Music, Play, Memory

Gallery volunteer Lola Rushton wrote this piece in response to collecting songs for a intergenerational playlist, created during the run of All The Things. The playlist brought together music that makes people feel playful, celebrating connections across generations through shared memories and joy.

Think of a song that makes you feel playful, one that reminds you of a joyful time, a song that you can’t help but smile ear to ear when it comes on. Maybe it’s a song that makes you tap to the beat, maybe it makes you want to hold hands with your best friend, maybe you remember hearing it in the car with your mum. We asked Orleans House Gallery staff, volunteers and visitors for their answers – and above is the link to the playlist created through people aged 7 to 92. It demonstrates the breadth of the community engaging with the exhibition, and the way people treasure their sensory connections with sound.

Music forms the backbone of social activities and community gathering. When you think about group events – festivals, weddings, funerals, parties, demonstrations – there is almost always music responding to the occasion, or as a focal point. So, it is unsurprising that almost all of the reasons people shared for the songs chosen relate to a shared memory. A song, an album or an artist played during a family car journey, a ballet lesson or a carefree day with close friends can become inseparable from the memory. They co-exist and endure in their relation, tied through the emotional intensity or particularity of the event. Audible reminders exist long after the time of the event has passed, or far away from its location, you can hear something in the supermarket and suddenly you’re back to being a child in a caravan, or you’re in a club in 1998.

Listening to music can also be intensely individual, but even those seemingly singular experiences are imbued with integral human connection – you are hearing someone’s voice; you are listening to melodies or beats or lyrics created by other people, at another time, in another place. You can connect with yourself through the sound, identifying with stories told through lyrics, intuitively moving, or allowing the sounds to conjure up images.

I also love the intertwining timelines in the experience of listening to music. The time of the creative process, multiple timeframes that co-exist in the music: the time it was written and created and produced, the time it came out, the time you first listen to it, the time you are currently listening to it and how this song will live on in the future. This is inherently playful, it’s rejecting the static or stagnant.

All the Things is a playful intergenerational exhibition through its formation and continual evolution in the gallery space, and this collection of songs forms an audible testimony to this. Through the exhibition and its surrounding programming, we are collectively guided toward realms of creative possibility. Whether it is to take a line for a walk using your pencil on the drawing wall upstairs, or to think about how music can encourage you to play, everyone is invited to play and imagine.

Words by Lola Rushton, 2026.