Composing biography — HARRIET ADIE

COMPOSING REVIEWS

MusicWeb International
“Each arrangement has required apposite revision, judicious emphasis and a sense of colour…Each of the 16 carols has some pliant or effective detail.”

British Music Society
“arrangements to which it is well worth paying attention.”

BBC Music magazine
“dynamic and varied new arrangements by Adie.”

South Wales Evening Post
“….the transcendental Elemental (composed by Harriet Adie). Adie’s composition was innovative and well phrased, displaying a timely use of percussive sounds chiming with contemplative passages.”

Richard Whitehouse, English Music Festival
“Harriet Adie’s Festive Fantasy combined 12 carols in various moods and styles for what is a gift to this instrument.

The Arts Desk
“Edgar Pettman's wistful Gabriel's Message feels as if it's being improvised on the spot. As does Adie's tender reinvention of I Wonder as I Wander – all the better for using so much of the instruments' lower registers.”

This is Herefordshire
“Sun, Moon and Stars `A Middle Eastern Sky' by Harriet Adie was very enchanting. Depicting a childhood in the far-east, beautiful textures combined with eastern scale and harmonies, it was quite spellbinding.”

She is clearly a talented composer and this is an effective work which matched scale and expressive range.

Music and Vision

Harriet composes alongside her career as a professional harpist, specializing in compositions and arrangements for solo harp and harp chamber music. Her critically acclaimed composition, Sun, Moon and Stars for harp quartet, was selected for performance at the 9th World Harp Congress in 2005, recorded by 4 Girls 4 Harps in 2009, and has been broadcast and performed as far across the globe as Australia. Her various commissions include Flight for solo harp, written for the Trinity-Guildhall harp syllabus, a 2003 work Songs of Beginning for harp and string quartet, and a 2007 song cycle for harp and children’s choir Songs of Childhood, both commissioned by the Two Moors Festival. Her second composition for harp quartet, Elemental (2012) was composed especially for 4 Girls 4 Harps and has twice been broadcast live on BBC Radio 3’s In Tune program.

Her arrangements of Christmas Carols for harp quartet feature on 4 Girls 4 Harps’ 2013 Christmas album. On its release, the CD was given a 4* review by BBC Music Magazine and broadcast on both Classic FM, where it was also selected as ‘Album of the week’, and BBC Radio 3. Some of Harriet’s arrangements of large scale orchestral works (including music by Prokofiev, Borodin, Shostakovich and de Falla) can be heard on 4 Girls 4 Harps’ 2017 recording, Dance.

In 2014 Harriet was selected by American online publishers, Harp Column Music, to be one of their featured arrangers and composers, making her music available internationally for the first time. Following on from this selection, her arrangement of Greensleeves for four harps was used by the Philadelphia Orchestra for their harp ‘play in’ day. In 2017, a BBC video of Harriet’s harp quartet arrangement of Shostakovich’s famous Waltz no.2 went viral, receiving well over 6 million views and leading to an invitation to record with Dutch label STS Digital.

A passionate educator, in recent years Harriet has enjoyed arranging and composing music for harp students as well as writing a ground breaking series of sight reading books. Some of the ensembles to perform her work include The National Youth Harp Orchestra of Great Britain, the American Youth Harp Ensemble, The Chicago Harp Quartet and the Australian Harp Quartet. Most recently Harriet was invited to write sight reading pieces for the 2025 ABRSM harp syllabus.

COMPOSING REVIEWS

MusicWeb International“Each arrangement has required apposite revision, judicious emphasis and a sense of colour…Each of the 16 carols has some pliant or effective detail.”

British Music Society“arrangements to which it is well worth paying attention.”

BBC Music magazine“dynamic and varied new arrangements by Adie.”

South Wales Evening Post“….the transcendental Elemental (composed by Harriet Adie). Adie’s composition was innovative and well phrased, displaying a timely use of percussive sounds chiming with contemplative passages.”

Richard Whitehouse, English Music Festival“Harriet Adie’s Festive Fantasy combined 12 carols in various moods and styles for what is a gift to this instrument.

The Arts Desk“Edgar Pettman's wistful Gabriel's Message feels as if it's being improvised on the spot. As does Adie's tender reinvention of I Wonder as I Wander – all the better for using so much of the instruments' lower registers.”

This is Herefordshire“Sun, Moon and Stars `A Middle Eastern Sky' by Harriet Adie was very enchanting. Depicting a childhood in the far-east, beautiful textures combined with eastern scale and harmonies, it was quite spellbinding.”