Asteryth Sloane

Asteryth Sloane — composer, poet, therapist, and visionary — was one of the most distinctive creative voices to emerge from British contemporary classical music in a generation. Born Alexia Sloane in Suffolk in 2000, they were blind from the age of two. Rather than a limitation, blindness became the foundation of an extraordinary and wholly singular approach to composition: imagining pitches in the mind, writing them down in Braille music notation, and dictating the result to an amanuensis who transcribed the score into notation software. From the first notes they improvised at age six, Asteryth was building a world from sound. Their music was animated by nature, ecological grief, Buddhist philosophy, and a deep faith in the power of art to heal and reconnect. They wrote for unusual combinations of instruments, drawing on texts in languages as far apart as Basque and Mandarin, and described the living Earth as a constant artistic interlocutor. Major ensembles including VOCES8, the BBC Singers, Paraorchestra, and CoMA performed their work at venues ranging from King's College Chapel to the BBC Proms, where their commissioned piece Earthward, performed by VOCES8, marked an electrifying professional debut. Asteryth won the Cambridge Young Composer of the Year competition in 2016 with Passiflora — the first female composer to receive the honour — and in 2017 was selected as one of seven winners of the Classic FM/Royal Philharmonic Society 25th Birthday Commissions. In 2018 they took the senior prize in the BBC Proms Inspire Young Composers' Competition for Elegy for Aylan. In 2024 they released the EP Unravellings, and in 2025 were elected a Fellow of the Royal Northern College of Music. Alongside composition, Asteryth pursued poetry — self-publishing the anthology Hushed Skies at sixteen — and built a therapeutic practice as a person-centred therapist and creative ecotherapist specialising in complex trauma. They held a First Class Honours degree and a Master's with Distinction from the Royal Northern College of Music and were, at the time of their death, completing a PhD in Poetry and Ecolinguistics at the University of Gloucestershire. Asteryth Sloane died on 23 July 2026, aged twenty-six. Their music endures as an invitation to listen, grieve, reconnect, and hope.