Long before Asteryth Sloane could check her work at a piano, she had already built it in her head: harmony, colour, and instrumentation held entirely in memory, set down in Braille music notation and dictated, phrase by phrase, to an amanuensis who copied it into a score an orchestra could read. Sloane, the British composer and poet who became the first female winner of the Cambridge Young Composer of the Year prize, died in July 2026 at 26, the Royal Philharmonic Society announced, according to Slippedisc. No cause of death has been made public.

Sloane had been blind since the age of two and grew up in Suffolk, where she spent years composing by ear and improvisation before moving into formal training around age twelve. She called herself a synaesthetic musician: she imagined the pitches and colours of a piece with no instrument in hand, then translated what she heard in her mind into notation, a method she carried through every score that followed.

In 2016, at sixteen, she won the Cambridge Young Composer of the Year Competition in its tenth year with 'Passiflora,' a setting of R. G. Gregory's poem 'Southampton Water,' becoming the prize's first female winner, according to the Royal College of Music. One of the judges, Ewan Campbell, called it 'an ambitious piece that makes excellent use of the available instrumentation, with some very interesting harmonies and unusual melodic scales.' That same year she was appointed a composer with the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, the first blind composer to hold that post, having already spent a year as an Aldeburgh Young Musician. She was also selected as one of four composers for the Britten Sinfonia Academy.

The recognition kept building. In 2017, Classic FM and the Royal Philharmonic Society named her one of seven composers nationwide for their 25th Birthday Commissions, putting a new work in front of the station's audience of roughly 5.4 million listeners, according to the Royal College of Music. 'Opportunities to reach such audiences, particularly as a young 16-year old composer not yet established in the industry, are very rare,' she said at the time. During her two years at the Royal College of Music Junior Department, she also won its Joan Weller Composition Prize and Humphrey Searle Composition Award, and in 2018 took the senior category of the BBC Proms Inspire Young Composers' Competition for 'Elegy for Aylan,' written for members of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra's Ensemble 10/10 and named for the three-year-old Syrian refugee whose death had become a symbol of a crisis.

In July 2019, her choral work 'Earthward' received its world premiere at the BBC Proms, sung by the vocal ensemble VOCES8 at Cadogan Hall and broadcast live on BBC Radio 3. 'I am very excited to have my work premiered by VOCES8 at the BBC Proms,' she said. 'I have fond memories of my time at the RCM Junior Department and am indebted to everyone there for believing in me as a composer.'

She went on to study at the Royal Northern College of Music from 2018 on a scholarship supported by the Amber Trust, the Humphrey Searle Foundation, and the RNCM's Gough Kelly Award, graduating with First-Class Honours before completing a Master's degree in Composition and Musicology, with Distinction, in 2022. Her research there explored how listening itself could foster more ethical relationships with sound. Around this period she began composing under the name Xia Leon Sloane, moving on from the name Alexia Sloane under which she had won her earliest prizes, before later taking the name Asteryth Sloane.

Her later work turned toward healing as deliberately as her earlier work had turned toward orchestras. As a Musician in Residence with Paraorchestra, the Bristol-based ensemble bringing together disabled and non-disabled musicians, she used the residency to explore music's place in a therapeutic healing process. Her commissioned piece 'Prelude to a Beginning,' described in the concert programme as 'a shimmering, sensual work rising from primordial silence,' opened the ensemble's 'Trip the Light Fantastic' concert marking the reopening of Bristol Beacon, according to Bristol Beacon. Alongside her composing, she trained as a person-centred therapist with a particular interest in survivors of abuse and complex trauma, work she treated as inseparable from her music and her poetry, and she was open about being queer and autistic.

What remains is concrete and findable: a catalogue built in Braille and dictation rather than at a keyboard, running from the ache of 'Passiflora' and the grief of 'Elegy for Aylan' through the hush that opens 'Prelude to a Beginning,' each still playable by any orchestra, choir, or ensemble willing to take up the parts. The doors she was first to open, as a blind composer with the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain and as the first female winner of a decade-old prize, stay open for whoever follows her into a rehearsal room with a cane or a Braille display instead of a pencil. The therapy practice she was building for survivors of trauma was a second body of work only just begun when she died at 26.