Helen Caddick
Composer
"Music fired by narrative, bringing little-known stories to light across dance, art, poetry, film, textiles and science."
Her work has been supported by Arts Council England, PRS Foundation's Women Make Music and Open Fund, the Vaughan Williams Foundation, Royal Holloway, University of London, the Stanley Thomas Johnson Foundation and the Swiss Embassy, London. She was shortlisted by the Royal Philharmonic Society, and is a former lecturer at Trinity Laban Conservatoire and Goldsmiths, University of London.
Born in London and now living on the Kent coast, Caddick majored in composition at Goldsmiths College, University of London. There she studied with Melanie Daiken and Edward Gregson, piano with John Tilbury and violin with Yvonne Woolrich. After graduating she worked with bands and producers as a writer and performer. She then returned to composition studies privately with Daiken at the Royal Academy of Music, and continued at the London College of Music with John McLeod. She also took conducting courses at Morley College with Lawrence Leonard.
Highlights
Phantomnesis selected artist, Cambiata Arts; featured in the compilation Phantomnesis: Voices Against Forgetting
Honorarium from the Coopman Foundation for A Soap Bubble went to meet Infinity
moon landing featured at the Saatchi Gallery's The Sun and the Moon: Art inspired by the Celestial (London, 2026), experienced by an estimated 375,000 visitors
We are Here choreographed for the Ballet Moderno y Folklórico Nacional de Guatemala and performed at the Teatro Nacional (2024)
Amphora voted a top pick in The Musician (2018) and selected for Alternative Classical's Concert Roulette series (2025)
Haze selected for the 2019 Turner Prize wider events, and featured in Tate Britain's Great British Walks series
Shortlisted by the Royal Philharmonic Society
Music aired on Channel 4, SkyArts, BBC 3's Late Junction and Belgium's Klassiek Centraal
Catalogue published by Composers Edition (2023)
Supported by Arts Council England, PRS Foundation, the Vaughan Williams Foundation and the Stanley Thomas Johnson Foundation
Selected works
Sparrowhawk — for soprano and harp. Premiered at the 2026 Wealden Literary Festival.
A Soap Bubble went to meet Infinity (2025) — for flute, bass clarinet and bubble machine. Inspired by the soap bubble theory of the universe, and awarded an honorarium by the Coopman Foundation. Premiered by the Rosalie ensemble in June 2025, and then performed by Heli Haapala and Pekka Niskanen of the Lapin Kamariorkestri, Europe's northernmost professional orchestra, at the Sinetan Musikkjuhlat Festival in July 2025.
T R A C E S – Tales from the Anechoic Chamber (2024) — for soprano, orchestra and gathered sound. Inspired by the true story of an influencer who spent time in the dark in an anechoic chamber. Premiered by Ruby Caddick Lawrence and Orchestra of the City at St. Andrew Holborn, with sounds from London's streets triggered by audio engineer Humphrey Percival. Selected by Cambiata Arts for Phantomnesis: Voices Against Forgetting.
moon landing (2024) — for string sextet (two harps, two violins, two cellos). Inspired by the women who wove the integrated circuits and memory cores of the Apollo 11 mission. Premiered at Somerset House in 2024, with further performances at Canterbury Cathedral in 2025. It was featured at the Saatchi Gallery in 2026, alongside a 16-metre textile woven in response by artist Margo Selby.
We are Here (2024) — commissioned by the Lilith Ensemble. Inspired by the women of Afghanistan protesting for their right to work and education. Premiered in Antwerp in May 2024, then chosen for choreography by Ana Sofia Villar, Director of the Ballet Moderno y Folklórico Nacional de Guatemala, and performed at the Teatro Nacional in July 2024.
With Beauty May I Walk (2024) — song cycle for soprano and piano. Sets texts by Edith Sitwell, Christina Rossetti and an anonymous text first sung in the Navajo language. Premiered at Deptford Town Hall by Ruby Caddick Lawrence and Eleanor Maynell.
Sophie (2021) — verbatim chamber opera for mezzo, baritone and an ensemble of flute/piccolo/alto flute, clarinet/bass clarinet, harp, piano, cello and percussion, with dancers. Inspired by the life and work of Swiss-German artist and dancer Sophie Taeuber. Directed by Lucy Bradley, with semi-staged extracts conducted by Chris Hopkins at Tête à Tête 2018 at the Cockpit Theatre, London. Currently in development for full realisation.
Amphora (2017) — for soprano and ensemble. Inspired by the art and poetry of the French-German poet and Dadaist Hans Jean Arp. Premiered by Katherine Crompton and CantiaQuorum, conducted by Alex Caldon, at the opening of the Arp: Poetry of Form exhibition at Turner Contemporary, Margate. It was re-performed at the 2018 Tête à Tête Opera Festival, and selected for Concert Roulette in December 2025.
Haze (2016) — for septet (flute/piccolo, clarinet/bass clarinet, trumpet/flugelhorn, piano, violin, cello, double bass and wineglasses). Inspired by five delicate paintings by JMW Turner, strung together as a fictional narrative of a man in a boat on the east coast of England. Premiered at the opening of JMW Turner: Adventures in Colour at Turner Contemporary. It was re-performed at the 2019 Turner Prize wider events with film by Phil Miller, and featured on SkyArts' Great British Walks.
Bright Planet (2015) — for trio (trumpet/flugelhorn, violin, piano). Commissioned by CantiaQuorum and inspired by Pedro Reyes's Palas por Pistolas, in which 1,527 guns used in Mexican drug crimes were melted down and remade as shovels to plant 1,527 trees. Premiered at Turner Contemporary in 2015 and invited back for its fifth anniversary. It was reimagined with dance for the Deal Festival in 2019, and revisited for the Eastbourne Walking Festival in 2024.
Between Sleeping and Waking (2015) — for solo piano. Extracts were performed by Caddick at secret southbank, in the final concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall before its two-year renovation. In 2016 she presented the work in full at All Saints, Tudeley, on an old Bechstein Grand, surrounded by Marc Chagall's windows.
Film, Television and Theatre
Caddick has also created music for the screen and stage:
Inflight (film), directed by Ian Cross, nominated for a Kunstmedia Internationale award and looped throughout Canterbury's Wise Words festival
Memo (television), for Channel 4, part of a series of films about artificial intelligence
Hush (theatre), directed by Donnacadh O'Briain, nominated for a Fringe First
String arrangements on the critically acclaimed albums Here's Tom with the Weather and The Magical World of the Strands, with Michael and John Head
Audience Response
"…each time I have been moved by her music, by the way it transcends me into another dimension… In her music she has truly captured the feminine dimension, which I rarely hear." — Susan Redgrave, on Amphora (2018)
"Sublimely lyrical immersive art installation, highlighting the very essence of an empathetic collaboration between artists… the work was delivered by women, continuing the historic legacy of the women whom it honours who would otherwise be forgotten." — Dr. Amanda Sefton Hogg, on moon landing (2026)
"You have miraculously captured so much of the feel of the Thanet coast, and of Turner's response to it." — Ian Warrell, curator of JMW Turner: Adventures in Colour, on Haze
"Haze is an amazing achievement… continually uncovering new colours in the music." — Jo Tonkin (2017)
T R A C E S – Tales from the Anechoic Chamber
Phantomnesis selected work
"A London ghost story for soprano, orchestra and the gathered sounds of the city's streets."
Helen Caddick is one of the composers selected for Phantomnesis, an international call from Cambiata Arts for unpublished recordings that bring the forgotten, the near-forgotten and the reimagined into today's listening. Her piece T R A C E S – Tales from the Anechoic Chamber is included in the compilation Phantomnesis: Voices Against Forgetting, six pieces for the forgotten, the half-remembered and the voices that refuse to fade. It is also the album's closing work, and its widest canvas.
Six jurors reviewed the submissions: composers, performers, researchers, a broadcaster and a musicologist. They work in Toronto, Hannover, Skopje, Bangkok and Tehran, and across Vienna, Graz and Klagenfurt in Austria, in fields from electroacoustic music and Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian musical heritage to voice, jazz scholarship and new-music broadcasting. They judged each work on its engagement with forgotten or near-forgotten material, its compositional richness and its artistic conviction. T R A C E S (11'30") is scored for soprano, orchestra and gathered sound. It was inspired by the true account of an influencer who spent several hours in the dark in an anechoic chamber, possibly the quietest room in the world, in an attempt to break a world record. In the dark he heard an underground train, saw rats scurrying, and saw a woman in white appear. Caddick's work asks: what if they had been real?
Through research in London's archives, Caddick decided the visitor could have been Sarah Whitehead, the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street. Sarah was 19 in 1811 when her brother Paul was found guilty of fraud and executed. He had tried to protect her by making sure she was out of the area and left instructions that she not be told. She went on asking for him every day at the Bank of England, where he had worked. In Caddick's narrative, Sarah mistakes the influencer in the darkened room for her brother.
The piece runs from medieval London to the present day. It weaves together the captured sounds of the subterranean River Fleet, the Sunday morning bells of St. Paul's Cathedral, London's pigeons and a Northern line train thundering into Bank station, where Sarah's ghost has been reported. Wineglasses reflect the spun-glass ceiling and floor of the chamber.
The story behind the piece
Caddick began the work with an Arts Council England funded project to explore acoustics and write for London's Orchestra of the City. One morning in July 2024, waiting for a Northern line train at Bank on her way to meet acoustics professor Stephen Dance at Elephant and Castle, she felt herself physically shoved onto the train from behind, and found no one there. Hours later, Professor Dance told her about the influencer and the woman in white. She doesn't believe in ghosts, but the coincidence led her to research London ghosts, and to Sarah Whitehead, whose ghost has been sighted at Bank. The station's ticket hall and lift entrance were built on the site of the former crypt of St Mary Woolnoth, which once housed 8,000 bodies.
To conjure Sarah's world, Caddick and audio engineer Humphrey Percival captured sounds around the City of London. They recorded pigeon wings, the medieval River Fleet through a storm drain, the bells of St. Paul's, bees, the hubbub of the streets and a Northern line train. She also used an old bell bought from the sale of a London pub, which turned out to match the pitch of the bell rung the night before an execution at the Old Bailey. The final movement sets the poem On the Death of my Brother by Jane Barker (1688), written in grief at the death of her own brother.
Her daughter, soprano Ruby Caddick Lawrence, premiered the work. At the time she was close in age to the young Sarah, and "conjuring Sarah through Ruby" added a further dimension for the audience. Trains could be felt and heard rumbling far below St. Andrew's Church, Holborn, where it was premiered, which played further with what was real and what was imagined.
Credits
Words by Helen Caddick, including a setting of "On the Death of my Brother" by Jane Barker. Performed by soprano Ruby Caddick Lawrence and Orchestra of the City, conducted by Chris Hopkins. Sounds gathered from London's streets by Helen Caddick and Humphrey James Percival, fed directly through the live performance by Percival. Recorded live by Mike Collins at St. Andrew's, Holborn, in December 2024, and mixed by Mike Collins at Big Jelly Studios. Supported by Arts Council England.
Phantomnesis: Voices Against Forgetting is curated and published by CambiataArt Records and released in 2026. Each artist retains full ownership and rights to their work.
Helen Caddick hears ideas for music everywhere, and a new commission is her greatest excitement. Research is a core part of her practice, and ideas often come from the most surprising places, such as an anechoic chamber, a Turner painting or the soap bubble theory of the universe. She seeks to create the "complete work of art", giving audiences immersive experiences built from the crossovers between dance, art, poetry, film, textiles, science, mathematics, verbatim and spoken word.
Her work is fired by narrative. She brings little-known stories to light, often with a focus on social, environmental or feminist issues, from the women who wove the memory cores of Apollo 11 to the women of Afghanistan protesting for education. She is also passionate about writing for living musicians, and describes no greater thrill than hearing her work leap off the page in performance, or watching it take on a life of its own beyond its premiere.
She is always looking for new performance spaces, and plays with acoustics, whether in galleries, cathedrals, town halls, literary festivals or the stage of a ballet company in Guatemala.
"My work is fired by narrative, driven by a desire to bring to light little known stories and to reflect the world we live in, often with focus on social, environmental or feminist issues." — Helen Caddick
"In the music I write and the projects I undertake I seek to find the crossovers that exist across multi art forms and to push boundaries through collaboration." — Helen Caddick
"I am fascinated with the idea of reaching new audiences and in exploring acoustics through finding unusual spaces to stage my work." — Helen Caddick