Sonilluminations: the musical equivalent of medieval illumination – the practice of adorning a manuscript with illustrations, grotesque figures, decorative lettering, and other flourishes.
The John Rylands Library is home to many richly illuminated manuscripts, ranging from Latin books of hours, to the apocalyptic Beatus, to an original copy of the Gutenberg Bible. Whilst doodling in the margins of these books would certainly be frowned upon today, the practise of adorning such manuscripts with decoration was commonplace in medieval Europe. By adding thin strips of gold leaf and burnishing them to the page, artists could literally ‘illuminate’ a page – one can imagine the pages of Latin MS 164 glowing and gleaming in the light of a flickering candle, an artist hard at work, poring over the finer details of a peacock’s glittering tail feathers.
The Rylands has recently played host to one such artist. In August 2024, we welcomed back Patrick John Jones, London-based composer and researcher. Inspired by the archives during his Artist in Residence posting at the Rylands in 2019, Patrick returned with a brand new project: Sonilluminations. In this ethereal sound installation, Patrick treats multiple archival sources from around the library as manuscripts to ‘sonilluminate’ – resurrecting medieval plainchants, re-scoring broadside ballads, and bringing the birds of paradise from the page to the open air of the library’s Spencer Room using a range of traditional and cutting-edge instrumentation.
As is the case with medieval illumination, Patrick used Sonilluminations to call attention to, decorate, and playfully accent different sources from around the archives. The Dies Irae plainchant, a Gregorian requiem chant, takes centre stage as the chorus, with broadside ballad The Northern Ditty and an apocalyptic Lake of Fire also featuring. These sources are then illuminated with sound throughout; with foliated borders of birdsong inspired by the books of Audubon and Gould; with inhabited opening initials pulled from the Dies Irae chant and transformed into drones and rhythms; and with a myriad of instruments ranging from futuristic theremins to the synthetic voice of musician Holly Herndon’s AI avatar, ‘holly.plus’.
The nature of Sonilluminations allowed our visitors to access and explore the archives of the Rylands in a brand new way. As the Sonilluminations composition runs at a length of around 17 minutes, visitors would enter into the Spencer Room at different points in the recording, making each experience of the piece unique. A QR code within the room provided a link to the archival materials that inspired the composition, allowing visitors to view these items up close whilst listening to their aural illuminations. This made for an engaging and at times whimsical effect, with parents examining the ornithological drawings of John and Elizabeth Gould whilst their children imitated bird calls amongst the Spencer Room’s archive of early modern manuscripts.
Sonilluminations also intersected with our public engagement offering at the Rylands in a variety of interesting ways, sparking a wide range of conversations. One facsimile encounter of the Gutenberg Bible, for instance, led to a discussion between our engagement staff and visitors on the use of new technologies in art, specifically with reference to the use of AI in the sound installation. The facsimile encounter focused on Bowdler Sharpe’s Birds of Paradise, meanwhile, was augmented by the spectral call of the curl-crested manucode in the next room along, allowing visitors to view the lithographic print of the bird in the manuscript and hear its mystical call in the very same instant.
In this way, Sonilluminations allowed visitors to experience the archives in a spontaneous and dynamic way, whilst also opening up avenues towards some often overlooked archival sources. The barred owl call featured in the piece, for example, descends directly into recordings of quasars taken at Jodrell Bank Observatory, which in turn bleeds into a section of plainchant in the style of Delia Derbyshire. Thus Patrick’s installation not only highlighted the breadth of the collections of the Rylands, but synthesised them in harmonious fashion, with Victorian birdsong, the sounds of the BBC radiophonic workshop, and the voices of medieval Europe all blending seamlessly together beneath the echoes of galactic nuclei spiralling into space.
To find out more about Patrick’s work and the Sonilluminations installation, visit his website here. You can listen to the piece in full here.
To explore more of the collections featured in the installation, head over to Manchester Digital Collections and LUNA.
‘Sonilluminations’ was created as part of a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship hosted by Guildhall School of Music & Drama and funded by the Leverhulme Trust.