Harriet Riley

Spindle Ensemble, Zoobers, Freelance Percussionist

Originally from Devon, Harriet grew up in a musical household and went on to study Orchestral Percussion at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. She has experience in a range of genres from orchestral playing with BBC National Orchestra of Wales to synthy Sci-Fi IDM Jazz with Zoobers, studying gamelan in Bali to folk duo with Alex Garden. Harriet performs regularly with Spindle Ensemble, a contemporary classical quartet. Their second album, Inkling was pressed to vinyl and released by Hidden Notes Records in 2021. Harriet works in a number of dance and theatre projects playing solo percussion, most recently for children’s circus theatre company Can’t Sit Still. Their show, Plink & Boo, toured the UK in 2018-19 and a recorded version, Play Along Plink and Boo, continues to be distributed by theatres during 2021. Harriet was granted funding by Help Musicians UK in 2020 to create a film for which Harriet was composer. The resulting short film, Please You Draw Near, was a collaboration involving circus, music and Shakespeare and premiered in March 2021 by Stroud-based magazine, Good on Paper. Harriet loves new music and premiered and recorded a new Evelyn Glennie composition, The Grace of Silence, commissioned by Sound World during 2020. Harriet has also regularly performed with the Paraorchestra + Friends on their music/dance collaboration The Nature of Why as well as many other projects at prestigious venues across the UK, Australia and Russia. In November 2019, Harriet performed a specially commissioned percussion concerto, Heartbeat, by William Goodchild, with the Bristol Symphony Orchestra to a sold out audience at St George’s, Bristol. Sonder, released in 2020, was the debut album of a folk duo with Harriet Riley and Alex Garden. She is currently a composer and performer for Thimble Theatre and has been working freelance in Bristol since she graduated in 2014.