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Arts Council England (ACE) has awarded a grant for Sussex's Orchestra of Sound and Light's new project, 'From Felpham to Beachy Head: a landscape and its people in poetry' through the ACE's National Lottery Project Grants scheme.

Led by Professor Ed Hughes (Music, Faculty of Media, Arts and Humanities), the Orchestra of Sound and Light is a music ensemble dedicated to the excitement of live music-making and composing through participatory projects. Joining Ed in planning and developing this project will be Educational Consultant Duncan Mackrill, who led the PGCE secondary music course at Sussex for many years and now advises Create Music and West Sussex Music. This new collaborative project builds on the Orchestra's previously ACE-funded South Downs Songbook, which features on the ensemble's album Distant Voices, New Worlds — the Guardian Contemporary album of the month, November 2024. 

'From Felpham to Beachy Head' will develop place-based, interdisciplinary creative music and song-writing methods and approaches with young people, inspired by radical early nineteenth-century poetic visions of Sussex's landscape and environment. Inspired by poetry and film documenting people's experience of the South Downs over the last 200 years, the project charts a route along the course of the South Downs, from Felpham in the West to Eastbourne. The ensemble will tour this participatory, co-creating, music performance project to four schools and five venues in June and July 2025: Felpham Community College, Ifield Community College (Crawley), Varndean School (Brighton), Ratton School (Eastbourne), finishing at Towner Eastbourne with a special event.

This concluding event takes place on Sunday 13 July at the Towner, and will be an intimate afternoon of live ensemble music from the South Downs Songbook, and has been programmed alongside the Sussex Modernism exhibition (23 May to 28 September 2025), curated by Dr Hope Wolf (English). 

Sussex Retold, a research strand of the Centre for Life History and Life Writing, also supports the project, and are holding a day course at the Towner on Saturday 31 May, Rifted Shores: Drawing in Response to Sussex Poetry, that explores the art and literature of Beachy Head and the Seven Sisters, facilitating visual responses to Charlotte Smith’s nineteenth-century poem.

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