Composer's Workshop: Lisa Illean

Born in Australia and now based in the UK, Lisa Illean composes ‘music that seeps into your consciousness’ (ABC Classic FM). Reflective and compelling, her ‘exquisitely quiet shadows’ (The Sydney Morning Herald) invite contemplation, often exploring unconventional tunings and the phenomena that arise through the interaction of quiet layers. Much of her work combines live and pre-recorded instrumental sound in performance to create ‘a soundscape unlike any other’ (Limelight). Her debut portrait album arcing, stilling, bending, gathering — described as ‘extraordinary stuff’ (The Arts Desk)— has been released on NMC recordings.

Illean has written widely across orchestral and chamber music, including An acre ringing, still - a ‘fascinating… intrinsically beautiful but uniquely challenging’ twenty-minute work for orchestra and electronics, and Tiding for electric guitar. Commissioned by the London Sinfonietta and partly inspired by the woodcut Deep Water by the German visual artist Christiane Baumgartner, Tiding has been performed as widely as New York (Time:Spans festival), London, Witten, Mälmo, Berlin, Florence, Chicago, and Melbourne, and is the first in a series of works for varied instrumentations/electronics: Tiding II was created through a residency with the Experimentalstudio des SWR and commissioned by SWR for Donaueschingen Musiktage (2021), while Tiding III was commissioned by Festival d’Automne and Ensemble NIKEL with support from the Ernst von Siemens foundation and first performed at IRCAM Centre-Pompidou in October 2025.