Composers’ Fund Grantee : Emily Peasgood
Emily Peasgood is an Ivor Novello Award-winning composer, sound artist, and interdisciplinary artist who creates thought-provoking musical experiences in non-traditional performance venues. Each composition is created for a specific place to highlight marginalised voices and/or histories at risk of being forgotten. She uses visual art and interactive technology to strengthen her sonic concepts, producing what she considers ‘musical artworks’. Her practice centres on creating experiences that are magical, evocative and ephemeral, connecting people with places, stories and what it means to be human.
Peasgood has created musical artworks for prestigious galleries and art festivals, including Folkestone Triennial, Tate Modern, Turner Contemporary, The Hayward Gallery at London Southbank, and Frieze Sculpture. This includes interactive choral works in graveyards, performances in moving trains and lifts, and installations in historic buildings. In 2023, she developed a series of ‘Listening Desk’ sculptures for the British Library, currently exhibited at 10 locations in the UK. Peasgood also has a permanent musical artwork, ‘I Would Rather Walk With You,’ exhibiting at the West Wing Battery in Fort Burgoyne, Dover. She is an electronic music professor at Guildhall School of Music and Drama, specialising in live electronics and sonic art.
EverSong
The Composers’ Fund is funding the creation of EverSong, a choral work where it is possible to hear the entire lifespan of a person in a song. It is experienced as an installation in tunnel-like environments and intimate pathways and references the fragility of life and the importance of celebrating our short time on earth. EverSong will be enabled through an AI Modelling timbre transfer technique developed in collaboration with Mark Hanslip and will tour the UK in 2024 and 2025.