Experience our collection displays like never before through a unique soundtrack with live performances of new works by young composers from the Royal Academy of Music, London.
This exciting collaboration between The Hepworth Wakefield, Tate and the Royal Academy of Music has resulted in six short pieces responding to Barbara Hepworth’s art, ideas and working processes. Musicians from the Royal Academy of Music will perform the compositions across the gallery spaces, surrounded by the work that inspired them.
All six pieces will be performed in the morning (11am – 12.30pm) and repeated in the afternoon (2pm – 3.30pm).
Author and art historian Michael Bird, said: ‘Barbara Hepworth seemed like the natural focus for a composition project, because of the many ways in which her sculpture, life and thought are permeated by musical ideas. She spoke of the sound world in which a stone-carving sculptor lives, with the ringing rhythm of the chisel, and of how a sculptor’s work echoes the shaping of landscape by natural forces. She collaborated with musicians like Michael Tippett and Priaulx Rainier. Hepworth told her friend Rainier that you should be able to ‘hear’ a sculpture in the same way as you feel a piece of music. I like to imagine that audiences at The Hepworth Wakefield listening to the new compositions, premiered by a group of very talented young musicians from the Royal Academy of Music, will experience both these things, just as Hepworth describes.’
