RCM announces collaboration with V&A
The Royal College of Music (RCM) and the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) have been awarded a major two-year Knowledge Transfer grant by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to connect objects in the V&A’s collections with music that shares their rich and distinctive pasts.
Stemming from recent research in music, art, design and technology, The Listening Gallery will offer visitors to the V&A a multisensory way to experience objects on display.
New and existing recordings of music will be integrated into the V&A’s major Spring
exhibition Baroque (4 April to 19 July 2009) and throughout the Museum’s new suite
of galleries for its Medieval and Renaissance collections (opening November 2009).
The new Medieval and Renaissance galleries will occupy a wing of the Museum,
arranged over three floors, and will display over 1,800 objects from the V&A’s worldrenowned collections to tell the story of European art and design between 300 and
1600. The Listening Gallery will pair specific objects on display, such as the Beckett
Casket and Donatello’s Chellini Madonna roundel, to pieces of music through audiovisual
points in the galleries and live performances.
There will also be a dedicated website (www.ListeningGallery.rcm.ac.uk) set up where
music and images from these projects will be freely accessible. The project will begin
this month, headed by Aaron Williamon (Centre for Performance Science, RCM) and
Ashley Solomon (Department of Historical Performance, RCM).
