Sarah Kingdom-Nicolls

Sarah Kingdom-Nicolls is currently expanding her pianistic pursuits with the addition of live, interactive electronics, taking the already impressive grand piano into a larger scale sonic feast for the ears. Awarded an AHRC research grant, she is leading six collaborative partnerships and travelling the globe to meet experts in the field. Most recently she has been to Berlin, where she met a fellow pianistic creator, Andrea Neumann. Neumann has quite literally taken the inside of the piano out of its normal body and added microphones and numerous noise-making devices to create an entirely new but piano-related instrument. Sarah has also met up with Tod Machover from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Michel Waisviez from the Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music in Amsterdam to discuss creating a new instrument with Sarah. Still in a consultation phase, this will combine all of the piano’s original innate characteristics, such as its vast natural resonating chamber and hyper-sensitive ‘action’ (hammers and keys) with electronically interactive technology.

For the current project, Sarah is preparing five newly-commissioned works which she will premiere in November at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and in London at the Cutting Edge Series (see www.sarahnicolls.com for more details) on November 29th. Each work explores different technological set ups, perhaps the most extreme being a piece where Sarah will wear sensors on her arms. This allows her to control through gesture the electronic manipulation of her own playing, thus creating the greatest level of synergy between natural pianism and computer processing. She has also worked with Brunel Research Professor Richard Barrett and together they have developed a new work which so deeply entwines piano sound with Barrett’s own electronic instrument (a midi keyboard in conjunction with extra controllers) that the resulting duo promises an almost unnervingly beautiful union of sounds known and new.

The contrast between the physicality of piano-playing and the cerebral world of computers is something which motivated Sarah to develop this project, specifically the desire to work with technology in an organic, natural and highly expressive way. To this end, a lot of her research has entailed looking at touch-sensitivity in midi controllers and how her pianism can be applied to these devices. Still a relatively new field – in terms of constantly developing technology – this has presented Professor Michael Clarke (from the University of Huddersfield) and the young composer Larry Goves (from the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester) with a challenging scenario. In each of these pieces, Sarah will trigger both pre-recorded sound files and live processing of her own sound. Finally, her research has also taken her into improvisational and almost theatrical considerations. For the former, she will present new work with harpist Ruth Wall, who also uses electronic processing to colour her sound. For the latter, expect electronic sounds to come out of the piano itself and to wonder how everything that you hear can come from only one pair of hands and an instrument so steeped in history as the acoustic grand piano.

Some comments from the Guardian 2003-2005

‘Sarah Nicolls brings a rare and radiant commitment to her focus on the contemporary repertoire.’

‘Nicolls’s performance seemed a model of clarity and accuracy. There was a certainty about every gesture, a cool precision even when the music was at its most explosive.’

‘Nicolls is a genuinely “edgy Brit”.

Publications