Welcome to Hannah Marshall's Website.
Hannah has been discovering ways of playing the cello and making music through improvisation, cross arts collaboration, sound design and education, since leaving The Guildhall School of Music & Drama in 1996.
Mostly she plays in an improvised setting where focus can be solely on listening and awareness. Sometimes she treats the instrument as a collection of parts at others she plays traditionally.
Hannah makes sound tracks for performance, spaces and film.
Since 2019 she has been making short films.
Hannah 'teaches' in schools, workshops and community, guiding musicianship, creative practice, and practical playing with people of all ages and experience.
The people and companies Hannah has worked with include: Veryan Weston, Alison Blunt, Ivor Kallin, Alex Ward, Rachel Musson, Tim Hodgkinson, Michael Oliva, John Edwards, John Russell, Roger Turner, Evan Parker, Sylvia Hallett, Ansuman Biswas, John Butcher, Maggie Nicols, Brian Irvine, Steve Beresford, Matthew Bourne, Julie Kjaer, Jacques Demierre, Luc Ex, Diartibes, Tony Marsh, Dan Am, Ingrid Laubrock, Amelia Pimlott, People Show, Bernadette Russell, White Rabbit, The Ding Foundation.
Please get in touch for a CV
Excerpts from reviews of performances and recordings:
'Tulse Hill' - solo record with Linear Obsessional:
"BRILLIANT improv pieces for solo detuned cello by glorious Hannah Marshall !!!! - minimal & rhythmic & instant & also eternal !!! - first BC random-hit of the day !!! - there is a god !!!!" -Pyongyang Plastics
The Ding Foundation's 'Wild Life':
"..perfect, sensuous clarity of performance. A heartfelt play, Wild Life serves up a jungle of emotions, the urge to make sure you never fall into the pit of personal abandonment and become stale, a ghost of yourself; for nobody should ever feel that small or insignificant. A wonderful production! Ian D. Hall - Liverpool Sound and Vision
Live performance with John Edwards - Bass & Alex Ward - Clarinet:
"The trio play two long pieces, with every note forged an act of co-operative discovery, every pattern of sound new, transient and fleeting, never to be heard again" Morning Star Online.
'Gratuitous Abuse' by Barrel with Ivor Kallin - Viola & Alison Blunt - Violin:
"...imagine three first class musicians locked up in a time capsule, having associated with various shamans, drunk Romanian fiddlers, Yiddish chant leaders, the serialists, especially Webern. Then folks like Ligeti, Satie, and various Dadaists pop their head round the door from time to time to put in their tuppenceworth. After a few months you let them loose in the 21st century to pick up on the very new....." Fouter & Swick
Halftone with Yvonna Magda - Violin, Tina Hitchens - Flute & Caitlin Callahan - Bass:
"The foursome play an unsettling, absently beautiful post classical music evoking wind in the trees, unresolved conversations and difficulties around corners" – Misfit City.
Wild Theatre's 'Stone Belly':
'...A trance-like hypnotic power, magnified by Hannah Marshall's specially composed score it lured the audience smoothly and effectively into it's world of dreams and memories, a place inhabited by discarded and forgotten things..." Animations Online -Isabel Smith
'Haste' with Ingrid Laubrock - Tenor Saxophone & Veryan Weston - Piano:
"sublime technical abilities, which is marked by spectacular passages of pizzicato and con arco playing. Replacing the absolute bass of the music, Marshall nonetheless shows up with brilliant passages where she reinvents melodic lines, provides spectacular harmonic intervention, and sets the pulse around which much of the music revolves. Together, these three musicians have created an ingenious document where past and present collide revealing a glimpse what might be in a not-so- imaginary future" - Raul de Gama Rose
Live performance with Julie Kjaer - Alto Saxophone & Rachel Musson - Tenor Saxophone:
" a single diaphonous improvisation of heart stopping intensity and quietude that brings the entire room into a tip-toed state of heightened awareness..." Daniel Spicer - The Wire.
Tulse Hill:
"..with 'Tulse Hill' Hannah Marshall has proven herself to be a solo player of imagination and intelligence; recording an album of deceptively simple but very rewarding and hypnotic music. A series of small meals that combine in a feast for the ears and mind." -Michael Holland - Ears For Eyes
