At the weekends quiet descends on the offices, squares and streets of the City of London, broken by the occasional sound of cars and the pealing of church bells. This quietness has inspired SURROUND ME, Susan Philipsz’s first commission in London, a constellation of sound installations in different spaces across the City.
Intrigued by the pronounced role the voice would have had in the early modern city, Philipsz has drawn material for SURROUND ME from a large body of late 16th and early 17th century English popular songs, rounds and madrigals, brought together in collections by composers and arrangers such as Thomas Ravenscroft. Her solitary voice will reverberate through both the public spaces of the City and a collective memory of song, animating what Peter Ackroyd called “the teeming silence” of the City.
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