Cevanne Horrocks-Hopayian tells stories through sonic art, installation, concert music, theatre and print. ICareIfYouListen has remarked that, across the variety, her pieces inhabit a strong sense of ‘place’, from themes of home and travel, to site-specific commissions.

 

Cevanne superimposes visual structures and physical boundaries onto text and music. She won an British Composer award for ‘Muted Lines’, a song based on a line about exile by a medieval Armenian poet from which she gradually redacted words to represent loss and censorship. 

 

A residency with the London Symphony Orchestra at the National Trust property ‘575 Wandsworth Road’ produced tactile ‘eye-music’ scores with holes cut across the pages. Ongoing work with the LSO includes the album LSO Panufnik Legacies III (LSO Live), two commissions for the Barbican Concert Hall, and her own album Welcome Party, released by NMC Recordings.

 

SoAnyway Magazine featured her collaborative multi-media installation for Coventry City of Culture, Rites for Crossing Water, which was projected onto billboards and reflected on the Coventry canal. Made of a collection of instructional texts imagined as future folklore, it was published by Ludic Rooms as an augmented reality book accompanied by an EP for Accidental Records with electronic instrument-builder Crewdson. It was nominated for an Ivor Novello Award in 2023.

 

Cevanne works with music technology pioneers. Her BBC Proms solo debut utilised a custom-built midi-controller, the ’Sonic Bonnet’, to perform her British Composer Award nominated album BRACE (Crewdson & Cevanne, Accidental Records). She has written for ‘Headspace’ instrument specialist Clarence Adoo to perform Cap O’Rushes, a dance piece commissioned by Arts & Health SouthWest to open the International Conference for Arts, Health and Wellbeing.

 

She is a lecturer at the Royal Academy of Music and has been a Visiting Fellow of Girton College, University of Cambridge. Following a residency at the Mahler & LeWitt Studios, Cevanne is currently creating a book on incense with printer Emily Juniper.

 

From performance art at Café Oto to tours with the Birmingham Royal Ballet, Cevanne’s work is “wide-ranging, dynamic and utterly unique” (BBC Music Magazine).