Sarah Angliss is an Ivor Novello Award winning composer and sound designer, creating new music and soundworlds for film, theatre, opera, dance, installations and her own live performances. Sarah’s music explores the sonorities of voices and instruments, revealing and augmenting them with her distinctive and finely wrought bespoke electronic techniques.

A composer who is equally at home with notation-based music, extemporisation, digital tech and electronics, Sarah’s work reflects her unusual musical background. A classically-trained composer and performer who specialised early on in baroque and renaissance music, Sarah cut her teeth performing on the UK folk scene. Her desire to get inside notes and finely manipulate sound led her to study electroacoustic engineering, then robotics, alongside music – a combination that enables her unique compositional style.

Sarah’s score for Eugene O’Neill’s Expressionist masterpiece The Hairy Ape (directed by Richard Jones) featured at The Old Vic, London, and Park Avenue Armory, New York. Her film score for Romola Garai’s horror Amulet premiered at Sundance 2020. In summer 2023, her widely acclaimed debut opera Giant opened Aldeburgh Festival (librettist Ross Sutherland, directed by Sarah Fahie). Giant is transferring to the Linbury Theatre, Royal Opera House, in March 2024.

In demand as a live performer, Sarah tours widely. She’s appeared at The Royal Festival Hall, Union Chapel, Arnolfini, LSO St Luke’s, Star and Shadow, BBC Halls Swansea, Supernormal and Supersonic UK; Prima Vista, Estonia; National Sawdust, Brooklyn, and many other festivals and venues. She’s been a recipient of the an Ivor Novello Award (category: Visionary Award) and a Paul Hamlyn Award for Composers.

Sarah is also a published historian of sound culture and often uses primary archival sources to inform her work. She draws on this research to create forward thinking sound and music that resonates with the themes and era of any production. With a deep interest in psychoacoustics and its use in music, she’s widely known for her work exploring the ‘haunting’ psychological effects of infrasound.

Sarah continues to work independently as a performer and composer, alongside film and stage projects. She relishes opportunities to collaborate with adventurous musicians, dancers, film and theatre makers. She aims to create sound and music that’s refined, expansive, compelling, technically adventurous and rooted in the world of any film or play.