CACrown ArchivesThe cinema collection
Menu
Research dossier · General Reference

Freya Waley-Cohen

(born 1989)

Cross-disciplinary reference desk with index cards, atlas, dictionary and catalogue
General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionNov 15, 2025
Entity authorityQ76204478
Source-derived summary

Freya Waley-Cohen (born 20 February 1989) is a British-American composer based in London.

Biography

Waley-Cohen grew up in an arts-oriented family. Her mother is the American sculptor Josie Spencer and her father is English theatre manager and producer Stephen Waley-Cohen. Her sister is the violinist Tamsin Waley-Cohen. She began playing the violin at the age of three, and at aged 11 enrolled for a composition course at The Walden School, New Hampshire. She studied with Giles Swayne whilst an undergraduate at Cambridge, and then afterwards with Simon Bainbridge and Oliver Knussen at the Royal Academy of Music. In 2016 she was a Composition Fellow at the Tanglewood Festival.

Music

An early composition was Dark Hour, a piano quintet with clarinet, performed at the Sage Gateshead in May 2013. The choral piece Linea was written specifically for performance inside the Princess of Wales Conservatory glass house at Kew Gardens, an installation as much as a concert piece. It was performed there by the vocal ensemble Reverie in October 2014.

Editorial summary

“Freya Waley-Cohen” enters the record as (born 1989). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Freya, Waley-Cohen and born can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1989, 2016, 2013, 2014—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1989-02-20. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Freya, Waley-Cohen and born.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Freya Waley-Cohen” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Freya, Waley-Cohen and born provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 15, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q76204478. VIAF identifies the subject as 47151246617944132162. The Library of Congress control number is n2017071309. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1989, 2016, 2013 and 2014.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

Best used for
  • Subject orientation
  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
Verify next

The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Freya Waley-Cohen”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Freya Waley-Cohen primary sources, Freya Waley-Cohen archive and Freya research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Freya Waley-Cohen”?
  2. Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
  3. What terminology or title could unlock a more precise catalogue search?
Subject index

Search terms from this dossier

Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Freya Waley-Cohen” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.