“Musician Beckles Willson (Orientalism and Musical Mission) scrupulously traces the history of the oud—a short-necked, fretless stringed musical instrument—from its first written mention in ancient Persia to the present day. An instrument long associated with bereavement (an early fable holds that a grieving father constructed it from his deceased son’s Read more…
I am thrilled to have my composition Teatime! presented as the first track on NMC’s CD release In These Exceptional Times. In November 2021 NMC launched The Big Lockdown Music Survey, an Arts Council England National Lottery Funded project which invited music creators from across England to submit recordings of music Read more…
Composing music with water, and for water, in a time of exteme climate crisis. This has occupied me in multiple projects in the last year. Playing with the Life of the Sea is a project I began early in 2023. I was deeply grateful that Tom Kieckhefer and Ocean Conservation Research Read more…
Participation and Playfulness in Museums: Engaging Visitors in Climate Action
As of 1 December 2022 I am Professor of Intercultural Performing Arts at Codarts University of the Arts in Rotterdam, and the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts in Leiden. This is a fantastic opportunity to draw together the multiple strands of my hybrid creative practice, and work with a Read more…
What would it sound like if a jukebox, lost at the bottom of a river, tried to make music again? This piece was the result of a collaboration with Distractfold’s Daniel Brew and Alice Purton. “The juke box that drowned” combines my field recordings of aquatic environments with broken melodies Read more…
For a long time the oud was disparaged in Iran, even though the Sassanian empire was fundamental to its development centuries ago. One key to its twentieth-century revival was the musician Mansur Nariman. I recently recorded some of his short pieces.
I was booked to play oud in Roxanna Panufnik’s opera Dalia, the story (libretto by Jessica Duchen) of a refugee in the UK, who finds her way into the hearts of local people through hr passion for cricket. The opera explores the kindness but also the hypocrisy of English society, Read more…
I was fortunate to have an artist residency to develop music within Olympias Music Foundation’s Migrant Voices project. The spontaneously-formed band in which I co-created music was called “Soap of My Heart”. Migrant Voices was the premiere performance of 4 new musical works, created during a week-long artist residency with Read more…
Rachel Beckles Willson · No Sacred Place I was asked to write a piece exploring the idea of place, in sound. In response, I examined how a place is not only as a physical location, but also a trigger for experience which can be expressed in sound. I used Read more…