Photo: Ilme Vysniauskaite
Sylvia Lim (b. 1992) is a composer based in London. 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.
Sylvia’s music has been performed by Ars Nova Ensemble, Mira Benjamin (Music We’d Like to Hear), EXAUDI, The Hermes Experiment, Prague Quiet Music Collective, Ben Smith, Rubiks Collective, Tabea Debus + Samuele Telari, Musarc, and members of the Aurora Orchestra. Her music has been performed at the London Contemporary Music Festival, CoMA Festival and BEAST FEaST, and broadcast on BBC Radio 3, ABC Classic and KFAI.
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). 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. She is a Professor of Composition at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, and also teaches composition at The Purcell School.