Other recent premieres include Dances, Songs & Hymns for Friendship, a string quartet commissioned by Wigmore Hall, Presteigne Festival and the Sacconi Chamber Music Festival to celebrate the Sacconi Quartet’s 25^th anniversary; Small Plinths, a wind quintet commissioned by the Academy of St Martin in the Fields; and Night Sky in a Stone, a solo guitar work commissioned by the International Guitar Foundation. A concerto for recorder virtuoso Lucie Horsch and Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, The Ladybird, continued Waley-Cohen’s creative partnership with Horsch, following the success of Variations on Sellinger’s Round (2022). 

In 2024, Waley-Cohen released her debut album Spell Book on NMC Recordings. The album was selected as an Editor’s Choice by Gramophone Magazine and praised by Limelight as ​“uncompromising yet seductive”, while BBC Music Magazine described it as ​“sophisticated, contemporary and feminist”. The title movement, performed by Héloïse Werner, Katie Bray, Fleur Barron and Manchester Collective, draws inspiration from the rituals and language of spellcasting. A Barbican portrait concert presented by Manchester Collective in 2024 celebrated the completion of the cycle.

Spell Book is based on poems from Rebecca Tamás’s WITCH, which also provided the inspiration for Waley-Cohen’s first opera. Commissioned by the Royal Academy of Music to mark its bicentenary, WITCH premiered in 2022, directed by Polly Graham and conducted by Ryan Wigglesworth, and was subsequently nominated for an Ivor Novello Award.

Waley-Cohen’s notable orchestral works include Mother Tongue (2024), commissioned by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and conducted by Edward Gardner; After June (2025), written for the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in response to Fanny Mendelssohn’s Das Jahr; Demon (2023), commissioned by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra; and Pocket Cosmos (2022), commissioned and premiered by the London Chamber Orchestra under Pekka Kuusisto, concluding her tenure as the orchestra’s Composer-in-Residence.

Among her recent chamber works are the moon, the moss & the mushrooms for Roderick Williams and Christopher Glynn; Pisces for Archipelago Collective’s tenth-anniversary festival; and Stone Fruit for Colin Currie Percussion Quartet, premiered at Wigmore Hall in 2024.

Waley-Cohen has also created several immersive and interdisciplinary projects, including Permutations (2017), an interactive artwork exploring the relationship between architecture and music, developed during her Open Space Residency at Snape Maltings. 

A Royal Philharmonic Society Composition Prize winner, Waley-Cohen was Associate Composer at Wigmore Hall in 2019/20 and Associate Composer of St David’s Hall’s contemporary music series Night Music from 2018 – 21. She was previously Associate Composer of Nonclassical, and was a founding member and artistic director of the Listenponyconcert series and record label. She lives in London.