Amelia Clarkson, the youngest feminine composer ever commissioned by the Ulster Orchestra, on her new work for them which premiered final month

Amelia Clarkson

The Rain Retains Coming by Northern Irish composer Amelia Clarkson was premiered by the Ulster Orchestra on the Ulster Corridor in Belfast on 10 October 2025. The work explores cycles of private renewal and reflection. Amelia is the youngest feminine composer ever commissioned by the Ulster Orchestra. 

Born in County Down, her music blends folks influences with modern timbres, exploring trendy points by means of the lens of nature, mythology and literature and has been described as having “inherent elusiveness… superbly captured” (Het Parool). Her 2024 work, I float between, was premiered Nationwide Symphony Orchestra Eire, conductor Gavin Maloney, on the Nationwide Live performance Corridor in Dublin in January 2025. The work was broadcast stay by RTÉ Lyric FM, and this recording might be heard on Amelia’s SoundCloud.

Chatting to Amelia after the premiere, she feedback that the efficiency went properly, although with a comparatively quick rehearsal interval, the time went very quick, and she or he did really feel strain. She first met the orchestra in 2023 and by no means anticipated to be working with them at such a younger age. She has identified she was writing a chunk for them for 2 years. And while the prospect of writing for the orchestra had its scary points, the truth of working with them was pretty, each the musicians and the individuals behind the scenes. Amelia benefited from the orchestra workshopping the piece in Could 2024, one thing that doesn’t all the time occur. This gave the musicians and the composer the possibility to familiarize yourself with one another.

For Amelia, The Rain Retains Coming is concerning the tides of life, resilience, and the sense of a relentless cycle. How solely within the hardest factors of life will we really feel totally current. Amelia labored so much with dancers and dance firms; even in her live performance works, she feels that there’s nonetheless a way of dance in her music. She is at present learning for a PhD on the Royal Northern School of Music. She was awarded the 2022 Mendelssohn Scholarship supporting her present PhD research on the Royal Northern School of Music.

She all the time imagines her music as associated to a dance occasion, even when it is not strictly. She feels that this alters your perspective on the work’s construction. And he or she is all the time transferring when composing, her music consisting of melodies and contours. And he or she admits that the benefit of imagining the dance is that she will change it in her head, as it isn’t actual. This leads us into an interesting dialogue of Tchaikovsky’s music: the symphonic nature of his dance music and the way dance appears to search out its means into his symphonic music.

Amelia Clarkson

Dance has been in her life for a very long time; as a younger lady, she danced earlier than she took up music as a passion. She solely began composing in her late teenagers, as she didn’t realise that being a composer was a factor. Now, working with music and dance looks like coming residence, combining her hobbies. In actual fact, singing was her first instrument, however she admits that she has left that behind, commenting that dance is the polar reverse.

After taking a music diploma at Cardiff College, she did a grasp’s at Trinity Laban, the place music and dance are studied facet by facet, in order that issues crystallised for her. She did numerous collaborations in Northern Eire, principally comparatively small items of labor. Her first massive alternative was working with Dutch Nationwide Ballet, when in 2023, her work Ephemeral with choreographer Wubkje Kuindersma was commissioned by the Dutch Nationwide Ballet and Dutch Nationwide Ballet Orchestra for the Junior Firm’s tenth Anniversary, and toured the Netherlands to fifteen venues throughout 2024.

Her PhD started as a examine of music for dance, difficult viewers perceptions of sexual violence. However she admits that almost all PhDs change as they progress, and now all of the items which can be a part of her thesis are commissions from the previous three years, together with three massive dance works in addition to orchestral works. As she labored on her thesis, she realised that she was extra within the course of than the violence. The topic of the PhD has now swivelled to how she writes for dance and while she admires the Amelia Clarkson of 2021, it isn’t her any extra.

After I ask about being Northern Irish and the way this influences her music, she feedback that there’s, the truth is, solely a small piece of water between Northern Eire and Nice Britain. In her music, there’s a slight folks affect, and she or he borrows from modes, however she feels the affect is extra cultural. She didn’t actually know that you could possibly compose until she left Northern Eire. It’s, she feels, a really completely different place from the remainder of the UK. Entry to new work in all artwork varieties, not simply music, was troublesome when she was rising up within the Province. It’s this cultural distinction that, she feels, creates a special mindset, so Northern Eire is current in her work extra by means of upbringing than sound.

She studied music at college as a result of ‘it was the one factor I used to be good at’. She selected Cardiff, the truth is, the music course which is threatened with closure by the college. She solely submitted her UCAS software on the deadline; she had no particular concept of the longer term and didn’t know conservatories have been an choice. In actual fact, Amelia’s alternative was influenced by the truth that the pinnacle of music at her faculty went there, and she or he felt {that a} music diploma could be a very good base.

She is at present on the RPS Composers Programme is writing a brand new work for the Hebrides Ensemble. She can be planning her first opera, which might be based mostly on the lifetime of Oscar Wilde. She is working with the author Michael J Daly and director Conan McIver, and the piece is at present in what she describes because the ‘experimental analysis part’.