Isabella Gellis is a British-Canadian composer whose music delights in ‘tactility, play, and manipulation of perception’. Having started out as a pianist and violinist, she went on to study composition at the Royal Academy of Music. In 2023 she spent a year on the Panufnik Scheme, resulting in the LSO performing her music, and this year the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal premiered a new work of hers.

 

And Other Things began with its second movement, written in 2018 for the Dartington Festival. When the Tritium Trio later asked whether there were indeed “other things” still to come, Gellis responded by composing the outer movements, shaping the work into a three-movement whole. The title also references Charles Ives’ Soliloquy or a Study in 7ths and Other Things; the first and third movements of Gellis’ piece explore the idea of widening intervals, inspired by a single bar in Ives’ song, whilst the central movement focusing on harmony, repetition, and a sense of ritual.

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David Palmer