Anna M Heslop is a Northumbrian composer, performer, and writer based in Newcastle upon Tyne and has just finished a research MA in Music

Friday 6th November | 1pm

Anna M Heslop

Piano, Prepared piano.

Anna M Heslop is a Northumbrian composer, performer, and writer based in Newcastle upon Tyne and has just finished a research masters in Music at Newcastle University. With a specialism in prepared-piano, her work treads the line between improvisation and more structured compositional styles with a focus on finding the essence of subject. Inspired by Lucian Freud’s idea of the ‘intensification of reality’ in his own work, Heslop’s piano preparations and unique playing technique position the body – its strength, fallibility, and humanity – at the centre, prioritising physicality and feeling over rigid concepts of perfection. Her most recent works, the Naked Structures suite (2026), and The Leaving (2026) combine this creative practice with her preoccupation with place construction and human perception, seeing her use embodied research methodologies to explore ways in which a temporal medium such a sound can convincingly represent the physical reality of landscape in the concert hall. Heslop’s work lives and breathes, always reacting, always becoming.

Heslop is the current copy-editor at Tempo New Music Journal and regularly writes popular and new music criticism for magazines such as Positionen, Tempo, and Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. Alongside her current work she is also the co-director of ‘Sensible Prices’, a contemporary music ensemble based in Newcastle and is part of the experimental improvisation noise duo ‘SCUM’. She regularly lectures at Newcastle University in areas relating to performance and composition with specialisms in improvisation, avant-garde music, place-studies, and electroacoustic music.

For more information on Anna M Heslop, check out her social links:

Music | Anna M Heslop (https://annamheslop.bandcamp.com/) Bandcamp

Anna M Heslop (@annamheslop) • Instagram photos and videos (https://www.instagram.com/annamheslop/)

A LIVE Lit & Phil Event | FREE

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This concert is financially sponsored by Alan England and we thank him for his contribution.

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