Photo by Sam Walton
About Lillie
Lillie Harris is a composer, based in South-East London. Since July 2017, she also writes the user manual for Steinberg's music notation software Dorico, informed by her additional experience engraving and preparing music for recording sessions and concert performances.
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.
It was her interest in creative writing, reading novels, playing instruments, foreign languages, and anything to do with paper that led to her falling in love with the whole world of music-making, and composing in particular. She often seeks to express deep and complex emotions in her compositions, and loves the opportunity this gives her to connect with people – such as after the performance of her orchestral piece remiscipate (about the demolition of Glasgow's Red Road Flats) when a previous inhabitant of the flats said the piece had given him closure, allowing him to move on.
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 (and watched 1.5 million times); 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; æfensceop for choir and saxophone, commissioned by Covent Garden Chorus and premiered in June 2024 with Christian Forshaw; and song cycles for children’s voices: Journey’s Meet (commissioned by Glyndebourne, East Sussex Music, and St Michael and All Angels Church, Berwick) and Weaving Warwick’s Stories (commissioned by Warwick: A Singing Town).
As a copyist and engraver, she has worked with a number of composers including Steven Price, Patrick Jonsson, and Cheryl Frances-Hoad (through Chester Music/Wise Music) and in both recording session and live performance contexts. She engraved the music for Big Screen Live’s performances of The Piano and The Great Escape live in concert, working with Tommy Pearson, and for Our Planet Live in Concert, preparing parts and scores on recycled paper.
Banner photograph © Piers Rawson, Cerne Abbas Festival 2015