Sarah Cattley

Composer

Sarah Cattley is an award-winning composer based near Cambridge, where she studied Music at Newnham College. Her composition teachers at university included Joseph Phibbs and Cheryl Frances-Hoad.

Sarah’s choral music has been performed across the United Kingdom, in Ireland, and in Sweden. A number of her works have been performed by chamber choir Granta Chorale, most notably in Ely Cathedral Lady Chapel, Saffron Hall and the chapel of St John’s College Cambridge. While at Cambridge she sang with the chapel choir of Fitzwilliam College, for whom she wrote a set of responses and an evening service, both of which were performed in Truro Cathedral in July 2017. That same month in Canterbury she won Caritas Chamber Choir’s inaugural International Young Composer Competition with her piece The Pardoner’s Song, which was subsequently recorded and released on the CD A Caritas Collection in 2017. As Caritas Composer of the Year 2017-18, she has enjoyed a close relationship with the choir, having been commissioned to write several more works for them, including an Ave Maria for their Christmas concert and a setting of the Easter text Haec Dies for their tour to Sweden in April. Some of her choral music is published by MazeMusic.

Sarah also writes chamber music. In 2012, her piece Quartet in Sepia was performed by members of the Britten Sinfonia in a concert in St Mary’s, Saffron Walden, as part of the Cultural Olympiad. Her trio Circle Dances for piano, viola and bass clarinet received its second performance in Haywards Heath in 2017. In the same year she participated in Colchester New Music’s New Structures in Composition project, for which she used an algorithm to set Robert Herrick’s poem A Ternary of Littles to music for piano duet which was performed in Fitzwilliam College Chapel.

More recently her performances have included the premières of Sicut Cervus, which was shortlisted for Buckfast Abbey’s Composition Competition; Prayer of Richard Rolle, written for Ripon Cathedral’s New Music Week in May 2018; and The Basilica Remembers A Maestro, a finalist in the National Centre for Early Music’s Young Composers Award performed by the English Cornett and Sackbut Ensemble.

Works by Sarah Cattley

Factus est repente
Missa Brevis pro Baccalariuswith Christopher Batchelor (Composer), Paul Ayres (Composer), Jonathan Wikeley (Composer), Bernard Hughes (Composer), Janet Wheeler (Composer), Joshua Ballance (Composer), Richard Pantcheff (Composer), Ronald Corp (Composer), Tim Ambler (Composer), David McGregor (Composer), Alastair Carey (Editor)
O Lord, support us
Preces and Responses (Set I)
Preces and Responses (Set II)
Unto the Father