Founded by Hazel Harrison and Phillipa Anders, Music To Die For was created from a shared passion for the way music shapes our lives. In 2024, they were awarded a Creative Health Residency by Britten Pears Arts to explore how music connects us to people, memories and emotions that words alone cannot express.
Hazel Harrison
Dr Hazel Harrison is a clinical psychologist with a passion for helping us feel connected, valued, and understood. She believes that psychology is for all of us, in our everyday lives. Whether supporting individuals, teams, or organisations, her work focuses on creating spaces where people feel safe, supported, and able to thrive. As the founder of ThinkAvellana, Hazel helps people bring more kindness, curiosity, and psychological understanding into their relationships, teams and workplaces. Hazel has collaborated with the BBC, BT, the Premier League, the Royal Ballet School, and many other organisations to share insights that make a real difference in how we live and work together.
During the 2020 pandemic, Hazel played a key role in creating wellbeing content for BBC Bitesize Daily, offering support to children and young people during uncertain times. She has also written and presented a series of wellbeing films for the BBC, helping to raise awareness about mental health in a way that feels relatable, and accessible.
Hazel plays the guitar and music has always featured heavily in her life, from her teenage years of making mix tapes to taking her own teenagers to gigs. Hazel tries to weave music into as much of her life as she can.
Music and grief matter to Hazel because they are both profound expressions of love — grief is what remains when someone we love is gone, and music helps us hold onto that connection. Music has the power to transport us through time, unlocking memories and emotions in a way that words often cannot. Music can bring comfort, spark reflection, and remind us that even in our deepest sorrow, we are not alone.
Phillipa Anders
Phillipa has worked in music her entire life, as a teacher, project manager and in a variety of leadership roles. Her work has taken her into schools, care homes, prisons and charity settings. She has worked for internationally renowned orchestras, opera houses and concert halls around the UK and has developed a particular interest in music’s role in our health and wellbeing.
Phillipa was Director of the Music Programme at Britten Pears Arts, sat on the National Centre for Creative Health working group as part of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Arts Health & Wellbeing and was a member of the Advisory Group for the Cambridge Institute of Music Therapy Research.
After her husband’s sudden death from a brain tumour in 2020, she left full-time employment to support her children and now pursues projects she has a deep passion for.
She currently works as a Coach and is the founder and lead of Widowed & Walking UK, as well as a Trustee for Streetwise Opera, an Involvement Champion for The Brain Tumour Charity, a member of the Creative Council for City of London Sinfonia and is involved in various voluntary roles within her local community.
Phillipa’s relationship with music has changed and morphed over the years. After her husband’s death she found it almost impossible to listen to any music at all. It had been such an important aspect of her life up until this point, so this felt uncomfortable and upsetting, but necessary. She now couldn’t cope without music - her tastes are developing and growing all the time, mirroring her own development and growth as she reorientates and reshapes her life and who she now wants to be in the world.
The story behind our artworks
We commissioned designer, Robbie Steer, to create the look and feel for Music To Die For. Here’s his story behind the artworks…
When beginning any creative brief the aim is to find a common thread between key elements – in this instance ‘music’ and ‘grief’. My conversations with Hazel and Phillipa highlighted two key points – that grief has no end, it simply evolves over time and that even within sadness there are still moments of joy and light as memories of your loved one come to mind.
This led me to consider the cyclical nature of music, as although each piece has an end, we listen repeatedly, experiencing different emotions each time, depending on our current state – physically and emotionally. Music, like grief, is not black and white; it contains shades and colours.
Which gave rise to a thought… ‘What if I could create a visual representation of the ebb and flow of grief using music-listening technology?’. This resulted in the following process:
I placed a sheet of paper on a turntable, like a vinyl record, and slowly dropped a series of gouache paints (representing tears of sadness and joy) to form a collage of colour as it rotated. As the paint dries, a unique abstract artwork is formed (as can be seen in the video) reflecting the ever-changing nature of grief and the spectrum of emotions in music.
No two are ever the same, much like us as humans.