British Baroque: Power and Illusion (2020)

Live Performance for Tate Britain

This live performance for historical instruments, analogue synthesisers, and live electronic processing was commissioned by Tate Britain in response to their exhibition ‘British Baroque: Power and Illusion’. Unfortunately, because of the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown, the performance was cancelled at the last moment.

Working with multi-instrumentalist Luke Challinor, the performance was due to include new music for bass viol, baryton, and theorbo.. Where Tate Britain’s exhibition reconsidered art of the English restoration as propaganda for the newly reinstated monarchy, my performance asked what this meant today, particularly where classical music is still so widely considered the preserve of an elite and where the mechanisms of its history tend to preserve a narrow cannon of composers and works. As well as new compositions, the performance therefore featured arrangements of music by neglected female composers of the Baroque, including Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre and Barbara Strozzi.