Alannah Marie Halay is an internationally performed British composer and author known for her work with avant-garde, contemporary classical, and experimental music. Halay studied at the University of Leeds, where she received her PhD in composition. She is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA) and qualified teacher (QTS, PGCE, MCCT).
Halay received a place at the University of Leeds via its Access to Leeds Scheme.[2] She began her composing career when her piece Dry Veins (2012) for piano and voice was performed in the Leeds Lieder festival in 2012.[3] She was later the winner of the Yorkshire Young Sinfonia Composition Competition 2015, and her composition Air, Earth, Water, Fire was selected to be workshopped in its summer course and performed alongside its BBC Radio 4 programme.[4][5] In the same year, she had a composition selected for the Gaudeamus Muziekweek Academy, which would be performed in the Gaudeamus Muziekweek Festival in 2016.[6] She attended the Gaudeamus Muziekweek Academy in the summer 2015 where she studied composition and contemporary harp techniques, and where she was selected to be the UK composer in cellist Katharina Gross's worldwide Cellomondo project.[7] Later in 2015, she worked with Hans-Joachim Hespos as a performer and composer, performing Hespos' Tja (1981) for pianist, wuniof 'k (1989) on piano, and realising the tape part for his MusikBoxen (1995).[8] During this time she also received composition and performance training from Hespos.[9] In 2017, she worked with Dr Michael Spencer to celebrate the University of Leeds becoming a Steinway School, with their piece Resonance/Light/Decay being composed to be played on twenty-eight Steinway pianos.[10][11] Throughout 2022, Halay worked with the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation through the support of enoa (European Network of Opera Academies), which selected her upcoming opera project, Queering Opera, for its Opera Creation Journey programme.[2][12][13] This follows her previous opera, Pacific Pleasures, which was written as a prequel to Leonard Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti, and performed together by Bloomsbury Opera at Goodenough College in 2017.[14][15]
Overall, Halay's music has been performed internationally, by musicians such as Ian Pace, Rui Baeta, Katharina Gross, Peter Wiegold (Notes Inégales), Ryszard Lubieniecki, Lara Martins, and others.[16][17][18][19][20]
Halay's practice-led research formed the basis of her PhD thesis, Recognising Absurdity through Compositional Practice: Comparing an Avant-Garde Style with being avant garde. The same methodology has informed her other publications, including her edited book, (Per)Forming Art: Performance as Research in Contemporary Artworks, published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing.[21] Some of Halay's musical scores are available from the University of California, Los Angeles, Music Library: Contemporary Music Score Collection.[22] Halay is also published by Vernon Press and the University of Nebraska Press.[23][24]
