Discover SoundEscapes: Where Music Meets Art
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.
Each composer was tasked with crafting a unique, 60-second piece that captures the essence of a chosen artwork. From ancient artifacts to modern masterpieces, these compositions provide a fresh, multisensory way to engage with the museum's treasures. The new works will be accessible to audiences worldwide from 6 December 2024, 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.
Sound and Music is 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.
Discover art as you’ve never heard it before.
Read the press release
Listen to all the new works via Smartify
Composers
Matthew Herbert has made music from the complete life of a single pig, a bomb exploding in Libya, an orgasm, a town in Poland, a nightclub full of people, someone swimming the English channel, a tank driving over a meal made for Tony Blair, 20,000 dogs, the sewers beneath Fleet Street, 245 shops in a shopping centre and countless thousands of other noises.
Visit Matthew Herbert's profile
Listen: Head of a Woman, Amedeo Modigliani (Ft. Momoko Gill & Ella Kay)
Ed Macfarlane is best known as the frontman of Friendly Fires.
He has released music extensively over his 20 year career under many guises and in varying styles. He continues to tour worldwide with his band while operating out of his home studio Magic Window in Hitchin, Hertfordshire.
Visit Ed Macfarlane's profile
Listen: Study (Imaginary Portrait of Pope Pius XII), Francis Bacon
Melanie Wilson is a U.K. based inter-disciplinary composer, writer and performance maker. Her work is founded on the dialogue between sound, experimental forms of composition, language, technology and live performance. Recent work includes 'Dreaming Species', an online binaural soundwork for voices and AI, 'glass human', a chamber opera with electronics for Glyndebourne and 'Current, Rising', a hyper-reality opera for Royal Opera House.
Visit Melanie Wilson's profile
Listen: Old Maids, Leonora Carrington
Marcus Joseph is a dynamic saxophonist and spoken word artist whose music seamlessly blends jazz, reggae, and hip-hop. A Leicester native, Marcus has performed at major festivals like Love Supreme and Manchester Jazz Festival and has supported artists such as Alfredo Rodriguez and The Blackbyrds. His debut album, Beyond The Dome, was released through Jazz Refreshed and has garnered critical acclaim.
Visit Marcus Joseph's profile
Listen: We Mask, Cote d’lvoire
Midori Komachi is a violinist and composer bridging the traditions and the contemporary scenes of UK and Japan. Exploring Western and Japanese timbres in surround sound, her works have been featured at exhibitions and installations, with collaborators including architect Kengo Kuma, Musicity and LUSH. In 2021 she was a Musician in Residence at the British Council and PRS Foundation.
Visit Midori Komachi's profile
Listen: Usagi Kannon, Leiko Ikemura
Tamsin is a multi-instrumentalist, composer and film-maker based in Bristol, UK. With roots in the folk music of England and Ireland, her interests and playing styles extend to European and Middle Eastern musics as well as experimental and ambient sounds.
Visit Tamsin Elliot's profile
Listen: The Accordion Player, Ossip Zadkine
Hailing from North Manchester, Meduulla is a 25 year old Zimbabwean-born Rapper and DJ. Meduulla marries her modern flows and witty lyrics with jazz inspired hip hop instrumentals to create music that reflects the present day whilst carrying a nostalgic air.
Visit Meduulla's profile
Listen: Ceremonial Bow-Stand, Democratic Republic of the Congo
t l k is a Bristol-based artist, vocalist, producer, composer. Fluid in genre and form, their works evolve from memory, dialogue, dreams and explorations into loss, selfhood, human behaviour and its coalescence and tensions with the non-human. Centring the voice-as-instrument, t l k’s practice holds a deep commitment to the act of Noticing.
Visit t l k's profile
Listen: Baby Asleep, Jacob Epstein
Eva
Eva is interested in creating atmospheric soundtracks for video games and films, and hope one day to go into professional music production. I like to connect emotions to narratives in my compositions, as I feel it's a very important part of how music works.
Listen: Discs in Echelon, Version 2, Barbara Hepworth
Diego
Diego, also known as Ponkachonka, is an electronic musician and aspiring DJ based in the Southwest of England, producing music across a wide range of electronic genres with a passion for drum & bass, UK jungle and ambient music.
Listen: Diagonal Cut, Günther Uecker
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
See also
In Motion is our flagship artist development programme for anyone in the UK working creatively with music and sound. The programme is shaped around the development goals of the composers and supports artists in taking the next step in their practice. We support 10 composers over 18 months to design and undertake their own artistic development journey.
The Essentials Fund is a small grant of between £250-£500 to support your work through paying for self-learning projects, equipment, mentoring, and other direct costs for a project or to support your artistic development in other ways. The Essentials Fund is open to any composer, music creator or artist working creatively with music and sound.
In the Making is our annual trailblazing artist development programme for young people aged 14-18 and it is the only programme of its type in the UK that supports young composers. Across 12 months, 50 young people will be supported to grow their confidence and expand their skills and creative ambition in an open and accessible environment.