Monthly Late events at London’s Tate Modern feature sets from DJs selected by the underground music radio station NTS.
The Northern Ireland War Memorial in Belfast held performances of songs used to boost morale in air raid shelters, in an event last year commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Belfast Blitz.
And the Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum has been hosting a classical song cycle written in response to its collection, featuring readings from the museum’s poet-in-residence and the city’s Makar (poet laureate).
These are just three examples of recent live music performances at museums. These kind of events vary immensely in their character and scale, and serve an equally wide range of purposes.
London’s Courtauld Gallery has been using live music to contextualise exhibitions since 2009. It holds live performances, usually by young professional musicians or music college students, on one Sunday every month. One event in the year is used to perform new compositions inspired by the gallery’s collection or spaces, from students at Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
An event in March involved performances of pieces by composers with links to the gallery’s German expressionist artwork collection. An octet (including a guitar, mandolin, and baritone voice, as well as wind and stringed instruments) performed a serenade by the Austrian composer Arnold Schonberg, who corresponded with the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky.
The event also featured extracts from a piece for solo soprano by the German artist Kurt Schwitters.
“Schwitters is known as a visual artist, but between 1919 and 1920 he was also making sound art and poetry,” says Charlotte de Mille, who curates the gallery’s music programme.
These events include talks exploring the links between the music and the visual art. They are advertised on the gallery’s website, but the audiences mainly consist of people who happen to be at the galleries at the time.
In one instance this programme has led to the rediscovery of a long-lost work: a poem written by Michelangelo for his muse Tommaso dei Cavalieri, set to music by the Renaissance composer Jacques Arcadelt. The piece was performed by a choral quartet at an event in 2010 to accompany an exhibition of drawings made by Michelangelo for dei Cavalieri.
“The music, which was first published in 1539, wasn’t readily available,” says de Mille. “I found a copy in a 19th-century book of madrigals in Senate House Library.”
Music for Museums, held at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 2015, took the approach seen at the Courtauld one step further by making live music a key part of the exhibition itself.
The 10-week project consisted of film screenings during standard gallery opening times, as well as a series of live experimental musical performances on Thursday evenings and Saturday afternoons. The most popular attracted about 200 visitors.
The exhibition took its cue from the 1960s when musicians and artists saw museums as places where they had more freedom to experiment and collaborate than traditional concert halls.
“In a concert hall, the sound system tends to be in place, there are lighting rigs and certain conventions dictated by the infrastructure. But a lot of those things don’t exist in the same manner in an art gallery,” says Lydia Yee, the Whitechapel’s chief curator.
The location allowed performers to experiment spatially with sound and in how they interacted with the audience. In one performance, the musicians were interspersed with gallery visitors, who could sit or walk around.
One attraction of holding experimental musical performances in museums is that it is not a big financial risk, says Yee: “To commission an orchestra to do something for a concert hall is a different prospect than asking some musicians to do something on a smaller scale in a museum setting.”
The Whitechapel partnered with the record label Vinyl Factory, which helped to fund the project and also promoted it to a new audience. “There was some crossover with our regular audience, but there was also certainly an audience that might not come to the gallery on a regular basis, but came because of some of the music,” Yee says.
The National Museum of Scotland (NMS) in Edinburgh is another institution that uses live music to attract wider audiences. It has put on free musical events during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for the past 15 years.
The museum sources musicians through Live Music Now Scotland, an organisation that provides performance opportunities for young musicians. This year’s programme involves performances of traditional Scottish songs and instrumental music to tie in with its temporary exhibition, Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobites.
“Anecdotally, our audience for Free Fringe Music reflects the national and international make-up of visitors to Edinburgh during the Festival period,” says Emma Webb, the learning manager at NMS.
“The nature of the performances – free, accessible and relatively short – means that we get a wide range of visitors across the three-week run. The performances are also really popular with family visitors.”
Webb adds that there are other advantages to the museum of holding this live music programme. “The performances add to the atmosphere of the museum at this busy festival period. And linking them to the themes of our major exhibition or our permanent galleries helps widen awareness of our exhibitions and collections to visitors.”
1. Acoustics
The structure and materials of a building can make a big difference to how music sounds within it. The Music for Museums performances at the Whitechapel Gallery were held in a former library reading room made of brick.
“The typical box gallery with a hard cement floor and drywall is quite difficult sound-wise. But because brick is more absorbent, the sound was good,” Yee says.
2. Noise
NMS's Emma Webb says that ambient noise from visitors or the cafe can be an issue at live music events.
“We have to ensure that performers are aware of the acoustic challenges which the space presents,” she says. “Some types of music work better than others – depending on the instruments or voices involved.”
3. Protecting collections
Charlotte de Mille says that because the Courtauld’s gallery spaces are small, ensembles are limited to about six instruments. The venue is also careful to limit numbers of people overall and make sure that they don’t stand too close to artworks.
“We have to balance responsibility for protecting the collection with meeting visitors expectations,” she says.
4. Equipment
The Whitechapel Gallery worked with an external company to provide equipment and an audio engineer for electronic musicians with complex technical requirements.
Supplying electricity was another issue: “We had to run cables from another room to have enough capacity,” Yee says.
5. Licencing
A live music event does not need a licence from the local authority if it takes place between 8am and 11pm, and has an audience of fewer than 500 people, and is held at a workplace or premises licensed to serve alcohol.
Unamplified music played anywhere between the same hours also requires no licence.
However, venues hosting live music are likely to need a licence from PRS for Music. The fee for this varies depending on the type of music played.
The Northern Ireland War Memorial in Belfast held performances of songs used to boost morale in air raid shelters, in an event last year commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Belfast Blitz.
And the Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum has been hosting a classical song cycle written in response to its collection, featuring readings from the museum’s poet-in-residence and the city’s Makar (poet laureate).
These are just three examples of recent live music performances at museums. These kind of events vary immensely in their character and scale, and serve an equally wide range of purposes.
London’s Courtauld Gallery has been using live music to contextualise exhibitions since 2009. It holds live performances, usually by young professional musicians or music college students, on one Sunday every month. One event in the year is used to perform new compositions inspired by the gallery’s collection or spaces, from students at Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
An event in March involved performances of pieces by composers with links to the gallery’s German expressionist artwork collection. An octet (including a guitar, mandolin, and baritone voice, as well as wind and stringed instruments) performed a serenade by the Austrian composer Arnold Schonberg, who corresponded with the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky.
The event also featured extracts from a piece for solo soprano by the German artist Kurt Schwitters.
“Schwitters is known as a visual artist, but between 1919 and 1920 he was also making sound art and poetry,” says Charlotte de Mille, who curates the gallery’s music programme.
These events include talks exploring the links between the music and the visual art. They are advertised on the gallery’s website, but the audiences mainly consist of people who happen to be at the galleries at the time.
In one instance this programme has led to the rediscovery of a long-lost work: a poem written by Michelangelo for his muse Tommaso dei Cavalieri, set to music by the Renaissance composer Jacques Arcadelt. The piece was performed by a choral quartet at an event in 2010 to accompany an exhibition of drawings made by Michelangelo for dei Cavalieri.
“The music, which was first published in 1539, wasn’t readily available,” says de Mille. “I found a copy in a 19th-century book of madrigals in Senate House Library.”
Music for Museums, held at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 2015, took the approach seen at the Courtauld one step further by making live music a key part of the exhibition itself.
The 10-week project consisted of film screenings during standard gallery opening times, as well as a series of live experimental musical performances on Thursday evenings and Saturday afternoons. The most popular attracted about 200 visitors.
The exhibition took its cue from the 1960s when musicians and artists saw museums as places where they had more freedom to experiment and collaborate than traditional concert halls.
“In a concert hall, the sound system tends to be in place, there are lighting rigs and certain conventions dictated by the infrastructure. But a lot of those things don’t exist in the same manner in an art gallery,” says Lydia Yee, the Whitechapel’s chief curator.
The location allowed performers to experiment spatially with sound and in how they interacted with the audience. In one performance, the musicians were interspersed with gallery visitors, who could sit or walk around.
One attraction of holding experimental musical performances in museums is that it is not a big financial risk, says Yee: “To commission an orchestra to do something for a concert hall is a different prospect than asking some musicians to do something on a smaller scale in a museum setting.”
The Whitechapel partnered with the record label Vinyl Factory, which helped to fund the project and also promoted it to a new audience. “There was some crossover with our regular audience, but there was also certainly an audience that might not come to the gallery on a regular basis, but came because of some of the music,” Yee says.
The National Museum of Scotland (NMS) in Edinburgh is another institution that uses live music to attract wider audiences. It has put on free musical events during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for the past 15 years.
The museum sources musicians through Live Music Now Scotland, an organisation that provides performance opportunities for young musicians. This year’s programme involves performances of traditional Scottish songs and instrumental music to tie in with its temporary exhibition, Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobites.
“Anecdotally, our audience for Free Fringe Music reflects the national and international make-up of visitors to Edinburgh during the Festival period,” says Emma Webb, the learning manager at NMS.
“The nature of the performances – free, accessible and relatively short – means that we get a wide range of visitors across the three-week run. The performances are also really popular with family visitors.”
Webb adds that there are other advantages to the museum of holding this live music programme. “The performances add to the atmosphere of the museum at this busy festival period. And linking them to the themes of our major exhibition or our permanent galleries helps widen awareness of our exhibitions and collections to visitors.”
Practical considerations
1. Acoustics
The structure and materials of a building can make a big difference to how music sounds within it. The Music for Museums performances at the Whitechapel Gallery were held in a former library reading room made of brick.
“The typical box gallery with a hard cement floor and drywall is quite difficult sound-wise. But because brick is more absorbent, the sound was good,” Yee says.
2. Noise
NMS's Emma Webb says that ambient noise from visitors or the cafe can be an issue at live music events.
“We have to ensure that performers are aware of the acoustic challenges which the space presents,” she says. “Some types of music work better than others – depending on the instruments or voices involved.”
3. Protecting collections
Charlotte de Mille says that because the Courtauld’s gallery spaces are small, ensembles are limited to about six instruments. The venue is also careful to limit numbers of people overall and make sure that they don’t stand too close to artworks.
“We have to balance responsibility for protecting the collection with meeting visitors expectations,” she says.
4. Equipment
The Whitechapel Gallery worked with an external company to provide equipment and an audio engineer for electronic musicians with complex technical requirements.
Supplying electricity was another issue: “We had to run cables from another room to have enough capacity,” Yee says.
5. Licencing
A live music event does not need a licence from the local authority if it takes place between 8am and 11pm, and has an audience of fewer than 500 people, and is held at a workplace or premises licensed to serve alcohol.
Unamplified music played anywhere between the same hours also requires no licence.
However, venues hosting live music are likely to need a licence from PRS for Music. The fee for this varies depending on the type of music played.