Lillie Harris is a composer, copyist, and engraver based in South-East London. She graduated with a First Class degree from the Royal College of Music in 2016, studying composition with Haris Kittos and winning the Elgar Memorial Prize for her final portfolio.
Musical from a young age, she plays a number of instruments – including Piano (Grade 8, Distinction), Flute (Grade 8, Distinction) and Classical Guitar (Grade 6, Distinction). Lillie also sings with Covent Garden Chorus. Her works have been workshopped and performed by a wide variety of ensembles and choirs – including the National Youth Choirs of Great Britain, Echo Vocal Ensemble, London Symphony Orchestra players, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Florilegium, the Gaudier Ensemble, the Assembly Project, and Ensemble Recherche – and performed at venues including Alexandra Palace Theatre, Gloucester Cathedral, York Minster, LSO St Luke’s, King’s Place, the Queen Elizabeth Hall, and Glasgow Royal Concert Hall.
Recent commissions and performances include a new art song Kind Regards, commissioned by the Royal Opera House through their Jette Parker Young Artists Programme and written with writer Laura Attridge, premiered online in March 2021; a new choral work Comfort for the Chapter House Choir York, premiered in York Minster on 13th November 2021; a Christmas carol Christmas Silence for Choir & Organ magazine’s November 2021 issue in collaboration with NYCGB; and a song cycle for children’s voices commissioned by Glyndebourne, East Sussex Music, and St Michael and All Angels Church, Berwick. She is currently the Associate Composer to Mount Kelly Choral Academy.
In 2017-18, she participated in both the LSO Soundhub scheme and the LPO Young Composers programme, and was selected for LSO Soundhub Phase II 2018-19. She was selected for the National Youth Choirs of Great Britain’s new Young Composers programme 2018-19, and the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Emerging Composer scheme 2019-20, for which she composed a new choral piece The Dusk of Thee and trumpet fanfare A Point of Pride for Cheltenham Music Festival 2021 (postponed from 2020). Dormientes Bestia for paetzold and tape was in the winning programme in the RCM Contemporary Competition 2016, and she was selected the National Centre of Early Music’s Composer Competition
Final in York in 2013 and 2014, and the International Antonin Dvorak Composition Competition 2016. In 2017, she was awarded the Tenso Young Composers Award. Lillie was in the RSNO’s first Composers Hub in 2015-16, from which her orchestral work remiscipate was chosen to be performed in their Season Finale concerts, and in July 2016 she attended a masterclass week in Weimar with Tristan Murail and Ensemble Recherche. Her commission for the Gaudier Ensemble, to write a work commemorating the centenary of the death of sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, was performed at the 25th Anniversary Cerne Abbas Festival in July 2015.
