Meet our SWMS Mentor Team
Jim Aitchison
Mentor – Composition and Music Theory Specialist
Jim Aitchison is a composer who creates music out of transformations of other artforms and disciplines. He is recognised for musical encounters with some of the world’s leading visual artists, and he is a visual artist in his own right. A life-changing encounter with the artists of the St Ives School after moving to Cornwall in 1998 ignited an interest in exploring correspondences between music and art. His first significant work in this area was with Sir Terry Frost for US pianist Andrew Russo, premiered at the Van Cliburn ‘Modern at the Modern’ concert series at the Fort Worth Modern Art Museum in Dallas. His collaboration with Peter Sheppard Skaerved and the Kreutzer Quartet began at Tate St Ives, responding to sculpture by Richard Deacon, for whom composed a string quartet, ‘Four Trajectories after John Hoyland’, shown at the ‘Trajectory of a Fallen Angel’ exhibition at Tate St Ives curated by Paul Moorhouse.
Supported by the Henry Moore Foundation, he composed music for the ‘Towards a New Laocoon’ exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute with violinist Philippa Mo, and ‘Memory Field’ after sculpture by Antony Gormley, performed by countertenor Nicholas Clapton and the Kreutzer Quartet in Antony Gormley’s Kings Cross studio. In 2008/9 Tate Modern commissioned him to respond to their large-scale Mark Rothko exhibition, and during this period he also responded to Doris Salcedo’s iconic Shibboleth installation, performed by Peter Sheppard Skærved in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. In 2012, Tate Media published Shadows of Light II (after Mark Rothko) as part of the Rothko Room multimedia tour at Tate Modern, and since then, Shadows of Light II has been performed by the NewEar Ensemble in Kansas City, USA
In other projects, he has composed musical responses to Anish Kapoor for the RA’s large-scale show with Peter Sheppard Skærved, Neil Heyde, and Michael Thompson, and in 2014, funded by Arts Council England, he created a huge geographically distributed response to the art of Gerhard Richter, working with curator Paul Moorhouse, the Kreutzer Quartet, Roderick Chadwick, and the Royal Academy of Music, Falmouth University, Yamaha UK, and Goldsmiths. In 2017 he was commissioned by The New Art Centre-Roche Court and Poole Museum, supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, to create music in response to sculpture by Anthony Caro for the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. In 2020, he made his filmmaking debut creating ‘Contrapunctus’, a piece of video music about disconnection and psychotherapeutic harm, for the Social Distancing Festival in Toronto. In 2023-2024 Arts Council England supported his large-scale project to respond in music and film to art installations by James Turrell at Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens in Cornwall, working with Peter Sheppard Skaerved, Roderick Chadwick and the Kreutzer Quartet, Falmouth University and Research England. He is the only composer to have been given a fellowship by the Henry Moore Foundation, which took place as the first of two research fellowships at the Royal Academy of Music. His music is published by Composers Edition and has been released on the NMC label. He is also a member of the Newlyn Society of Artists.
