Name: Amelia Clarkson
Nationality: Northern Irish
Occupation: Composer
Current Event: Amelia Clarkson's The Rain Keeps Coming received its world premiere performance by the Ulster Orchestra in Belfast October 10th 2025.
Recommendations for Northern Ireland: The sea! If you’re visiting Northern Ireland, just get to the water. The County Down peninsula is particularly special to me, but if you’ve never been, the Giant’s Causeway feels almost supernatural.
Topic I am passionate about but rarely get to talk about: I’m really invested in the evolution of new music for dance. There are many approaches today, and it’s fascinating to see how the choreographer-led model is shifting. I think we’ll see a huge amount of change over my lifetime.
If you enjoyed this Amelia Clarkson interview and would like to know more about her music, visit her official homepage. She is also on Music Patron, Facebook, Soundcloud, and Instagram.
The borders between producers, sound artists, and even songwriters are becoming increasingly blurry. What does being a composer mean today, would you say?
For me, a composer is someone who creates music.
We’re lucky to live in a time with so many fragments of genres with many artists moving fluidly between them but at its heart, it really is that simple.
Many people perceive classical music and contemporary composition as having high barriers of entrance, both for listeners and musicians. What have your own experiences been in this regard?
I have found myself in all heated discussion or two on this subject!
If we’re considering the perception of the ‘classical’ arts, it’s evident that some people don’t feel welcome or comfortable our concert halls, opera houses and theatres, and this needs work. However, if we’re looking at access in terms of cost, ticket prices for classical and contemporary music are often far lower than pop music gigs or sporting events.
Where I feel the real challenge lies is in access to creating music, especially for children and young people. Funding for opportunities to participate, perform, and create is in a dire situation in the UK and this worries me deeply.
As of today, what kind of materials, ideas, and technologies are particularly stimulating for you?
Movement has become central to how I think. I’ve been writing for dance as long as I’ve been composing professionally, and it’s shaped how I approach my work, especially structure, pacing and a sense of space.
In 2023, I composed Ephemeral with choreographer Wubkje Kuindersma for the Dutch National Ballet Junior Company. This is a piece about the fleetingness of time, which I think it’s a perfect encapsulation of dance as an artform.
Working with movement has made me acutely aware of music’s similarly transient qualities.
Where do most of your inspirations to create come from – rather from internal impulses or external ones?
I frequently use nature, mythology and literature as lenses through which to explore potent social issues.
I think of it as layering: I start with an area of beauty, and then find a parallel in society. Those threads start to form webs in my head, and eventually I find myself layering them into a new soundworld.
Which current social / political / ecological or other developments make you feel like you need to respond as an artist?
In the early stages of my career, I was hellbent on confronting difficult subjects head-on, often circling around themes of violence.
For example I AM LEDA (2022) performed here by Hard Rain SoloistEnsemble, was a non-verbal retaliation to William Butler Yeats’s poem Leda and the Swan and the romanticisation of non-consensual sex in classical and contemporary culture.
In dance, White Doves (2023) took a different angle for what became Belfast’s first ever new ballet. We used a mixture of abstract imagery and narrative scenes to depict the tragic events in 1970s conflict-torn Belfast, to actively avoid staging violence.
More recently, my approach has changed. Whether through fatigue or natural evolution, I am more and more interested in a musical space where fragility and strength coexist. My new orchestral work, The Rain Keeps Coming, commissioned by the Ulster Orchestra, grows from this place.
It’s not so much a response to an external crisis, but a celebration of resilience and the magic of the downpour.
Tell me a bit about the sounds & creative directions, artists & communities, as well as the colleagues & creative hotspots of your current hometown, please. How do they influence your music?
It’s such an exciting time to be making music in Belfast!
The scene has expanded rapidly, and ensembles such as Hard Rain SoloistEnsemble have been leading the way, presenting ambitious programmes of new music from both local and international composers. They were the first ensemble at “home” to commission me and perform my work, after I’d begun my career in England. Their concerts have become a genuine community hub for composers.
We also have some wonderful venues and a small but mightily growing ecosystem, which I’ve talked about in depth here.
Composing has always had an interesting relationship between honouring its roots and exploring the unknown. What does the balance between these two poles look like in your music?
For me, the root is who I am right now, and the work I’ve created in the past. The unknown is the next thing which has a really nice sense of pushing forward.
When I’ve found myself in burnout, I know I’m ready to write again whenever I feel that sense of pulling towards a new challenge.
How much potential for something “new” is there still in composition? What could this “new” look like?
I think perhaps as a composer, your perception of “new” is altered. Newness isn’t always about sound itself, but about process and approach. For me, every project feels new because the circumstances are different- who I’m writing for, who I’m working with or even where I’m at in my life.
In the past year, I’ve composed three works for orchestra, each with a dramatically different journey. I float between (2024) for the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland was a brand-new work, shaped through several workshops with the orchestra.
In contrast, Wings of Peace (2024) for the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra is an adaptation of my 2023 ballet White Doves, which was about revisiting and reshaping material. .
Even old can be new! Audiences of orchestral music attend performances of the same historic works year-on-year. There is something astonishing about new colours you hear when the same score is in new hands.
What does your creative space / studio look like and what tools does it contain?
I am a bit of a creative space nomad and I don’t really have a fixed studio. I travel a lot between Belfast, Manchester, Dublin, and elsewhere, so my workspace is wherever I happen to be.
I’ve written at my mother’s dining table, on dance studio floors, in practice rooms, hotel rooms, trains, even on planes. A piano is a luxury; sometimes even a desk is.
I’ve had to adapt and have become flexible, both practically, and mentally, in terms of not being precious about conditions. I don’t have a set ritual, which means there’s nothing to disrupt.
It is my impression that adding a conceptual, non-musical dimension to one's work is almost a prerequisite for commissions and grants. How do you view this tendency and how “conceptual” is your own approach to writing?
I’d say my approach naturally leans toward the conceptual, partly as a result of my collaborations in dance and theatre. When I’m working in those contexts, dramaturgy and character often sit alongside the music and develop together.
Recently I co-created The View from Mars with Six Dance Collective at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast. From the beginning, concept and structure were interwoven to the choreography, score and visuals, with large portions created live in the studio for what became a psychodrama for solo dancer and solo cellist.
I find that way of working really satisfying, and feel the audience’s experience is richer for it.
Working with long forms, complex concepts or new vocabulary is potentially more challenging today because they require us to remember things that happened perhaps minutes ago – while most of us are finding it hard to focus even on what's happening right now. Both as a composer and as a listener yourself, how do you deal with this?
The world is a lot and it can feel strange to focus on the detailed work of creating against the backdrop of huge world events, and that is a privileged problem to have.
For me, memory in composing works differently. I’ve learned to trust my subconscious to hold ideas that don’t make sense right away.
My process is a cycle: I build something up, tear it down, rebuild, and repeat, until the musical material reveals itself surfaces.
For many artists, life-changing musical experiences take place live. Few works these days, however, are performed beyond their premiere. What, do you feel, does this mean for composers, and the music they write, and how does this reality influence your own work?
It’s something I wrestle with.
Notated music has a heavy sense of permanence and there is both a weight and a joy to this. I try to block this out, attempting to stay present in the work I want to make now, rather than becoming overwhelmed by the intimidating fact that my work will exist beyond me.
This is a little more challenging every year, almost as if the natural growing sense of mortality is seeping into my music.
The Montreux Festival intends to preserve its archive of recordings for future generations. Do you personally feels it's important that everything should remain available forever - or is there something to be said for letting beautiful moments pass and linger in the memories of those that experienced them?
In a world of screens, there’s still something irreplaceable about a shared live experience, and a moment that only exists between the people on stage and the audience.
We carry unlimited access to content in our pockets, yet still seek out these live and fleeting artistic experiences.
