Photo: Nina Close
Sylvia Lim (b. 1992) is a composer based in the UK. Her works are intimate, exploring a small amount of material in depth. She is interested in the materiality of sound, notions of close listening, perception, rawness and instability.
Recent commissions include music for Ars Nova Ensemble Instrumental + The Riot Ensemble, Mira Benjamin (Music We’d Like to Hear), EXAUDI, The Hermes Experiment, Prague Quiet Music Collective, and Tabea Debus + Samuele Telari. Sylvia’s music has been performed by Plus-Minus Ensemble, CoMA Singers, Liam Byrne, Ben Smith, Natasha Zielazinski, Musarc, Fournier Trio, and members of the Aurora Orchestra. Her music was published in the CoMA Partsong Book, and performed at the London Contemporary Music Festival, CoMA Festival, BEAST FEaST 2021 and Barbican OpenFest’s Unfinished. She was on the LPO Young Composers Programme and Psappha’s Composing for Piano scheme in 2019/20, the RPS Composers Programme as a Rosie Johnson RPS / Wigmore Hall Apprentice Composer in 2020/21, and Orkest De Ereprijs’s 28th Young Composers Meeting (The Netherlands, 2022). Her music has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3, ABC Classic and KFAI. Sylvia is the 2022 winner of Rubiks Collective’s Pythia Prize.
Sylvia completed her PhD (‘Exploring organic decay through sound’) at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, where she also gained a first class Bachelor of Music (Honours) and a Master of Music with distinction, winning the Ian Horsbrugh Memorial Prize for Composition in 2015. She now teaches composition at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, The Purcell School and the Royal Academy of Music’s Junior Academy.
‘An undeniably beautiful, drifting cloud of sound’
– Luke Altmann, ABC Classic‘An investigation both playful and profound…of the violin as a sound-making resource’
– Tom Service, BBC Radio 3, New Music Show
Listen to more works < here >