BIO

SHORT

 

Lara Weaver (b.1998) is a composer and researcher currently undertaking a PhD at the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC) at Queen’s University Belfast, under the supervision of Professor Pedro Rebelo. Previously, she was at St John’s College, Cambridge, where she read for her undergraduate degree, achieving a First, and MPhil, 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. Her output includes orchestral, choral, chamber music and song, electroacoustic music and installation works. Current projects include collaborations with the Crash Ensemble (as a Crash Works Creator 2023-2025) and Hard Rain Ensemble, and recent performances include works at the BBC Proms, the Electric Picnic Music and Arts Festival (Co. Laois, Ireland), Coventry City of Culture Festival (UK), and St John’s College (University of Cambridge). 

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LONG

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Lara Weaver (b.1998) is a composer and researcher currently undertaking a PhD at the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC) at Queen’s University Belfast, under the supervision of Professor Pedro Rebelo.

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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 composes music for a wide variety of artists and ensembles: these include the Cambridge Choirs of St John’s College, St John’s Voices, and Pembroke College, the Crash Ensemble, cellist Laura van der Heijden, the Hard Rain Ensemble, the Amatis Trio, cellist Marcin Zdunik, and the SIGMA Project Saxophone Quartet. Her output includes orchestral, choral, chamber music and song, electroacoustic music and installation works.

 

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; Nijū Hibakusha 被爆者 (2019) for choir and string orchestra, commemorating the victims of the 1945 atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; 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. 

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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.