BIO

SHORT

Dr Lara Weaver (b.1998) is a scholar and composer from England. Lara's music draws from a diverse range of influences, from her own field recordings of singing sand dunes to the envelope poems of Emily Dickinson. Her output includes orchestral, choral, chamber music and song, electroacoustic music (often using her own field recordings), immersive audio and ambisonic works, and gallery installations.

Lara is presently working with the London Symphony Orchestra as a Helen Hamlyn Panufnik Composer (2026-2027), supported by Lady Hamlyn and The Helen Hamlyn Trust. Other recent projects include a commission for three IKO spherical Loudspeakers, as Artist in Residence with the University of Greenwich (2026); works composed for the Crash Ensemble as a Crash Works Creator 2023-2025 (‘Singing Sands’, premiered at New Music Dublin 2025); and Hard Rain Soloist Ensemble (‘Soft Ground’, exploring the sounds of Irish boglands, premiered at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2024). Lara's music has received multiple broadcasts on BBC Radio 3, and her work has recently been released on Crash Records as part of their Crash Works II album.

Lara holds a PhD from SARC, Queen’s University Belfast, supervised by Professor Pedro Rebelo and as the recipient of a Northern Bridge Doctoral Training Partnership (AHRC). Her doctoral research blends music, field recording, philosophy, and environmental science to explore novel interactions of sound and environment, attending to the unusual earthy sounds of peatland bogs and 'singing' sand dunes.

Lara graduated with a First from St John’s College, Cambridge, with a BA (Hons) in Music, after which she continued to an MPhil in Musicology and Composition, which was awarded with Distinction.

LONG

Dr Lara Weaver (b.1998) is a scholar and composer from England. Lara holds a PhD from SARC, Queen’s University Belfast, supervised by Professor Pedro Rebelo and as the recipient of a Northern Bridge Doctoral Training Partnership (AHRC). Her doctoral research blends music, field recording, philosophy, and environmental science to explore novel interactions of sound and environment, attending to the unusual earthy sounds of peatland bogs and 'singing' sand dunes. Lara graduated with a First from St John’s College, Cambridge, with a BA (Hons) in Music, after which she continued to an MPhil in Musicology and Composition, which was awarded with Distinction.

As a composer, Lara's music draws from a diverse range of influences, from her own field recordings of singing sand dunes to the envelope poems of Emily Dickinson. She has always enjoyed using her research to inform her music, and likewise letting her compositional practice motivate and inform her intellectual projects. Her work is also often politically motivated, engaging with current issues such as human displacement, the regulation of sound in our cities, and the climate change crisis. Lara's output includes orchestral, choral, chamber music and song, electroacoustic music (often using her own field recordings), immersive audio and ambisonic works, and multi-channel gallery installations.

In summer 2023, Lara’s music was performed at the BBC Proms with the second performance of A Thing That Holds, for cello and piano, first commissioned by and premiered at St John’s, Cambridge, for Laura van der Heijden and Tom Poster. Further recent works include: Desert Mix (2023), composed with field recordings taken in the Arabian Peninsula, premiered at the Electric Picnic Music and Arts Festival (Co. Laois, Ireland); This Blue Distance (2023) for electronics, commissioned as part of the Polar Sounds project by Cities and Memory, the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity, and Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research; Children of Light (2021), commissioned for Holy Trinity Choir, Coventry, for the City of Culture Festival (premiered 2022); This Place (2021), a installation work for choir and electronics in St John’s Chapel; Echo(location) (2020), written for the Amatis Trio; Infrasonic Episodes (2020) for electronics, marimba, guitars, and strings; St John’s Service (2020), a set of canticles commissioned by Graham Walker for St John’s Voices; the Common Ground cycle (2020) for double choir with solo voices, an elegy on division and borders in the face of forced migration and displacement; Aeon (2019), commissioned by Jack Bazalgette for the Malcom Street Orchestra and performed in the St John’s College Summer Orchestral Concert in 2019, preceding Shostakovich 10; Gorgeous Nothings (2019), a song cycle for soprano which sets envelope extracts of poet Emily Dickinson (premiered in 2020 at Murray Edwards College Cambridge as part of the Purcell 360 concert series); and her string quartet, Four Ages (2018) which was performed as part of the 2019 Cambridge Female Composers Festival by the Arc Quartet.

Previously, Electric Blue Clouds (2018) for saxophone quartet was premiered in Cambridge by the SIGMA Project Quartet, and Gravity (2018), written for cellist Marcin Zdunik, was premiered at the King’s Lyn Festival 2019. Other notable works include Thirst (2018), written for BBC Young Musician Laura van der Heijden and the St John’s College Choir, thrice now performed both in evensong service and in concert, and streamed online as part of the virtual evensong series (2020); Entr’actes for Horn and Percussion, commissioned for a production of Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes with dancers and orchestra in Howard Theatre, Cambridge; Christus factus est, commissioned by Graham Walker for the St John’s Voices Choir; and As on a Darkling Plain for flute, oboe, horn and string ensemble, performed as part of the Alternate Lessons and Carols Concert Series at Jesus College, Cambridge.

Lara has studied composition under Richard Causton, Christian Mason, and Tim Watts at the University of Cambridge, Pedro Rebelo at Queen’s University Belfast, and she currently studies under Colin Matthews and Christian Mason through her residency with the LSO.