ABOUT

Hollie Harding is a composer, researcher and curator of contemporary music events in the UK and overseas. Her work has been performed and broadcast internationally and has been released by NMC Recordings. She has worked with many of the leading contemporary musicians and ensembles in the UK including notable commissions from Heather Roche, BCMG, EXAUDI and the London Symphony Orchestra where she held the position of LSO Jerwood Composer + from 2019-2023. This role included writing two new chamber works for LSO performers and curating two contemporary music events at their home venue of LSO St. Luke’s.

Hollie is interested in collaborating with performers, across art forms and mediums, recently working with director and choreographer Josh Ben-Tovim (Impermanence Dance) and environmental activist George Monbiot on an audio-visual piece FERAL. The work explores themes of rewilding and human loss of connection with the natural world and was funded by the Arts Council England, Hinrichsen Foundation and Jerwood Arts.

She has written several works that combine acoustic instrumental performance with electroacoustic elements and enjoys exploring the vibrancy, ambiguity and complexity of layering recorded and live performed sounds. Her piece Melting, Shifting, Liquid World  was the first composition to incorporate the use of open-ear, bone-conduction headsets alongside live acoustic and amplified instruments to create a multi-layered sonic environment for the audience to move around and within. The project was awarded funding by Arts Council England, PRS Foundation’s Women Make Music, Hinrichsen Foundation and Gemma Classical Music Trust and was the concluding piece of her Trinity Laban RDP Scholarship funded PhD in Composition at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. Her PhD research considered various ways of constructing performance scenarios, exploring the impact of this on compositional processes and the listening experience.

In 2019, Hollie won the Royal Philharmonic Society Composition Prize and was commissioned to write a piece for the Philharmonia conducted by Patrick Bailiey (What was scattered) which was later released by NMC Recordings in 2022. Prior to this she participated on the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s Leverhulme Young Composer Scheme writing a piece for the orchestra for their Debut Sounds series. She has also written pieces for Bergen International Festival, Sjøforsvarets Musikkorps (Norwegian Navy Band), Alwynne Pritchard, CHROMA ensemble, Castallian String Quartet, Ensemble Via Nova (Weimar) and DeciBells (Basel).

Hollie has a passion for working with amateur musicians and was 2017 Composer in Residence with CoMA. She subsequently led workshops on their Summer School in Orkney and had pieces performed at their 2018 and 2020 Festivals of Contemporary Music for All. Her choral part-song 5 Landscapes for Voices was published by CoMA as part of an anthology in 2022. Hollie was also one of four selected composers on the Cohan Collective 2018-21 residencies working with choreographers, dancers and members of Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra at Pavilion Dance South West.

Teaching plays an important role in Hollie's artistic life, and she has been Associate Head of Composition (UG) at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama since 2020, where she is responsible for leading the undergraduate composition programme and teaches students at undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral level. During her time in the role she has worked to expand the curriculum including creating a new module in intermedia notation, developing new original composition projects with expert contemporary performers such as Mira Benjamin and Heather Roche, and has designed and leads a short summer course for composers aged over 21. She has worked as external examiner for Postgraduate Taught Programmes at Royal Holloway University since 2023 and regularly guest lectures at leading higher education institutions across the country. Hollie was awarded a teaching and research contract at Guildhall School of Music and Drama in July 2025 and now has significant responsibility for research. Prior to working at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama she was a lecturer in Composition and professional studies at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance from 2013 to 2020, and has held various music project management and events production roles in the UK and abroad including working for Borealis Festival for several years.

List of Works

SHORT BIOGRAPHY

Hollie Harding is a composer, researcher, and curator of contemporary music events in the UK and overseas and has been Associate Head of Composition at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama since 2020. Her work has been broadcast and performed internationally, most recently by Heather Roche, BCMG, LSO and EXAUDI, and has been released by NMC Recordings. She has written several works that combine acoustic instrumental performance with electroacoustic elements and enjoys exploring the vibrancy, ambiguity and complexity of layering recorded and live performed sounds. She is interested in the different dynamic and interlocking spaces of musical performance, and exploring the impact of variations to these spaces on compositional processes and the listening experience.

PRESS / Reviews

“Harding has a lovely sense of colour and timbre, the work's multi-layered transparent orchestration impressing greatly.” Extract from Philharmonia's 2019/20 Composers' Academy Release Review by Robert Hughill

“…the result was an entirely different, much more expansive sense of immersion than one usually experiences. The work’s title could hardly have been more directly relevant to what the music was doing. It was easy to hear its slow changing and evolving forms as processes of shift and melt, and the fluidity of Harding’s material – no solid sonic objects here – combined with the way we could move anywhere at any point to create a world that felt decidedly liquid… Further tensions emerged between tendencies toward dronal stasis and large dissonant agglomerations, the flat map beneath our feet seemingly being extended upward into something three-dimensional through the pronounced shifts in musical contour.” Extract from review of Melting, Shifting, Liquid World - Dr. Simon Cummings, 5:4

“The effect of this multi-layered, multimedia approach was nothing less than scintillating, the evocative strains of Harding’s orchestration counterpointing the often unsettling sensation caused by the pre-recorded sonic textures fed to us through headphones… But the real star of the show was Harding, whose brilliant score and setting made this one of the finest immersive performances I have ever had the pleasure of seeing – and I’ve seen some great ones over the years” Extract from review of Melting, Shifting, Liquid World - Miles Hedley, Greenwich Visitor