Announcing our Musicians in Residence 2025-26

We are delighted to announce that Simone Seales and Jason Yarde are our 2025/6 Musicians in Residence. Here’s a look at what they have in store.

Simone Seales

Simone Seales is a cellist and performance artist based out of Glasgow. Simone is passionate about exploring sound and its relationship to emotional experience. They centre their creative work on Blackness, sexuality, intersectional feminism and anti-racism. 

During their year as Musician in Residence, Simone aspires to continue developing their practice as an intersectional cellist. They plan to explore the integration of visual and aural archival material into their creative work, combining and collaborating with various art forms and bringing their philosophy and activism to audiences in an accessible format.

Jason Yarde

Jason Yarde is a composer, arranger, producer, musical director and saxophonist. Jason casts a wide musical net, having worked with Orlando Julius, Plan B, Britten Sinfonia and Wonderbrass to name a few. Highly accomplished, his projects range from McCormack & Yarde Duo, TRiO WAH to the larger ACOUTASTiC BOMBASTiC with accolades in the form of a Paul Hamlyn Award and the first BASCA/IVOR Award for Contemporary Jazz Composition for his BBC Proms compositional début. 

During his residency, Jason is keen to explore the cross points of improvisation and composition. Steering away from the ‘composer as dictator model’, Jason seeks to outline a new framework for the compositional process that prioritises interpretation, expression and deep collaboration for the musicians that he works with. Jason will explore holding one-to-one meetings with musicians and non-traditional scoring techniques to forge a new path towards collaboration between composers and musicians.

About our Musicians in Residence programme

Our Musicians in Residence scheme is delivered as part of Modulate, our artist development programme. Now in its fifth year, the residency provides two musicians or composers with a bursary plus wraparound budget and support from the Paraorchestra team in a programme designed to facilitate collaboration and unrestrained exploration. 

What form the residency takes is entirely decided by the artists themselves. Previous residents have used their time to record albums using cutting-edge spatial audio techniques, master new instruments, and explore new cross-disciplinary forms from audio-visual programming to aerial performance.  

Sign up to our mailing list to receive updates as Simone and Jason bring their ideas to life.