There are moments in life when time opens up and feels like a true gift. Our 5 day R&D residency at Hawkwood was precisely that: a gift of time, space, connection and true listening.
From the moment of our arrival, we realized that this was not simply a place to “produce” work. It was a place to inhabit and notice every aspect that makes Hawkwood special – its stunning location, nature, and the welcoming team whose ethos is that everything is possible.
One of the greatest luxuries was being able to set up our equipment exactly as we needed, and to leave everything in place for the entire duration. As musicians, we often live in a state of perpetual dismantling: packing away, clearing up, resetting. Here, there was continuity and time to settle.
Equally transformative was the feeling of being undisturbed. There were no external demands pressing at the edges of our concentration, no subtle urgency, and no sense that we needed to justify our presence. Time was truly our own and listening became our compass.
The structure of the day supported this immersion. Meal times and tea breaks were wonderfully timed, almost like little punctuation marks in the rhythm of our work. We were nourished without having to think about nourishment. There is something profoundly enabling about knowing that you will be well fed and well cared for.
Those shared meals became moments of recalibration – a chance to step out of intense focus and return again refreshed. Creativity is not sustained by inspiration alone – it requires energy, steadiness, care and attention. Hawkwood understands this deeply. The rhythm of the day created a natural ebb and flow, allowing us to work intensely yet sustainably. It felt, in many ways, like being on retreat – not retreating from the world but retreating into attentiveness.
We both value exploration, curiosity, and risk in our individual work as musicians, but at Hawkwood, the absence of pressure created a rare freedom. We could follow an idea without fearing it might fail. We could dismantle what we had built and begin again, not from frustration, but from discovery.
And at the heart of it all was listening.
In our increasingly accelerated world, such depth of attention is one we need to value and protect. To allow listening to be central is transformative. It shifts the focus from performance to presence, from outcome to exploration.
As we reflect on our time at Hawkwood, we realise that the true gift was not simply the work we created. but the reawakening of trust – trust in time and trust in the process. Creativity flourishes when it’s given space to unfold, it deepens when it is nourished, and it becomes honest when it is undisturbed.
Hawkwood offered all of this. And in that environment, we were reminded that the most powerful music often begins not with sound but with listening.
Evelyn Glennie & Jon Sterckx, February 2026
The above text was first published and featured as part of the Artist in Residence blog on the Hawkwood website, which you can find here: https://www.hawkwoodcollege.co.uk/blog/artist-in-residence-2026-evelyn-glennie-and-jon-sterckx
To discover more about this collaborative project, visit Jon Sterckx’s dedicated page here: https://www.jonsterckx.co.uk/collaboration-with-evelyn-glennie/
You can listen to the Stories that Matter episode (a podcast series created by Hawkwood) featuring an interview with Evelyn and Jon during their residency, visit here: https://audioboom.com/posts/8869711-stories-that-matter-with-dame-evelyn-glennie-and-jon-sterckx
Ways of Listening Project
The Ways of Listening project is a global creative collaboration between The Evelyn Glennie Foundation and Cities and Memory, one of the world’s largest sound projects. Together, they’re inviting people everywhere to share their own creative response to a simple but powerful question: “What does listening mean to you?”
Contributions can take any creative form – music, poetry, a photograph, a video, a sketch, a sound recording, a short piece of prose, even a single sentence or a word. The project is open to absolutely anyone, anywhere in the world. These responses will help spark a global conversation about the importance of listening, culminating in an online exhibition launching in July 2026 to coincide with World Listening Day. They are also hoping to display some of the responses as part of a collaboration with City Lit in London between 6th and 20th May 2026.
You can find full details here: https://www.citiesandmemory.com/listening and here https://www.evelynglennie.foundation/stories/ways-of-listening-a-global-creative-project-with-cities-and-memory/