Sonia Allori

She/Her
A photograph of Sonia Allori playing the clarinet

Sonia Allori is a composer, performer, researcher and community music therapist on wheels based in the Scottish Highlands.

She completed a PhD in composition which explored interactions between music and text at Edinburgh Napier University and was a Music Fellow in Learning & Participation at Trinity Laban in 2019 through to early 2020.

Following on from PhD study Sonia has continued developing new works that combine sound and words and through collaboration with other musicians and across art forms. After experiencing significant hearing loss and tinnitus, Sonia was driven to expand her sound palette into writing electroacoustic music, discovering a diverse sound world within which to experiment and create and finding a new voice in the combination of acoustic and electronic sounds.

Allori’s work has been supported and commissioned by PRS, Scottish Music Centre, Hatton Gallery, DaDaFest, Drake Music, Drake Music Scotland, Sound Festival and more. She is Development Artist at Sonic Bothy, an inclusive new music ensemble based in Glasgow, where she composes and performs with the ensemble, and curates the Open Session Series which explores experimental music with people who have an additional learning support need. She recently performed in The Lost Thing for Royal Opera House/Candoco in winter 2019 and in Ellie Griffith’s Sound Symphony (Independent Arts Projects/ Oily Cart) which toured Scotland in Spring 2019 and will tour again in 2021. Sonia is currently researching D/deaf performance at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

Curiouser

Curiouser is the first movement from a new concerto for Electronic Wind Instrument (EWI). Scored by Sonia Allori for EWI, voice track, synthesized track and creative captioning/audio description.

What can you hear when you see the sea?
Nothing now but remembered sounds.

Wheels cut trails through velvet sand,
Deeper and deeper making narrow bands
.

You chance upon a shell,
Casting shadows like ears,
In the afternoon sun”.

In this first movement from a proposed 3 movement concerto, the EWI stays very much in the electronic music realm with all aspects of the music crafted from samples, treated voice and electronic sound. This is an R&D presentation of the development of this new concerto.

Sonia adds:
“I’ve always been curious. Quietly curious. I’m exploring writing music with profound hearing loss partly from remembered sound, imagined sound and sound captioned with words in audio description.

I hope to complete this work next year through finding an ensemble or orchestra to collaborate with on movements 2 and 3. In movement 2 the EWI will explore an electroacoustic landscape somewhere between electronic and live acoustic sound. In movement 3 the EWI will act as a live classical concerto instrument with full live orchestra or ensemble.”