Born in Australia and now based in the UK, Lisa Illean composes ‘music that seeps into your consciousness’ (ABC Classic FM). Reflective and compelling, her ‘exquisitely quiet shadows’ (The Sydney Morning Herald) invite contemplation, often exploring unconventional tunings and the phenomena that arise through the interaction of quiet layers. Much of her work combines live and pre-recorded instrumental sound in performance to create ‘a soundscape unlike any other’ (Limelight). Her debut portrait album arcing, stilling, bending, gathering — described as ‘extraordinary stuff’ (The Arts Desk)— has been released on NMC recordings.

Illean has written widely across orchestral and chamber music. An acre ringing, still was hailed as a ‘fascinating…intrinsically beautiful but uniquely challenging’ twenty-minute work for orchestra and electronics. Commissioned and premiered by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Ryan Wigglesworth, An acre ringing, still received its German premiere with WDR Symphonieorchester and Elena Schwarz at the 2025 Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik: “Ein stilles und edles Stück, kein Ausrufezeichen, eher ein Gedankenstrich, der lange nachklingt” (NMZ).

Commissioned by the London Sinfonietta and partly inspired by the woodcut Deep Water by the German visual artist Christiane Baumgartner, Tiding has been performed as widely as New York (Time:Spans festival), London, Witten, Mälmo, Berlin, Florence, Chicago, and Melbourne, and is the first in a series of works for varied instrumentations/electronics: Tiding II was created through a residency with the Experimentalstudio des SWR and commissioned by SWR for Donaueschingen Musiktage (2021), while Tiding III was commissioned by Festival d’Automne and Ensemble NIKEL with support from the Ernst von Siemens foundation and first performed at IRCAM Centre-Pompidou in October 2025.

Other recent works include Illean’s first for solo piano, a Sonata in ten parts commissioned by Wigmore Hall for Cédric Tiberghien, and arcing, stilling, bending, gathering, a work for piano, string ensemble and pre-recorded sounds where “the music’s different layers variously, slowly overlap and occlude one another. Repeated listenings throw up a wealth of colour and detail, my favourite being a spellbinding [guitar] entry in the second section” - The Arts Desk. 

Illean has maintained strong connections with her birth country, with commissions from Finding Our Voice/Ukaria Cultural Centre (arcing, stilling, bending, gathering), Melbourne Symphony Orchestra  and Sydney Symphony Orchestra, for whom she composed Land’s End - a “compelling exercise in stillness and quietude” (The Australian) which has since been taken up by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and the Australian National Academy of Music with Brett Dean. 

In the U.K., Illean has worked closely with soprano Juliet Fraser (A through-grown earth – Excerpt I, Excerpt II), Explore Ensemble and GBSR Duo; as well as the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Philharmonia Orchestra and Britten Sinfonia. Abroad her music has been presented at such events as Taiwan International Festival of the Arts, Tzlil Meudcan (Tel Aviv), Transit Festival (Leuven), November Music (S’Hertogenbosch), AnglicA Festival (Bologna), Unerhörte Musik (Berlin) and Osaka (Expo 70, with the Australian Chamber Orchestra); with commissions from Ensemble InterContemporain (ever-weaver), Radio France’s Festival Présences (février), and the BBC Proms.

In recent years she has oriented her practice as a composer to include making long-form pieces with both performed and pre-recorded material, in close development with one or two others. This process often includes unadorned ‘everyday’ instruments, such as simple zithers; exploring visual analogies and tactile ways of sketching. She draws on her knowledge of acoustics, tuning and electronics to pose questions about how to combine seemingly disparate elements.