ABOUT (long biography here)
Emily Hazrati is a composer and educator based in London. Her music centres around environment, place and belonging; frequently informed by sounds and landscapes from the natural world, as well as ideas around breath, ritual, and circularity. She has a particular affinity to working with narrative and text, and is interested in collaborative, interdisciplinary ways of making art.
Emily is Oxford Song's Associate Composer for 2024-26, with the premiere of a large-scale work at Oxford International Song Festival planned for 2026. Her first full Festival commission was a new song cycle for Soraya Mafi and Ian Tindale, with text by writer Nazli Tabatabai-Khatambakhsh, taking inspiration from the Shahnameh ('Book of Kings', the national epic of Ancient Persia) and premiering in October 2025. Other recent and upcoming projects include writing for The Marian Consort on the Royal Philharmonic Society’s 2025 Composers programme, a new work for London Symphony Orchestra as one of their Helen Hamlyn Panufnik Composers 2024-25, and a choral commission for St Martin’s Voices and Imogen Whitehead. Emily has worked with ensembles and organisations including the BBC Singers, Royal Ballet and Opera, Ligeti Quartet, National Youth Choir and CHROMA ensemble, amongst many others. She has recently been developing her second chamber opera TIDE, commissioned by Britten Pears Arts, which received its first, sold-out performances at the Aldeburgh Festival 2022.
Emily’s music has received multiple broadcasts on BBC Radio 3, and performances in the UK, Canada, Germany, USA, Australia, and New Zealand. Her compositions have been released on Resonus Classics and on NMC Recordings as part of their Young Composers 5 album, and have received critical acclaim from BBC Music Magazine and The Observer. In 2024, she was awarded PRS Foundation’s The Open Fund for a new song project with Ella Taylor and Jocelyn Freeman, premiering in SongEasel’s ‘A Vast Obscurity’ series.
When not composing, Emily is Composition Tutor & Coordinator at Centre for Young Musicians (part of Guildhall Young Artists), and is a workshop leader with London Sinfonietta for their Composition Challenges, inviting young people to create music inspired by the works and musical ideas of living composers. She has also been a composer on Music in the Round’s WeCompose programme: an initiative bringing composition to students in secondary schools across the country.
​