Sylvia Lim

materiality, rawness, decay, close listening, perception, instability, resonance, indeterminacy, open notation, agency, temporality, liminality, transformation, timbre, the nocturnal, prepared instruments, intimacy, found sounds/objects, the elusive, repetition, improvisation, collaboration, joyful accidents, visual arts, dance, ambiguity, migration, home

Sylvia Lim is a composer based in London. Her music has been described as “ethereal” (The Times), “undeniably beautiful” (ABC Classic), “strange” (TEMPO) and “playful and profound” (BBC Radio 3). She is interested in the materiality of sound, notions of close listening, perception, rawness and instability. 

Sylvia's music has been performed by Ensemble 10:10 (Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra), BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra (Tectonics), EXAUDI, Mira Benjamin (Music We'd Like to Hear), Ben Smith, Prague Quiet Music Collective, Rubiks Collective, The Hermes Experiment, Tabea Debus & Samuele Telari, and principal players of the Aurora Orchestra.

Her music has been played at Wigmore Hall, Cafe OTO, Wandelweiser's Klangraum (Düsseldorf), the London Contemporary Music Festival, CoMA Festival and BEAST FEaST, and broadcast on BBC Radio 3, ABC Classic and KFAI. Her debut portrait album was released by Sawyer Editions (Texas).

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 the 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.

I am currently supervising:

• Joseph Graydon, Explorations of Experiential Ambiguity in Composition