New Resonances: Acoustics & Memories
How is music shaped by the architectures and geographies it is made in? Listen to the resonances between contemporary musical culture and new spaces for performance across three days of debates, performances and workshops.
SATURDAY 13TH OCTOBER
11.30 INTRODUCTION
11.45-13.15 ACOUSTICS
How does new writing respond to the sonic resonances of ex-industrial and infrastructural spaces? How does the design of new spaces for music enable or constrain new music cultures? What are the values in different kinds of acoustic?
Chair: Christos Carras, Onassis Cultural Centre
Laura Cannell, performer and composer,
Ella Finer, Artist Research Fellow in Drama and Performance at Queen Mary University of London
Gascia Ouzounian, Associate Professor of Music at University of Oxford
14.30-16.00 MEMORIES
How does composition make the past audible? Should music be shaped by histories of sites, or resist and reinvent them? What is the difference between working with personal memory and canonical history, which can often be in conflict with one another?
Chair: Gareth Evans, Whitechapel Gallery
Ruth Bernatek, architect, UCL Bartlett
Haig Aivazian, artist (Beirut)
Jennifer Walshe, composer
16.15-16.45 PERFORMED INTERVENTIONS
Worlds within Walls: Internal Music
Solo Acoustic performance – Overbow Violin & Double Recorders
Laura Cannell performs three short site specific pieces inspired by fragments of medieval music and shaped within the space of the Whitechapel Gallery walls. Wherever we travel each of us brings our own internal playlist and history of music. Inside every performance space or building, we hope that sounds of a performance strike a chord within our physical human framework as well as within the walls in which we listen collectively. We think in sound, speech, pitch, colour, pattern and rhythm. Do our eyes determine our responses to music and the architecture in which we hear it? You are invited to close your eyes.
non-curated (summertime)
Ella Finer and Flora Pitrolo of the collective The International Western present a performance-composition based on the electromagnetic resonances of the Whitechapel Gallery. An experiment in listening to the non-curated sonic dimension of the building and in bringing the building as sonic document into the archive.
16.45 – 17.45 WORKROOM CONVERSATIONS: ON TRACES/ON MEMORY
How other artistic practises deal with questions of architectures and geographies? Does site shape dance, sculpture, installation or writing in a similar or different way to its resonance in music? Two smaller conversations between practitioners from different disciplines drawing on Theatrum Mundi’s regular sessions looking at how ideas become form.
Haig Aivazian, artist
TBC
New Resonances is organised by Theatrum Mundi and the Onassis Cultural Centre, Athens, as part of the Interfaces project supported by the Creative Europe Program of the European Union.
