Collaborations
The Study Group has collaborated with different organisations to create projects exploring queerness, music, and the academy. Below are a few examples of past collaborations. We welcome proposals to collaborate via our Contact Us form.
Moving Kinship with Beatrice Allegranti
An ongoing, in-progress unique performance project exploring issues of kinship in the queer community with choreographer, filmmaker and psychotherapist Beatrice Allegranti. Find out more below.
LGBTQ+ History Month 2022
Building on our previous collaboration, we worked with Sound and Music again in 2022 to celebrate LGBTQ+ History Month 2022 in the UK and offer paid opportunities for new works to UK-based LGBTQ+ composers, musicians, writers, and researchers. Scroll down to find out more about the sonic and editorial work commissioned in 2022.
Sonic Works
Leon Clowes is an interdisciplinary emerging artist investigating the distance of memory and the space between sounds and words in space. 
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The project: 'SHAMES; Looking Never Hurt' is an exploration of being a teeange queer in a white rural working-class family during the 1970s/80s when the moral panic about AIDS was at its most hysterical. Radically revisiting the four track electronic pop demos I made and sought solace in, I'm revisiting the banality of the daily trauma of schoolyard bullying and relentless ridicule, putting that to a visceral peace through sound, song and script.” Click here to listen to the work, and read a Q&A with Leon.
Jamie Elless (they/she) is a composer, performer and artist from the Midlands. She is currently a Gareth Neame scholar at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, studying composition with Laura Bowler and Gwyn Pritchard and harpsichord with James Johnstone. Jamie completed her BA and MRes degrees in Music at the University of Nottingham, studying the latter as a Henry Thomas Mitchell scholar under the supervision of Elizabeth Kelly and Duncan MacLeod.
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The project: “I am fascinated by the voice and its role as an “immediate identifier”, a descriptor that allows our brains, for better or for worse, to quickly jump to conclusions. Lower voices have historically meant “male”, higher voices “female”, and these incorrect assumptions continue to pervade much of the music written and performed today. For this project, drawing inspiration from Sarah Hennies’ Contralto, I want to create a documentary piece that features trans+ performers describing their experiences of navigating the modern musical world. I will pair pre-recorded voices with instruments that mimic their natural speech inflections, with the instrumental sounds eventually taking precedence over the voices.” Click here to listen to Jamie's work and read more about the creative process.
Finn Patrick McLean is a composer and performer based in Glasgow. Finn has worked with Psappha Ensemble, soundfestival, the International Percussion Institute and more.
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The project: “I will be using this grant to work on a new piece for two violins about the way in which queer folk learn and grow with each other in non-systematic ways. Specifically, I want to draw a connection between the famous icon figures that were so fundamental to my queer identity and the close personal relationships and friendships with other queer people that have shaped who I am just as much. It's this relationship between icons and domesticity that I find most interesting.” Listen to the work and read more about Finn here.
Editorial Content
Casey Hale is a composer, producer and guitarist living in Bristol, UK. With a background in composing concert music for orchestras and chamber ensembles, his current work focusses on creative music technology and studio production. Click here to read 'Desire Lines: Queer Theory, Microtonal Practice', exploring the interplay between queer gender/sexuality and the queer musicality of microtonality.
j.n.m. redelinghuys is a South African born composer, performer, and musicologist based in York UK. 'The Musical Possibilities of Queer Spaces' addresses the necessity of thinking about the queer body in music as both a creative resource and a socio-political event.
Laura Iredale is a freelance film and media composer, score engineer and sound editor. Click here to read 'Herself to her a music: Emily Dickinson', which explores how a relatively new understanding of Emily Dickinson's works and personal relationships has inspired queer music representation in recent years.
Michael Betteridge is a composer with an eclectic output creating work that challenges and inspires audiences and performers alike. Read 'Queer choral music in the UK today' to learn about commissioning choral music for queer leisure time music making settings
LGBTQ+ History Month 2021
To mark UK LGBTQ+ History Month 2021, the Study Group collaborated with The British Music Collection's Sound and Music to commission new music from LGBTQ+ composers. The project celebrated queer histories, sounds, and stories, with a national call-out for new works from queer artists in the UK. Read more about the collaboration, including interviews with each artist on Sound and Music's website, and listen to each of the works below.
Sonic Works
Peace of Mind : Piece of Mine by MÉLOMAN3
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In ‘Peace of Mind : Piece of Mine’ – MÉLOMAN3 introduces us to a sensory journey travelling to the subconscious ideas that plague the mind regarding personal identity, sexuality and expression. Taking influences from the beat and music artist, ‘E.N.D.’, she relays the rollercoaster merry go round of discovering identity in a world that is fixed and against the norm. Throughout this journey, she engages listeners to be still and embrace the reality of standing outside of self, a juxtaposition of her reflection of her place in the world.
Mass for the Masses by Ellie Showering
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Ellie Showering’s Mass for the Masses is a response to the way the queer community, and other marginalised groups, have been sidelined by the Church for centuries. The piece itself is a celebration of identity and solidarity through a queer lens.
‘a remedy for the blues’ – Sophie Marie Niang and Ruari Paterson-Achenbach
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Sophie Marie Niang and Ruari Paterson-Achenbach’s ‘a remedy for the blues’ explores the process of collective making and being, experimenting with forms of sound and text that are generative without relying upon defined end goals. It reinvigorates an articulation of queer love for the act of being with each other and making music together
Now the Time by Lunatraktors
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Folk duo Lunatraktors composed ‘Now the Time’ as an act of mourning for silenced voices and stories, attempting to transform erasure and violence into acceptance, transcendence and power.