Sarah Nicolls has been innovating as a pianist since winning the British Contemporary Piano Competition in 2000. She has premiered multiple piano concertos with orchestras like the London Sinfonietta and ASKO/Schonberg Ensemble, often commissioned by the BBC and by composers including Larry Goves, Richard Barrett and Niccolo Castiglioni.

Combining the amazing sounds of electronic music with live piano playing, Sarah pioneered many interactive technologies over 2010-16, including muscle sensors and games controllers. Sarah founded an interactive music festival, BEAM and ran the UK’s first ever New Interfaces for Musical Expression conference, with performances by Imogen Heap and Tim Exile alongside MIT computer scientists and early pioneers like Laetitia Sonami.

Sarah started composing her own music when she started inventing pianos to make playing the strings easier and more within reach, to create layers of textured sound. 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 Erard grand which became a sculptural feast of an instrument, standing 2.5m tall and able to swing.

Sarah is currently close to finishing her patent-pending third prototype – this time built from scratch with master piano builder David Klavins and composites engineers through her company Future Piano. The ‘Standing Grand’ is aiming to be under 90kg and portable (see futurepiano.co.uk).

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. Last year Sarah built an eco-house with her husband and is now learning land guardianship with the help of Stroud locals.

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