Out of Silence is an innovative, site-specific music and heritage project which focuses on ‘lost' music, extraordinary places, and the lives of people who have lived there.

Out of Silence attracts people fascinated by history who may not have described themselves as music-lovers. This approach can offer increased insight into both history and music: songs can breathe life into the ‘human side' of heritage because of their capacity to trigger all the senses, emotions and the imagination. This creates a deep and lasting impression of the past as a startlingly different place with people just like us populating it.

In 1999, Sally Brown was working as a freelance artist on an a project for the National Trust at Belton House near Grantham in Lincolnshire, a Restoration property of the 1680s. She was interested in looking at some hand-writing from the 17 th century to help with that project and went into the house to see what could be found. In the library she met Peter Hoare, a freelance librarian who was cataloguing all the books in the house. As he kindly searched on his computer, ‘manuscript' came up on the screen.

“Oh”, he said, “that's not hand-writing; they're books of music.”

Sure enough, on the highest shelves of the library were three large, leather-bound volumes of songs, dating from the 17 th and 18 th centuries. The books had been kept throughout the lifetimes of women who had lived at Belton and are priceless collections of much-loved songs, learnt from itinerant musicians, from visiting performers and music teachers. For a musician, this was like finding buried treasure. At that moment a plan was hatched to bring these songs out of silence.

With funding from the National Trust and The Arts Council of England's ‘Year of the Artist' Scheme, Sally embarked on a year-long project, adapting and arranging material from the manuscripts, as well as writing music in response to the historic material.

A brand new choir was recruited especially for the project, comprising thirty-five men and women aged eighteen to sixty-five, coming from across the region to weekly rehearsals. Many of the choir members had not previously sung in a choir. Unusually, the singers themselves were creatively involved, both in writing new lyrics for fragments of old melodies, composing new melodies for old lyrics and writing wholly new songs. Bradley Creswick, leader of the Northern Sinfonia Orchestra, was invited into the project as a musical collaborator, playing solo violin with the choir.

Within a year, the choir performed at six sell-out concerts and did a live recording at Belton House of the fascinating body of songs they had created: songs from the manuscripts as well as new songs written about the extraordinary lives of the women who had written the songbooks some four hundred years earlier. That first CD can also be bought from this site.

With the ‘Year of the Artist' project so successfully completed, the choir wanted to carry on working together. They continued to sing, independent of the National Trust, based at Belvoir Castle, working on material from the thousand-year history of the Castle.

During the year at Belvoir Castle, discussions with the National Trust continued, and at the start of 2003, the Out of Silence Choir embarked on a project part-funded by DEBRA funds from the National Trust. Additional monies were sought from A4A Lottery funds, with an additional grant has come from The Arts Council of England East Midlands, New Commissions Fund to bring in Tim Dalling as a collaborator on The Workhouse.

This new project enabled Out of Silence to create a song-cycle for three contrasting National Trust properties. Alongside beautiful, historic music, there are imaginative and atmospheric songs which capture the spirit of the times and the essence of these special places: Clumber Park near Worksop, The Workhouse at Southwell, and Sudbury Hall in Derbyshire.

A key part of this song-cycle was that it extended participation to groups of young people at schools near each property, involving them in writing songs and gaining vocal and performance skills.