LONG BIOGRAPHY
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 writing for voice and working with text, and is interested in collaborative, interdisciplinary ways of making art.
Emily is Oxford Song's Associate Composer for 2024-26, with premieres of her compositions at Oxford International Song Festival planned for 2025 and 2026. Recent and upcoming projects include writing for London Symphony Orchestra as one of their Helen Hamlyn Panufnik Composers 2024-25, a new work for The Marian Consort on the Royal Philharmonic Society’s 2025 Composers programme, choral commissions from St Martin’s Voices and Vox Urbane, and music for Uckfield Concert Brass as part of Making Music’s Adopt a Music Creator 2024 scheme.
Emily has worked with artists, ensembles and organisations including the BBC Singers, Royal Ballet and Opera, Ligeti Quartet, National Youth Choir and CHROMA ensemble, amongst many others. Her music has received multiple broadcasts on BBC Radio 3, and performances in the UK, Canada, Germany, USA, Australia, and New Zealand. Emily's compositions have been released on NMC Recordings as part of their Young Composers 5 album, receiving critical acclaim from BBC Music Magazine and Planet Hugill. She was awarded PRS Foundation’s The Open Fund for a new song project with Ella Taylor and Jocelyn Freeman, setting text by Joseph Spence and premiering in SongEasel’s 2024 ‘A Vast Obscurity’ series.
In 2022, Emily developed her second chamber opera TIDE in collaboration with librettist Nazli Tabatabai-Khatambakhsh, commissioned by Britten Pears Arts, which received its first, sold-out performances at the Aldeburgh Festival, Snape Maltings. Emily and Nazli's first chamber opera, Paradise Garden, was staged and performed at Milton Court in 2021 as part of the Opera Makers programme at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, in association with the Royal Ballet and Opera.
As part of her practice, Emily is passionate about community, social and outreach projects. She is currently Lead Composition Tutor & Coordinator at Centre for Young Musicians, runs the Music Theory course for Guildhall Young Artists Online, and is a composer on Music in the Round’s WeCompose programme: an initiative bringing composition to KS3 and KS4 students across the country.
Emily completed her MA in Opera Making and Writing with Distinction at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Prior to this, she graduated from Cambridge University with an MPhil in Composition, and from Oxford University with a BA (Hons) in Music. Emily is a previous winner of the Royal Ballet and Opera Fanfare Competition; her fanfare was recorded under the baton of Antonio Pappano, and played as a warning gong at the Royal Ballet and Opera for a year.
Emily is grateful to have been generously supported in her current and previous work by PRS Foundation, Dorothy Green Music Trust, Fidelio Charitable Trust, Thompson Educational Trust, and the Vaughan Williams Foundation.
​