Born in Australia and now based in the UK, Lisa Illean composes ‘music that seeps into your consciousness’ (ABC Classic FM). Reflective and compelling, her ‘exquisitely quiet shadows’ (The Sydney Morning Herald) invite contemplation, often exploring unconventional tunings and the phenomena that arise through the interaction of quiet layers. Much of her work combines live and pre-recorded instrumental sound in performance to create ‘a soundscape unlike any other’ (Limelight). Her debut portrait album arcing, stilling, bending, gathering — described as ‘extraordinary stuff’ (The Arts Desk) — has been released on NMC recordings.
“UK-based Australian composer Lisa Illean has a striking feel for the elusive, writing music that’s not so much between states as finding exacting clarity in details that initially escape our notice. The four works on this portrait album masterfully balance sound as disparate layers that shift depending on the perspective of the listener, and how the various elements collide and combine.” – Peter Margasak, Bandcamp ‘best of’
Illean has written widely across orchestral and chamber music, including An acre ringing, still – a ‘fascinating... intrinsically beautiful but uniquely challenging’ twenty-minute work for orchestra and electronics, and Tiding for electric guitar. Commissioned and premiered by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Ryan Wigglesworth, An acre ringing, still received its German premiere with WDR Symphonieorchester and Elena Schwarz at the 2025 Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik: “Ein stilles und edles Stück, kein Ausrufezeichen, eher ein Gedankenstrich, der lange nachklingt” (NMZ). Commissioned by the London Sinfonietta and partly inspired by the woodcut Deep Water by the German visual artist Christiane Baumgartner, Tiding has been performed as widely as New York (Time:Spans festival), London, Witten, Mälmo, Berlin, Florence, Chicago, and Melbourne, and is the first in a series of works for varied instrumentations/electronics: Tiding II was created through a residency with the Experimentalstudio des SWR and commissioned by SWR for Donaueschinger Musiktage (2021), while Tiding III was commissioned by Festival d’Automne and Ensemble NIKEL with support from the Ernst von Siemens foundation and first performed at IRCAM Centre-Pompidou in October 2025. Other recent works include Illean’s first for solo piano, a Sonata in ten parts commissioned by Wigmore Hall for Cédric Tiberghien, and arcing, stilling, bending, gathering, a work for piano, string ensemble and pre-recorded sounds where “the music’s different layers variously, slowly overlap and occlude one another. Repeated listenings throw up a wealth of colour and detail, my favourite being a spellbinding [guitar] entry in the second section” – The Arts Desk.
Illean has maintained strong connections with her birth country, with commissions from Finding Our Voice/Ukaria Cultural Centre (arcing, stilling, bending, gathering), Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and Sydney Symphony Orchestra, for whom she composed Land’s End – a “compelling exercise in stillness and quietude” (The Australian) which has since been taken up by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and the Australian National Academy of Music with Brett Dean.
In the U.K., Illean has worked closely with soprano Juliet Fraser (A through-grown earth – Excerpt I, Excerpt II), Explore Ensemble and GBSR Duo; as well as the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Philharmonia Orchestra and Britten Sinfonia. Abroad her music has been presented at such events as Taiwan International Festival of the Arts, Tzlil Meudcan (Tel Aviv), Transit Festival (Leuven), November Music (S’Hertogenbosch), AnglicA Festival (Bologna), Unerhörte Musik (Berlin) and Osaka (Expo 70, with the Australian Chamber Orchestra); with commissions from Ensemble InterContemporain (ever-weaver), Radio France’s Festival Présences (février), and the BBC Proms.
In recent years she has oriented her practice as a composer to include making long-form pieces with both performed and pre-recorded material, in close development with one or two others. This process often includes unadorned ‘everyday’ instruments, such as simple zithers; exploring visual analogies and tactile ways of sketching. She draws on her knowledge of acoustics, tuning and electronics to pose questions about how to combine seemingly disparate elements: ‘To spend time with Lisa Illean’s music is to feed the quiet parts of your soul’ (Limelight). Her music is published by Faber Music.
‘Illean conjures an air of precarious beauty from her lightly woven fabric of filaments and intimations.’ (The Wire magazine)
Album Reviews
Limelight
“To spend time with Lisa Illean’s music is to feed the quiet parts of your soul. She’s one of those composers who can open up a space with just a few notes, her sensitive music entices us to pay careful attention to the sounds she chooses. As an experience, it’s somehow like stepping into a minimalist art gallery, as the sole viewer, walking around and pausing to observe every part of an artwork, letting each look reveal something new. The familiar feels unfamiliar and vice versa.
Enough generalities. This beautifully played album, featuring both Australian and British musicians, showcases works spanning eight years. It begins with arcing, stilling, bending, gathering, four movements for 13 musicians that explore the layering of sound, shifting from piano droplets to elusive rumblings. Tiding II begins with a background hum, opening a portal into the music’s world. As we wander in this lost landscape, sounds emerge against the backdrop: punctuated by percussion, anchored by the piano, haunted by the saxophone.
A Through-Grown Earth, setting words from three poems filled with the natural world by Gerard Manley Hopkins, started life as a solo piece for soprano Juliet Fraser, before growing into this mesmerising work for live voice and pre-recorded sound. Harp, strings and zithers, with non-tempered and microtonal tunings, create a soundscape unlike any other. Land’s End, for chamber orchestra, takes its inspiration from a Latvian American visual artist whose abstract works are themselves inspired by ocean, desert and night sky. We are back in a place where quiet and stillness rule, but which, paradoxically, feels loud with meaning, the music never content to settle.
It all adds up to a fascinating showcase, packaged with a cover featuring a wonderful etching by Rachel Duckhouse, To the Lizard.” (Rebecca Franks)
Gramophone
Lise Illean was born in Australia but is now based in the UK. Her compositions draw on landscapes that are both aural and visual, imaginary and real, abstract and actual, as heard in this absorbing debut recording.
The visual nature of Illean’s music can be gleaned from the album’s title-track – the four-movement arcing, stilling, bending, gathering for piano, string ensemble and pre-recorded sounds. In the opening movement, searching string glissandos are combined with pointillistic patterns on piano that appear on the music’s surface like droplets of water suspended in mid-air. More animated moments punctuate the second, while the third’s chorale-like opening imparts a more austere expressiveness to the music. The final movement, which served as Illean’s starting point for the composition, offers a fitting conclusion by drawing on elements presented in the previous three.
Caught in a web of suspended animation, Illean’s music draws in the listener. Viewed as if through a microscope, details are enhanced at times to reveal their sonic inner structures. At other times, one is made aware of the music’s slowly shifting gaze and panoramic sweep. Nicholas Moroz, artistic director of London-based Explore Ensemble – who give an impressive account of Illean’s A Through-Grown Earth for soprano, chamber ensemble and pre-recorded sound – likens the composer’s long shots and slow pans to film director Andrei Tarkovsky.
The two substantial works contained on this recording – Tiding II (silentium) for soprano saxophone, percussion, piano and electronics and the earlier Land’s End for chamber orchestra – linger longer in the memory, perhaps because their extended timescale allows Illean to explore and develop a more diverse and distinctive sonic palette. Inspired by Christiane Baumgartner’s woodcut Deep Water, the 18-minute Tiding II (silentium) combines gong-like sounds and metallic timbres with prepared-piano-style interjections, the latter executed with poise and precision by Siwan Rhys, while the dense, low-lying reverberations and string tremolandos in Land’s End (performed here by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra under David Robertson) conjure up a desolate barren terrain that owes something to the photographic images of visual artist Vija Celmins.
With its focus on elemental forms and patterns, arcing melodies and tactile textures, the hushed, understated gestures of Illean’s music invite listeners to immerse themselves in a world where near silence and stillness shape the very fabric of its sound. Recommended. (Pwyll ap Siôn)