Isobel Waller-Bridge

Isobel Waller-Bridge has established herself across cinema, television, radio, and stage work as a remarkably productive, award-winning composer and sound designer who moves with equal assurance between orchestral scores and exploratory electronic textures. Born in 1984 as the oldest of three children, she grew up in Ealing, west London, within a prosperous family; her sister Phoebe later achieved recognition as creator and lead of the BBC comedy-drama Fleabag in 2016. Her father helped develop an electronic trading platform while her mother was employed by the City of London’s Ironmongers livery company. An early fascination with music began when she sat at the piano at age four, and by ten she had already written her first score for a friend’s short film. During initial classical studies she responded strongly to Rachmaninov’s expansive, lyrical style, yet encounters with Janáček and Poulenc at Edinburgh University steered her toward leaner textures featuring distinctive harmonic choices. After completing her degree there she earned a master’s at King’s College London and a diploma from the Royal Academy of Music.

Throughout the 2000s she performed with the experimental group Tangent, though by decade’s end she concentrated on her own writing. One of the first pieces to reach an audience was the piano trio “Eikhah: Book of Lamentations,” premiered in Edinburgh in 2008. The following year she scored a Lucy Patrick Ward short film, yet wider attention arrived after she supplied additional orchestration for George Fenton’s Ivor Novello-winning soundtrack to the BBC natural-history series Life. That collaboration led to further work with Fenton in 2010 on the Hollywood feature The Bounty Hunter. In contrast, she supplied fragile, clockwork-like piano miniatures for Claire Oakley’s 2010 debut short Beautiful Enough. Before the year closed she joined Stephen Warbeck on the BBC radio play Gilead and served as musical director for a Manchester stage production of A Christmas Carol; in 2011 she repeated the latter role for Katie Mitchell’s National Theatre staging of A Woman Killed with Kindness.

Her orchestrations appeared on the 2012 feature films Day of the Flowers directed by John Roberts and The Imposter directed by Bart Layton. Versatility surfaced again in the skewed folk-rock she wrote for a Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh production of Phil Porter’s Blink, while the somber strings and piano for Oakley’s short Physics returned to more familiar territory. In 2013 she supplied music and sound design for six separate stage productions, among them a north London mounting of Rajiv Joseph’s Gruesome Playground Injuries that blended playful guitar-and-piano pieces reminiscent of Belle & Sebastian with glitch-inflected electronics. Angus Jackson’s Chichester staging of If Only gave her scope to explore Latin jazz, whereas his subsequent King Lear production contained some of her most taut and dramatic writing to that point.

Additional projects with Oakley arrived in 2014, and her restrained score for the short James received the Best Composer prize at that year’s Underwire Festival. Sound design for Nick Payne’s Incognito at the Bush Theatre earned her the Best Sound Design award at the Off West End Awards. Further film and theater assignments followed in 2015, yet the year also marked the release of her debut solo EP Music for Strings. Recorded at Angel Studios in Islington, the EP was supported several months later by a rare live appearance at Union Chapel in the same borough.

Opening 2016 with another restrained piano-and-orchestra approach, she scored the BBC serialization of War & Peace. The July premiere of Fleabag on the same network marked a decisive turn for both sisters; an early version of the first episode prompted the raw, punk- and heavy-metal-tinged guitar figures that frame each installment of the BAFTA- and Emmy-winning series. As commissions multiplied, Waller-Bridge reduced her pace slightly. In 2017 she fashioned irregular, throbbing avant-garde electronica for Jack Thorne’s Old Vic revival of Woyzeck and wrote grave string-ensemble pieces for Knives in Hens at the Donmar Warehouse. The year 2018 brought increased television work for the BBC series The Split and The ABC Murders plus ITV’s Vanity Fair, though she delivered perhaps her strongest contribution that year with the shimmering electronic score for Chanya Button’s Vita & Virginia, applying an unexpected sonic palette to a 1920s setting.

Mid-2019 saw the launch of The Song Project, a live collaboration with Dutch singer-songwriter Wende. She next created custom sound design for Phoebe’s touring stage adaptation of Fleabag. Early 2020 yielded an ornate, kinetic score for Autumn de Wilde’s directorial debut Emma; its appearance coincided with the release of her first Mercury KX single, the reflective solo piano piece “September.” March 2021 brought “Illuminations,” a track featuring experimental chimes. That year also included contrasting film scores for Christian Schwochow’s Munich: The Edge of War and Craig Roberts’s The Phantom of the Open. After partnering with ballet dancer Francesca Hayward on Jess Kohl’s Siren, her climate-themed piece “Temperatures” premiered at the Royal Festival Hall. She maintained theater involvement with sound design for London productions of The Forest and Mad House, while her work occupied a central place in mid-2022 on Babak Anvari’s Netflix crime thriller I Came By and Apple’s anthology series Roar. November witnessed the release of the VIII EP performed by the 12 Ensemble, and the year concluded with her delicate score for the animated adaptation of Charlie Mackesy’s The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse.