Performed by The Choir of Clare College, Cambridge in their evensong on Sunday 19th January as part of The Minerva Festival, which celebrates music by female and non-binary people. 

Soprano - Matilda Mills
Conductor - Graham Ross

Clare College Chapel, Cambridge, UK.

Drop Down, ye Heavens, From Above - The Choir of Clare College, Cambridge

Emily Hazrati is a composer and educator based in London. Her music centres around environment, place and belonging; frequently informed by sounds and landscapes from the natural world, as well as ideas around breath, ritual, and circularity. She has a particular affinity to working with narrative and text, and is interested in collaborative, interdisciplinary ways of making art.

Emily is Oxford Song's Associate Composer for 2024-26, with premieres of her compositions at Oxford International Song Festival planned for 2025 and 2026. Current projects include writing for London Symphony Orchestra as one of their Helen Hamlyn Panufnik Composers 2024-25, a new work for The Marian Consort on the Royal Philharmonic Society’s 2025 Composers programme, and choral commissions for St Martin’s Voices and Vox Urbane. Emily has worked with ensembles and organisations including the BBC Singers, Royal Ballet and Opera, Ligeti Quartet, National Youth Choir and CHROMA ensemble, amongst many others. She has recently been developing her second chamber opera TIDE, commissioned by Britten Pears Arts, which received its first, sold-out performances at the Aldeburgh Festival 2022.

Emily’s music has received multiple broadcasts on BBC Radio 3, and performances in the UK, Canada, Germany, USA, Australia, and New Zealand. Her compositions have been released on NMC Recordings as part of their Young Composers 5 album, receiving critical acclaim from BBC Music Magazine. In 2024, she was awarded PRS Foundation’s The Open Fund for a new song project with Ella Taylor and Jocelyn Freeman, premiering in SongEasel’s 2024 ‘A Vast Obscurity’ series.

When not composing, Emily is Composition Tutor & Coordinator at Centre for Young Musicians (part of Guildhall Young Artists), and is a composer on Music in the Round’s WeCompose programme: an initiative bringing composition to KS3 and KS4 students across the country.