Discover SoundEscapes: Where Music Meets Art

Share this page

A new project connecting art and music is set to help bring a world-class art museum’s collection to life.

SoundEscapes is a unique collaboration between Sound and Music and the Sainsbury Centre where 10 of the UK’s most exciting composers have been invited to create new compositions to capture the essence of a work of art in the Centre’s collection. With artworks spanning 6000 years up to the present day, and including all mediums, the collection is one of the finest in the UK and a celebration of the power of human creativity.

Long-standing collaborator of Björk, Matthew Herbert, will work with vocalist Momoko Gill and experimental composer Ella Kay to create a new composition. There will also be new work from Ed Macfarlane, the lead singer of two-time Brit Award nominated band, Friendly Fires.

Joining these music creators are a cohort of young, emerging and established composers from across Sound and Music’s programmes and alumni community.

You can listen to the new works here.

Tamsin Elliot playing the accordion to Ossip Zadkine’s The Accordion Player, 1918, at the Sainsbury Centre. Photo: Kate Wolstenholme

CEO of Sound and Music, Will Dutta, said:

“We are thrilled to partner with the Sainsbury Centre whose visionary approach to engaging with art resonates deeply with our own. Composers and music creators have long turned to visual art to intensify their own musical expression. Now this project enables composers to apply their creativity in new contexts while giving sound to the complexity and intimacy of some of the Centre’s finest art objects to bring the viewer’s encounter closer still.”

Launching on 6 December 2024, the new works will be accessible to audiences worldwide on both on the Sainsbury Centre’s website and in the museum itself, where visitors can experience the music alongside the artworks that inspired it. These compositions will also feature on the Smartify app, offering a dynamic audio guide to the collection, as well as Sound and Music’s Minute of Listening platform in 2025.

Following the Sainsbury Centre’s Living Art relaunch, there have been many ways for people to meet art in a more personal and emotional way in the museum. There is no better way of doing that than with the power of music.

Director of the Sainsbury Centre, Jago Cooper, said:

“Imagine your favourite film, or the best party you have ever been to and take away the music. What would that experience have been like without its soundtrack? That’s how visiting an art museum can feel like. Music has the power to transform that silent canvas into an emotional landscape, elevating the visual experience into a multisensory masterpiece. Just as a film score breathes life into its scenes, music can set the tone for an unforgettable encounter with art. That is why we are so excited to be working with the wonderful Sound and Music organisation.”

Marcus Jospeh at the Sainsbury Centre. Photo: Kate Wolstenholme

Selected Composers and Works

We gave composers the challenge to create a short original composition of no more than a minute long, in keeping with our much loved Minute of Listening collections, to help capture the essence of a work of art in the Sainsbury Centre’s collection. With these compositions, each object in the collection will be able to better tell its life story and engage with audiences in a new and dynamic way, all through the power of music.

The selected composers and works are:

Maruvaashe ‘Meduulla’ Shongedza at the Sainsbury Centre. Photo: Kate Wolstenholme

About the Sainsbury Centre

The Sainsbury Centre is a world-class art museum with a unique perspective on how art can foster cultural dialogue and exchange. Following a radical relaunch in 2023 the Sainsbury Centre is the first museum in the world to formally recognise the living lifeforce of art, enabling people to build relationships across an arts landscape.

The art of the Sainsbury Centre is able to help reframe and answer the most important questions people have in their lives. It is not a museum to only learn more about artists, cultures or movements like Francis Bacon, the Tang Dynasty or Modernism, it is a place of experience, where collections are animate, and visitors are emotionally connected.

One of the first museums in the world to display art from all around the globe and from all time periods equally and collectively, Sir Robert and Lady Lisa Sainsbury created one of the most sought after yet non-conformist art collections. In 1973 they donated their collection, which transcended traditional barriers between art, architecture, archaeology and anthropology, to the UEA, and created an entirely new type of museum. Housed in Sir Norman Foster’s revolutionary first ever public building, the space aimed for an interactive relationship between people, object and landscape, where art was placed within an open yet intimate ‘living area’.

Visit sainsburycentre.ac.uk or call 01603 593 199

Follow @sainsburycentre on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram