Listening Gallery

The Listening Gallery was a knowledge transfer collaboration between the Royal College of Music and the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (2008-10). Stemming from research in music, art, design, and technology, the project connected objects in the V&A’s collections with music that shares their rich and distinctive pasts.

New and existing recordings of music were integrated into two V&A projects. Baroque 1620-1800: Style in the Age of Magnificence was the V&A’s Spring 2009 exhibition, which ran from April to July 2009. Medieval and Renaissance Europe is a series of eleven new galleries that re-opened after major renovation in December 2009. The collection is one of the finest in the world, and its redisplay will have a minimum lifespan of 25 years.

The music employed in the Listening Gallery – much of which was especially recorded by RCM students and staff, using instruments from the RCM Museum and manuscripts from the RCM Library – comes from precisely those years, those cities, those spectacles represented by objects in the V&A’s galleries. The music and the artefacts on display were typically commissioned by the same patrons, and to experience them reunited enhances understanding of the periods, places, and people represented.

The variety of musical styles, genres, and instruments covered across European art and culture from 1000-1800 has required the consideration and application of a wide range of musicological sources. Moreover, the input provided by performers to early music scholarship has been essential, particularly for the earliest works where hands-on music making is often the best means of addressing interpretative and notation questions.

Project team

Aaron Williamon, RCM (PI)
Glyn Davies, V&A
Flora Dennis, Sussex
Stuart Frost, V&A
Peta Motture, V&A
Joanna Norman, V&A
Giulia Nuti, RCM
Ashley Solomon, RCM

Partners

Victoria and Albert Museum

Supported by

Arts and Humanities Research Council
(2008-10)