AMELIA RAY IS THE INTERPRETER.
Amelia Ray is a writer, composer and performer who engages in barrier-breaking storytelling. Her 31-year career has spanned the fields of music, literature, performance art, film and humanitarianism. As a polyglot, Ray has spent decades contemplating how similar concepts are expressed differently linguistically across cultures. This research has permeated her versatile artistic work, which aims to improve understanding and communication between people from different backgrounds.
Ray’s catalogue includes cross-genre and multilingual compositions, “Can't Jemima” – a one-act musical about cultural appropriation – and “Hambone Says” – a performance piece that uses contemporary past aesthetic to explore racism, rage and role reversal, and which won the Global Film Exhibition 2024 Best Music Video award.
In 2020, Ray organised The Quarantuned Music Festival – a series of virtual music festivals benefitting artists affected by Covid-19 concert cancellations. Her essay “The Best Writing Tip: Cut with a Razor” won the 2022 Writers College My Writing Journey Competition. Ray is also the founder of Europe for Ukraine – an initiative to produce an original, multilingual composition in support of Ukraine.
Ray’s latest single, “Dream” – a tribute to musicals –, is a testament to her deftness at constructing cohesive works from diverse elements. Each line in “Dream” references at least one musical, and the piano and choral arrangements were constructed using dozens of layered parts. Ray masterfully assembled the pieces together to complete a jigsaw puzzle of a song that sounds like it came straight from a Broadway production.
What will she think of next?
PRESS
Amelia Ray, Interview, Dinya Magazine, March 2024
Amelia Ray, Interview, The Misty Music Podcast, 25 February 2024
Amelia Ray, Interview, Global Film Exhibition, 11 October 2023
"Erilainen Euro Vision Ukrainan tueksi," Nurmijärven Uutiset, 13 April 2022
Andrew Zhang, “Amelia Ray’s ‘Hambone Says’: A Harrowing Role-Reversal on Race,” Two Story Melody, 22 October 2020
Amelia Ray, Interview, And the Next Thing You Know... podcast, September 2020
Amelia Ray, Interview, Mejunje 2.0, June 2020
Andrea Huberyc, "Klagosangen tog ton i radhuset,” Ystads Allehanda, 29 September 2018
Jay McDaniel, “Music as Spiritual Homeland: Amelia Ray and Levon Helm,” OpenHorizons.org, June 2018
Marty Sattell, “Local Musicians: Amalia Ray,” InMadrid, 2008