Commission: Susan Philipsz – SURROUND ME

An Artangel Commission

Susan Philipsz
SURROUND ME
A Song Cycle for the City of London
Various locations through the City of London
9 October 2010 – 2 January 2011
Saturdays & Sundays only, 10am–5pm

Every day of the working week, the City of London is alive to the sounds of trade, commerce and traffic. At the weekends, quiet descends on the offices, squares and streets of the City, broken only by the occasional sound of cars and the pealing of church bells.

The silence of the City has inspired SURROUND ME, 2010 Turner Prize nominee Susan Philipsz’s first commission in London, a constellation of sound installations in different spaces within the Square Mile. Philipsz’s haunting voice resonates through the hushed streets, across Modernist high-walks and tucked-away medieval alleyways, and along the banks of the River Thames…

The experience of the City at the weekend returns the pedestrian to the human scale and soundscape of the city in pre-industrial times. 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.

Philipsz’s solitary voice reverberates 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.

Read more about the project on the Artangel website.

For press information please contact Janette Scott or Sarah Davies or call 020 7713 1400. Press information and images can be downloaded from the press section of the Artangel website.