Nature’s Music at Manchester Museum

View Manchester Museum’s collections in a new light as the RNCM delivers an immersive show that places live ensembles among the museum’s most iconic spaces, performing music inspired by the natural world.

All ages are invited to take a nocturnal journey through Living Worlds and Nature’s Library, the Fossils and Dinosaurs displays, as well as the UK’s first South Asia Gallery, with ensembles bringing to life the collections around you. Wandering through the museum, you’ll hear interpretations of birdsong, wind and water, land and sky, and compositions that conjure visions of Egypt and China, as history becomes a living thing, and nature speaks in music.

Many compositions will be known and loved by audiences, a highlight among them being a rare arrangement of Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending for violin and chamber choir. These curated sound interventions will be presented by RNCM students as well as guest artists, including the College’s brand new Community Chorus.

Also performing are the 15-piece K’in Ensemble, featuring an eclectic mix of classical, pop and jazz musicians, as well as Trees.R.Good, a producer and multi-instrumentalist on a mission to make people pause, contemplate and marvel at the world around us. After sets like these, you may well feel inspired to put your own creativity into practice, which you can do in the open-to-all crafting workshop, where you’ll preserve a piece of nature in clay.

The event is part of the College’s The Future Is Green initiative – another feather in the bow of one of the world’s most progressive conservatoires. The initiative seeks to reduce the RNCM’s carbon footprint and to use music as a catalyst to spark discussion about the climate emergency. Running alongside other hugely ambitious concerts like The Silent Planet, which re-imagines Holst’s The Planets in the context of our own world’s ill-health, Nature’s Music sets a new bar in the way we think of music as part of pressing conversations around the natural world.