Pete M. Wyer: A Map of the Invisible

Overview

Fitzrovia Chapel presents a haunting new immersive sound installation by composer and sound artist Pete M. Wyer. A Map of the Invisible, created while Wyer was living in Venice, invites audiences to step inside sound and reflect on the unseen worlds that surround us. The result is a deeply moving encounter shaped by faith, care, suffering and beauty.

The richly decorated interior of the Fitzrovia Chapel – once the chapel of the former Middlesex Hospital – draws inspiration from Venice’s St Mark’s Basilica, one of the most influential buildings in music history. It was there that Renaissance composers pioneered the use of separate choirs in different galleries to create “spatial music,” centuries before the advent of modern audio technology.

Drawing on this legacy, Wyer has composed nine new vocal works for a 16-speaker immersive sound system within the Chapel walls. The pieces are interwoven with field recordings captured across Venice – church bells, footsteps, lapping water, voices and distant streets – creating a richly textured sonic environment. Reflecting the Fitzrovia Chapel’s own history, the works draw on deeply personal testimonies of illness, recovery, grief and resilience, alongside accounts of paranormal experiences associated with the site, including stories from former Middlesex Hospital staff.

Wyer’s motets and vocal works draw on real-life stories. In For My Child, a mother prays for her baby whose life hangs in the balance. Fifty years later, that story finds its answer in On the 17th of March: the child survived and is now a woman who returns to the Chapel, giving thanks to the doctors and to the mother who saved her. Elsewhere, in Love Will Not Be Lost, a doctor keeps vigil with a patient they cannot save, while in Dance, Dance, a patient once not expected to survive celebrates life with joy, dancing in gratitude.

The Fitzrovia Chapel is a place where, for more than a century, people have come to sit with their “map of the invisible” – just as they have done at St Mark’s for over a thousand years. Their hidden emotional stories are echoed in this meditation on the unseen forces people bring into scared spaces – hope, fear, memory, prayer, trauma and healing.

Pete M. Wyer was born in Cheltenham, UK in 1964. His immersive installations have attracted more than 500,000 visitors in New York and Los Angeles with spatialised choral works such as I Walk Towards Myself, The Sky Beneath Our Feet and Song of the Human. He has composed for some of the world’s most prestigious ensembles, including the London Symphony Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Royal Opera House (ROH2), Juilliard and BBC Television. His body of work includes eight operas and music theatre productions and, most recently, Natural World (for the 100th birthday of Sir David Attenborough). pmwmusic.com