About
Sylvia Villa is a British composer and pianist who graduated from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in the summer of 2019, having studied both acoustic and electronic music composition.
Her music has a rather ethereal, delicate and innocent quality that is frequently twisted by moments that are eerie, macabre and haunting.
Fascinated by folklore, fairies and fables from the past, much of her music takes on a magical quality, as she chooses to explore fanciful notions that although are often fictional and illusionary, frequently reflect back a thought-provoking moral or lesson that relates to the modern world.
As a huge lover of ballet (having grown up dancing herself) much of her music is geared towards the world of dance; which suits her twisted fairy-tale sound world she has created within her music. Ballet and theatre have been a constant source of inspiration to Sylvia’s work, with her ultimate career goal being to write and stage her very own ballet.
Sylvia has collaborated with choreographer Kat Collings on a dance-piece called ‘Un’ (June 2018) for the National Dance Company Wales’ production, Alternative Routes. She has also created her own dance production called ‘Looking Glass’ (May 2019) in collaboration with choreographer Kim Noble, that explored the notion ‘if in a mirror you could see inside, would you be happy with what you’d find.’
She was also incredibly involved with the Drama department at the RWCMD, collaborating on 3 different theatrical productions during her time there; including ‘The Agony and the Style’ (Dec. 2017), written by Lope de Vega and directed by Josh Roche, ‘Candide’ (May 2018), written by Mark Ravenhill and directed by Andrew Whyment and ‘The Sicilian Courtesan’ (May 2019), written by Lope de Vega and directed by Laurence Boswell.
In 2019, Sylvia was a finalist in the BBC NOW Composition: Wales competition with her piece for Symphony Orchestra, entitled ‘Sortilège’(meaning a foretelling by divination). The piece has since been performed again by the Royal Tunbridge Wells Symphony Orchestra on International Women’s Day 2022.
Her success in this competition resulted in her receiving a commission from Tŷ Cerdd to write a solo guitar piece to be performed by guitarist Sean Shibe. The finished piece is called ‘The Shadowman’ that seeks to capture the elusive nature of a shadow that although is visible, is never really there. It was premiered at St David’s Hall (Cardiff) in September 2021 and the score was recently published by Tŷ Cerdd which you can find here.
Throughout 2021, Sylvia composed and recorded a collection of seven piano pieces, creating an album called ‘The Keynote’. The individual pieces are all inspired by different stimuli, from a painting, photographs and a gown to a rather beautiful bird. You can listen to the album here.
Currently, she is working on a new collection of solo work, this time seven pieces for solo cello, titled ‘Sanguine’. The scores should be available online by the end of 2022. She is also part of a new dance project- ‘The Imaginary Self’- which seeks to explore the creative collaboration between a choreographer (Jasmine Coomber), pianist (Wai Yu) and composer. Performances for this production a planned for 2023- more details to follow.
