Kit McCarthy (b. 2002) is a composer and producer from Fife, Scotland. He is currently writing for the London Symphony Orchestra as part of the 2025-26 Helen Hamlyn Panufnik Composers’ Scheme.
Kit writes music about the natural world, memory, physicality, colour, nostalgia, dance, homesickness, colour, chaos and fragility. He makes music for a range of chamber ensembles, orchestras, and artists, and across a range of genres.
Kit won the 2025 National Centre for Early Music’s Young Composers Award; his piece Molten Kaleidoscope was recently performed at the love:Handel festival by the Brook Street Band and broadcast on BBC Radio 3.
He scored who will be remembered here (fieldwork performance/Forest of Black), an acclaimed short film about queer Scottish heritage featured at the 2025 Edinburgh Art Festival. He is currently working on commissions for the Bubblyjock Collective and the St Andrews Renaissance Singers.
Kit studied classical composition and electronic music at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and graduated in 2024 with a first class honours degree. His teachers included Hollie Harding, Laurence Crane and Julian Philips. He won Guildhall’s Ian Horsburgh Memorial Prize for his orchestral piece The Players Nearest The Fire Exist.
Kit has written for the Ligeti Quartet, EXAUDI, the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, the Brompton Quartet, Ben Smith and Heather Roche, amongst others, and his music has been conducted by Antonio Pappano, Jack Sheen and Richard Baker. As an arranger and producer, he has worked with Sophie Wright, Elisa Tombazi, Ania Sharwood and the London Music Theatre Orchestra.
His music has been performed around the UK and, weirdly, once on a cruise ship somewhere off the coast of New Zealand.
Recent projects have been about wide-ranging topics: séances, constellations, seagulls, mania, black holes, the concept of time, seaweed, the materiality of empty space, shadows, white noise, tape saturation, oatcakes, rewilding, train journeys along the east coast, topological insulators, the Overground, and lobsters (amongst other things).
Kit’s musical practice is often cross-disciplinary. He is currently collaborating on a new musical about a fatal kayaking accident off the west coast of Scotland (Guildhall undisciplined), and has also written for theatre (Byre Theatre; University College Oxford), dance (Shaper/Caper), and radio drama (University of St Andrews).
Kit plays the French horn. Highlights include performing in Neil Luck’s Real Telepaths, broadcast on BBC Radio 3, and in the world premiere of John Luther Adams’s Across the Distance: 32 horns in a walled garden, blanketed by sea mist (it was the best thing ever).
He is also an experienced music editor and copyist, having worked on projects for the LSO, the BBC Scottish Symphony, the BBC Concert Orchestra, Erland Cooper and Ruth Barrett.
Kit’s studies were generously supported by the Caroline Fitzmaurice Trust, the Cross Trust, and a merit scholarship from the Guildhall School Trust.
Kit loves the Cairngorms, open cello strings, birch trees, harmon mutes, ceilidh tunes, and poems about crows.
Other links
CV (PDF download)
Photo gallery
Some of what I’m listening to at the moment (Spotify playlist)
Kit McCarthy 