Inside-Out Piano

About Sarah Nicolls

Sarah Nicolls is a pianist who has spent her life stretching what’s possible on the piano. Starting as a classically-trained prodigy, while studying in London Sarah got into playing the latest classical music and won the British Contemporary Piano Competition in 2000. She premiered multiple piano concertos with orchestras like the London Sinfonietta and ASKO/Schonberg Ensemble, including special commissions from the BBC and works including Larry Goves, Richard Barrett, Niccolo Castiglioni, Wolfgang Rihm. Scores by living composers often asked her to play quite literally in the ‘inside’ of the instrument – playing directly on the strings. The sounds were lush and they were there to be explored so Sarah started improvising and messing about with electronics. She formed a band with Mira Calix and David Sheppard, putting out an EP on Warp Records.

But these extra sounds were hard to reach. Standing up to lean inside the grand piano, Sarah thought – how about we change the shape of the piano? She built her first ‘Inside-out Piano’ in 2008. With £500 to spend, she hacked apart an upright and stuck it back together with some steel legs made by a Liverpudlian ship builder. In 2014, she collaborated with Pierre Malbos to re-shape an Érard grand which became a sculptural feast of an instrument, standing 2.5m tall and able to swing.

On these instruments, Sarah has found her compositional voice. Sarah has made shows about motherhood and climate change (working with climate scientists across the UK, ‘12 years’ was a Guardian Autumn 2020 Top Pick and was featured on BBC 4’s Front Row). She’s been a soloist in the PRSF New Music Biennial and Matthew Herbert’s 20 Pianos project, is regularly broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and has had residencies at Southbank Centre’s Collision programme, Artangel’s Library of Water in Iceland, the Arvon writing centre The Hurst and Snape Maltings Festival of New.

In 2023, Sarah became one of Innovate UK’s Women in Innovation, and has recently won a Creative Catalyst award to work with the astonishing world-leading structural engineer Neil Thomas and his company Atelier One, who have worked on structures including World Building of the Year ‘Gardens by the Bay’ in Singapore. She is aiming to produce a lightweight, acoustic vertical grand piano. Sarah is also a Visiting Senior Research Fellow in Music and Engineering at King’s College, London and a recipient of the Arts Council England ‘Develop Your Creative Practice’ award.

Photography: Adam Gasson and Joe Linehan