

This year, Johnson has set herself another impossible task, bigger than ever: ‘It is still in its embryonic stages, though it already has the tag line “Can a choir change the global economy?"’ Inspired by Professor Kate Raworth's book Doughnut Economics, Johnson resolved to make her future projects shine a light on political, social or global issues. Having sought approval from the Doughnut Economics team, alongside Ex Cathedra the forces will comprise a children's choir, some community choirs, plus a choir made up entirely of economists; ‘I think that is going to be the biggest challenge,’ she admits. Funding is still being sought and the premiere is tentatively planned for 2024.

Previous mentors of Johnson's have included Judith Weir, Julian Phillips, Jonathan Harvey and Colin Riley. Are there specific lessons that she remembers? ‘Jonathan Harvey told me that as composers we need to take the listener by the hand and guide them through the music. I thought that was a beautiful way of describing the process of navigating the audience through a new piece, especially if it's a more abstract soundscape. While working on a dance project, Judith Weir helped me to question the impact of what I had written: “Is it doing what you intended?” So for me the bedrock of knowing if something is right or not is an emotional response'

Does she follow a process when composing, especially with regard to choral writing? ‘Every piece is different but I do have some tools - crutches, possibly! I like using found material, or creating my own which I then use as found material. I sometimes use alphabet grids to spell out a word or name - Coventry Cathedral, and other names in the Requiem. One of the lovely things about being a composer is making your own set of rules for each piece - I like the playfulness of that, and the sense of discipline and cohesion that it creates. When a piece is nearing completion, I may go back through it and create “pre-echoes” or hints of things to come later. When I begin a new piece, I might spend time meditating on the actual feeling I want to convey. Then, as the music emerges, which always seems quite magical to me, I need to ask myself, “Does it make me feel something, does it make me respond in a physical kind of way, or do I just feel ambivalent?” That's how I judge whether I've got it right’