ABOUT

Hollie is a composer, researcher and curator of contemporary music events in the UK and overseas. Her work has been performed and broadcast internationally and released by NMC Recordings.

She has worked with BCMG, London Symphony Orchestra (Jerwood Composer Plus), Philharmonia Orchestra (Royal Philharmonic Society Composition Prize), London Philharmonic Orchestra (Leverhulme Young Composer Programme), Sjøforsvarets Musikkorps (Norwegian Navy Band), Amy Jolly, Alwynne Pritchard, CHROMA ensemble, Castallian String Quartet, Ensemble Via Nova (Weimar) and DeciBells (Basel).

Her PhD research considered different ways of constructing performance scenarios and exploring the impact of this on compositional processes and the listening experience. Her piece Melting, Shifting, Liquid World is the first composition to incorporate the use of open-ear, bone-conduction headsets alongside live acoustic and amplified instruments to create a multi-layered sonic environment for the audience to move around and within. The project was awarded funding by Arts Council England, PRS Foundation’s Women Make Music, Hinrichsen Foundation and Gemma Classical Music Trust and was the concluding piece of her Trinity Laban RDP Scholarship funded PhD in Composition at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance.

Hollie is interested in collaborating with performers, across art forms and mediums, most recently working with director and choreographer Josh Ben-Tovim (Impermanence Dance) and George Monbiot on an audio visual piece exploring themes of rewilding and human loss of connection with the natural world. She has a passion for working with amateur musicians and was 2017 Composer in Residence with CoMA, subsequently led workshops on their Summer School in Orkney and had pieces performed at their 2018 and 2020 Festivals of Contemporary Music for All. Hollie was also one of four selected composers on the Cohan Collective 2018-21 residencies working with choreographers, dancers and members of Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra at Pavilion Dance South West.

Teaching plays an important role in Hollie's artistic life and she has been Associate Head of Composition (UG) at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama since 2020, prior to this she was a lecturer at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance from 2013 to 2020.

List of Works

PRESS / Reviews

“Harding has a lovely sense of colour and timbre, the work's multi-layered transparent orchestration impressing greatly.” Extract from Philharmonia's 2019/20 Composers' Academy Release Review by Robert Hughill

“…the result was an entirely different, much more expansive sense of immersion than one usually experiences. The work’s title could hardly have been more directly relevant to what the music was doing. It was easy to hear its slow changing and evolving forms as processes of shift and melt, and the fluidity of Harding’s material – no solid sonic objects here – combined with the way we could move anywhere at any point to create a world that felt decidedly liquid… Further tensions emerged between tendencies toward dronal stasis and large dissonant agglomerations, the flat map beneath our feet seemingly being extended upward into something three-dimensional through the pronounced shifts in musical contour.” Extract from review of Melting, Shifting, Liquid World - Dr. Simon Cummings, 5:4

“The effect of this multi-layered, multimedia approach was nothing less than scintillating, the evocative strains of Harding’s orchestration counterpointing the often unsettling sensation caused by the pre-recorded sonic textures fed to us through headphones… But the real star of the show was Harding, whose brilliant score and setting made this one of the finest immersive performances I have ever had the pleasure of seeing – and I’ve seen some great ones over the years” Extract from review of Melting, Shifting, Liquid World - Miles Hedley, Greenwich Visitor