Choir as Method: Musarc Folk Meet on a Midsummer Day until Dusk V by coursdepoetique

Choir as Method

Choir as Method:

Musarc Folk Meet on a Midsummer Day until Dusk

Saturday 22 June 2024

6.30–sunset

St Paul’s Bow Common

Burdett Road

London E3 4AR

Artistic Director

Joseph Kohlmaier

Director of Music

David Young

Voice Coaches

Jessica Gillingwater

Stephen Jeffes

Photography

Yiannis Katsaris

Food + Drink

Agnieszka Cybul

Amy Teh

Andy Cowton

Anna Schabel

Aranzazu Fernández Rangel

Carol Mancke

Carolyn Roy

Dan Knight

Hannah Zafiropoulos

Hélène Lomenech

Jakub Modrzejewski

Łukasz Kopeć

Sophie Barshall

Zeina Nasr

Zsófia Varga

Special Thanks

Adam Cheltsov

Aranzazu Fernández Rangel

Mthr Bernadette Hegarty

Carol Mancke

Julian Brears

Kirsty Fergusson-Lewis

Philippa Longson

Sam Belinfante

Serena Braida

Flowers

Natalie Savva

The choir labours under the sun. It carries its own weight, falls, rises and inspects its own ruins. It is thirsty. The choir attentively puts the facts, that is the way it knows, not by logical exegesis. The choir pauses. It turns its sail hard into the wind of tradition. It is commensurate with the materials that pass through its practice. This practice is the only territory it owns, its performances are but materialisations, archipelagos. The choir’s many bodies extend and contract with every new encounter. It is first and foremost a body of bodies, that is its affordance. It puts next to each other multiple languages and looks for contradictions, in which it rejoices. It is a civic structure, vacillating, interdisciplinary, it has grown its own immune system under minor and major incursions. The choir projects its own transformations. It makes its own effigy to rethink what it may be. The choir is writing, it is looking to find a common desire (prose, mostly without meter). It is for those who feel their way through a score to an unknown end. This is its destiny: to defend itself against the disparity of the moment. The choir is not easy. It has hierarchies, but they cannot always be seen. It wishes to be touched, it is pure relation, that is its erotics. The choir is a method: everything for it is a metaphor that leads back to itself.

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Legendary Jazz pianist Pat Thomas has introduced the choir to conduction – a method to structure free improvisation using a simple set of hand or baton signs originally pioneered by American composer, cornetist and conductor Butch Morris (1947–2013). Often starting from a single gesture given by the performers, conduction evolves a performance through augmentation, repetition, continuation, silences, duplication, changes in speed or dynamics, or the addition of new material. The conductor submits to what is given by the performers who in turn submit to the structure the composer evolves. From this structure, performers continuously develop new material through acts of submission, anarchy, or transmission of happenings, unexpected sensations, events in the space. For this performance, Thomas has divided the choir into smaller ensembles performing in parallel, each with one, or multiple, changing conductors. In this setup, the gestures and material given by one ensemble of singers can be absorbed and added to the performances of other ensembles playing in the room. Pat Thomas’s work with the choir is a gift that creates a place to return to, a future framework for the choir to ask a central, cybernetic

question: what is it like to be a choir without a score, left to its own devices, without a composer, with conduction in the place of a conductor?

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The choir has been working with puppeteer, dramaturg and theatre maker Rachel Warr to learn the practice and techniques of animating objects, as part of a longer-term project between Warr, composer Benjamin Oliver and the ensemble’s Writing Group. The choir is constructing its double, a small chorus-body as a site and field of projection that materialises its own relations, collective intentions; or the hallucination, presence and possibility of the chorus as a collective self. The puppet chorus is a form of model, testing out transformations at different scales, thinking the choir as a civic and political body that observes, then speaks. Importantly, the puppet body represents embodiment itself, what a body can do,* or bodies in coalition can do; and how the sway of what is abstract, imaginary, political, ideological is first and always structured by bodies in space, of which the choir is a peculiar concoction. This concoction is not neutral, and carries in itself the weight of its history and traditions, and the histories of all the bodies in it.

The choir’s puppet work is evolving alongside its ongoing practice of writing and reading together. The Writing Group materialises the preoccupations and questions the choir may have; it tests what is urgent and needs to be addressed. At the same time, it thinks what writing in common can be like, it sets its own rules and structures to create a space for different voices speaking in relation. In this evening’s performance, readings from the Writing Group provide an oblique and poetic commentary, connecting across a distance, punctuating events and marking scene changes.

Since Musarc first performed Jennifer Walshe’s The White Noisery in 2019 – a choral work scored for voices (with objects) and CD originally commissioned by National Chamber Choir of Ireland in 2012 – the artist’s fiercely interdisciplinary, essayistic and poetic approach to composition and performance has acted as a template through which Musarc has been

* See Ben Spatz, What a body can do (Routledge, 2015)

Musarc is one of the UK’s foremost experimental choral societies. Founded by Joseph Kohlmaier at the School of Art, Architecture and Design, London Metropolitan University in 2008, the ensemble has developed a distinct reputation for its interdisciplinary, open-minded and research-led approach to music and performance, and the space it affords artists and singers to experiment with new ideas. Since its inception, the choir has collaborated with more than one hundred artists and composers, including Jennifer Walshe, Peter Broderick, Jay Bernard, Lin Chiwei, Jack Sheen, Laure Provost, Ed Atkins, Jenny Moore, Lina Lapelyte, Sam Belinfante, Fritz Hauser, Neil Luck and many others; and numerous festivals and arts organisations in the UK and abroad – including Artangel, BBC Proms, London Contemporary Music Festival, Palais de Tokyo (Paris), the Royal Academy, CCA Goldsmiths, Post Disaster Rooftops (Italy), Museum of London, Extra City (Antwerp), Serpentine Gallery, MK Gallery, Wysing Polyphonic, STUK (Leuwen) Cafe OTO, Bold Tendencies and Whitechapel Gallery. Musarc us open to everyone and does not audition. Over the years, the choir has enabled more than 300 singers to be part of contemporary art and music in the making.

“The most original compositional voice to emerge from Ireland in the past 20 years” (The Irish Times) and “Wild girl of Darmstadt” (Frankfurter Rundschau), composer and performer Jennifer Walshe was born in Dublin, Ireland. Her music has been commissioned, broadcast and performed all over the world. She has been the recipient of fellowships and prizes from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York, the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm, the Internationales Musikinstitut, Darmstadt and Akademie Schloss Solitude among others. Recent projects include TIME TIME TIME, an opera written in collaboration with the philosopher Timothy Morton, and THE SITE OF AN INVESTIGATION, a 30-minute epic for Walshe’s voice and orchestra, commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland. THE SITE has been performed by Walshe and the NSO, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and also the Lithuanian State Symphony Orchestra. Walshe has worked extensively with AI. ULTRACHUNK, made in collaboration with Memo Akten in 2018, features an AI-generated version of Walshe. A Late Anthology of Early Music Vol. 1: Ancient to Renaissance, her third solo album, released on Tetbind in 2020, uses AI to rework canonical works from early Western music history. A Late Anthology was chosen as an album of the year in The Irish Times, The Wire and The Quietus. Walshe is currently professor of composition at the University of Oxford. Her work was profiled by Alex Ross in The New Yorker.

David Young is Musarc’s new Director of Music. A conductor working on a diverse range of projects across the UK and beyond, David is Chorus Director of the National Symphony Chorus, Ireland, and currently acting as guest Musical Director with the Cambridge University Symphony Chorus. He has worked extensively with the BBC Symphony Chorus, and prepared them and the BBC Singers for a collaboration with Jon Hopkins and Jules Buckley at the 2023 BBC Proms. Forthcoming engagements include conducting Mendelssohn Elijah in Cambridge, a Christmas concert with New London Singers, preparing Mahler Symphony No. 2 for Anja Bihlmaier and Vaughan Williams A Sea Symphony for Leonard Slatkin in Dublin, as well as conducting J.S. Bach St Matthew Passion, also with the NSO. He has recently collaborated with Oliver Beer on his Resonance Caves project, working on recording sessions in the Grotte Font-de-Gaume where 20,000 year old cave paintings are found. As guest conductor he has appeared with RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra and recorded Paul Frost’s orchestral suite The Burning of Cork with RTÉ Concert Orchestra. He has had tenures as Musical Director of Cardiff

Polyphonic Choir, Reading Bach Choir, Dorking Choral Society and Stafford Choral Society, and as Choral Director at the Yehudi Menuhin School. His guest work with choirs also includes Huddersfield Choral Society, The Royal College of Music Chorus, amateur choirs all across the UK and a number of professional groups in London including St Martin’s Voices and The Portrait Choir. David regularly works as chorus muaste and has held the post of Sir Alexander Gibson Fellow with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra Chorus.

Born in Taipei in 1971, Lin Chiwei is a transdisciplinary artist who received academic training in French literature, cultural anthropology and media art. Since the early 1990s, Lin has been involved in the Taiwanese counter-cultural scene. He was a founding member of noise band Z.S.L.O. and responsible for the programming of various alternative art festivals. At the same time, Lin explored the realms of religious music and art, notably temple sculpture and Taoist rituals, through intense research and field studies. These experiences, combined with his practice in noise performance and electronic music composition, developed into critical positions toward contemporary art practices. Since 2004, Lin has worked on the Tape Music and IDCM (Interhuman Dynamic Coordinated Models) series of works – synchronous protocols which allow individual autonomy in the forming of collective intelligence that leads to complex sound works. In his 2012 book Beyond Sound Art – The Avant Garde, Sound Machine and the Modernity of Hearing was published in 2012, Lin denies the term ‘Sound Art,’ and provides a holistic view blurring the boundary between human culture and technology. Lin’s art works were showed in various biennales and museums including Tate Modern, Pompidou Center, PSA Shanghai along with other non-art sites including local community projects, private residence, public schools, factories, churches, temples, bars and live venues in different countries around the world. Lin Chiwei lives and works in Shanghai, Taipei and Paris.

Heleen Van Haegenborgh is a pianist, composer, and improviser. She studied piano with Claude Coppens and Daan Vandewalle at the conservatory of Ghent, and composition at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels. Courses on improvisation with Godfried Willem Raes in Ghent proved influential for Van Haegenborgh. Improvisation became an essential medium for mutual understanding in collaborations with musicians from genres other than classical music. Some of those early collaborations include projects with guzheng-player Wu Fei for the Peking Express Festival at the Vooruit and with Erdem Helvagiolu, an electronic musician from Turkey. Since 2015, Van Haegenborgh has been working with jazz pianist Christian Mendoza as a duo, releasing the album Copper in 2017. Creating, composing, improvising, and performing merge together in the artistic output of Van Haegenborgh. Besides her own compositions, Van Haegenborgh regularly performs works by John Cage, George Crumb, Morton Feldman, Peter Garland, Alvin Lucier, Thomas Smetryns and James Tenney. She was also part of several music theater productions by LOD. As a creator, Van Haegenborgh works collaboratively with artists from a broad range of disciplines. She has created soundtracks for film artist Jasper Rigole, worked with electronic musician Jürgen De Blonde and jazz musicians Lander Gyselinck and Kristof Rosseeuw. In 2017, she wrote Index for the period instruments of the Icelandic ensemble Nordic Affect and built a ‘listening scale model’ together with Nu Architects for Concertgebouw Brugge.

Choir as Method: Musarc Folk Meet on a Midsummer Day until Dusk V Saturday 22 June 2024, 6.30–sunset

Agnieszka Cybul is a Polish dumpling born in Bydgoszcz, based in London. A designer, architect, sometimes an actress. Alumna of London Metropolitan University. She is known for her cakes and ceramic. With Musarc since Nov 2022 Alice Watson is a maths teacher and a dancer. She loves playing her accordion too. Amy Teh has nearly finished her Masters in Architecture at Central Saint Martins. She is most excited to develop her sculpture-making practice which currently includes ambitions for a critterly crowd of scrappy stools and a series about architectural accessories connecting us to the elemental and electromagnetic atmosphere such as wind socks, weather vanes and satellite dishes. Anastasia Glover is a singing architect. When not singing, Anastasia can be found on a building site in London, the countryside or a Greek island. Some days are spent teaching architecture with fellow Musarcians, Margit , Toby and Lara. In an previous life she was a Japanese linguist. She is happiest bathing in a bubble bath of choral sounds. Andy Cowton is a composer working across multiple platforms of film and performance. Anna Schabel is an architect and director of Wilton Studio Ltd. She is a writer for architecture magazines and visiting university critic. She produced a film about women architects and chaired Women in Architecture UK. She is a school governor and trustee of the Hackney School of Food. Aranzazu Fernández Rangel is an architect whose practice centres around public realm design and placemaking. She holds an MA in Narrative Spaces from CSM and a PG Dip in Integrative Arts Psychotherapy from UEL. She is passionate about transforming environments, internal and external, through relationship building and participation. Ashmi Thapar is an architect, maker and performer, driving sustainable design with a social purpose. Alongside her practice in innovative housing, she furthers the discourse by curating events, teaching, participating in expert panels and writing. She is passionate about the

body in sound, exploring this with Musarc since 2019. After 25 years in architectural practice and ten years teaching, Carol Mancke plays in the intersection of fine art and cities. Her collaborative projects engage different time frames and use images, objects, physicality, humour, hospitality and conversation, to create clearings in the midst of everyday life. She would like to be an ocean or river mammal in her next life. Carolyn Roy is a dancer currently interested in fundamentally useless activities and barely perceptible micro performances. She teaches various things at Trinity Laban, LCDS and Independent Dance and is a member of Chisenhale Dance Space. Charles HM Mok is a former boy soprano and art history major who has previously sung in classical and gospel choirs, and is keen to explore further vocal possibilities. Dan Knight is a multidisciplinary artist who studied sculpture at St Martins and the RCA. He focusses on making large interactive sound sculptures and also makes films, paintings, music and performances. He’s finishing number seventy nine in a series of paintings of a being who is deeply connected with nature. Dominic Thurston is a partner, a son, a friend, a brother, an uncle and a collaborator. Much of his life has been shaped by a fascination with people, how they connect and develop relationships, communities, organisations and cultures. He also likes word games, sea swims, yellow socks, weird music, and that perfect final mouthful of dinner that has all the best bits (not an exhaustive list). Douglas Cape has certificates for BA(Hons) French, PG Diploma of Theatre Studies, WSET Sommelier, and PADI Open Water Diver. In reality he is a photographer, webmaster, blogger, cyclist, grandfather and jazz fan. Founded z360.com Emily Foster is an Architectural Assistant at Allford Hall Monaghan Morris. Having recently completed a degree apprenticeship with the practice, she is an advocate for alternative routes into architecture through her work with the Royal Institute of British Architects and architectural charities such as Open City and HomeGrown Plus. Franziska Boehm is a somatic movement and voice practitioner, dance artist, and lecturer at London College of Music. She spends her time devoting to the skills of softening, gentleness and releasing. She has a cat called RatBetty and when she isn’t in a studio, she is working in a Spanish deli pairing wine and meat. Hannah Archambault is a French-Polish artist and composer. She explores ambient music through field

recordings, drones, organs and voice. She is interested in the meditative qualities of music and uses sound through sensory installations. Uneven Places of Love is her first solo EP released on Glossy Mistakes label in 2023. hannaharchambault. com Hannes Voss joined Musarc in 2011. He embraces the surprise elements of Musarc’s performative choral repertoire which makes him question established principles of conformity. This exposure complements his day-to-day work in the construction industry and nurtures the broader interest in promoting holistic models of working. Besides being a grounded baritone within the ensemble, Hannes provides practical support and logistical skill for the choir’s events at home and abroad. Hélène Lomenech is a Breton in London since 1996. She is a nurse, massage therapist and currently occupational therapist in a psychiatric hospital. Hélène is interested in people, life and death, spirituality, philosophy, health and well-being and the intricate relationships between body-mindpredisposition-environmentcircumstances-habits, etc. She also studied ceramics in Camberwell, has a great appreciation for music and sounds – notably birds – and enjoys the silent presence of cats. Ian Blake writes music and words, and is continually surprised by everyday enchantment. In a former life he made records and toured a lot. A member of Musarc since 2015, Jakub Modrzejewski is forever trying to strike a good balance between his work as a software engineer and a passion for music and performance.

Jeni Be sings and performs with Musarc, with her queer fam F*choir, on her bike & with bands, including Jenny Moore’s Mystic Business. She works in child rights programming for the UN and occasionally in film production. She loves nature and swimming in cold water. Jeni writes poetry and sometimes shares it. She is known for her salads and playlists. Joanna Ward is a composer and performer from Newcastle upon Tyne. Joanna’s score-making ranges from the relatively conventional to the very abstract and/or open. She likes to collaborate with other artists and performers to develop work; she also likes to work with recorded sound and video, also. As a vocalist and performer Joanna likes contemporary and experimental repertoires, improvisation, and sometimes writing songs. She is also a fundraiser, mostly working with musicians and arts charities. Joseph Kohlmaier is the founder of Musarc

Ensemble

and has acted as the ensemble’s creative director since 2008. Joseph’s interdisciplinary practice, which brings together performance, research and teaching, curatorial projects, design, and publishing, has been a driving force in the development of the choir and the foundation of its open, experimental, and research-led approach. Joseph is Associate Professor in Critical and Contextual Studies at the School Art, Architecture and Design, London Metropolitan University, and the founding director of graphic design practice Polimekanos (2001–2020). Judith Lösing is an architect, joiner and gardener. She is a director at East and the first research fellow at the Architecture Foundation where she is working on a book called the London Arboretum, and curating Tree Talks at the Barbican. She also sings with F*choir. Kirsty FergussonLewis is a singer, composer, performer and producer from London. She combines an experimental and exploratory approach to vocal composition, performance and electronic music. Kirsty graduated from Goldsmiths University with a masters degree in Music, Creative Practice, culminating in Sirena, a feminist opera for three women retelling the sirens from Homer’s Odyssey Łukasz Kopec likes to play with words, sometimes sounds, once weekly with sourdough, and numbers. Manu Wachter is a writer based in London. He’s passionate about the interplay between uniqueness and commonality between people, which was one of the motivations to join Musarc in 2024. Margit Kraft is a registered architect, practicing landscape architect and sculptor and has a specialism in sustainable architecture, natural healthy materials and collective construction. She was trained in music since she was six and has been performing collectively since the age of ten; engaging creatively with space, sound and performance form an active part of her practice. The outcomes of Margit’s creative process are as varied as the challenges she meets when engaging with a brief; a collection of proposals for repair and hope. Mariam Bergloff is a music researcher and sound artist based in London. Her compositions take the form of dissonant soundscapes, noisy polyrhythmic loops and generative sound collages. She is also half of Spiraal, a new electronic duo drawing upon the paranormal, OSTs, field recordings, discordant melodies and restless dreams. Michael Poole is a Cornish artist and lazy athlete living and working in South London. His practice

is concerned with tracing movement through time in the forms of sound, performance, long distance running and cycling. He enjoys back lanes and discarded objects. Natalie Savva is an Architect, educator, exhibition designer and scenographer. She has always lived on an island and finds peace in scuba diving and sweltering cross country road trips. An alumna of the Cooper Union, she co-founded multidisciplinary design house Studio naama and teaches Architecture at Oxford Brookes University with a focus on collective and sustainable housing. Paul Martin Art School: Painting, Reliefs, Sculpture, Environment & Performances with fellow students including electronic tape. Sculpture: Tape Pieces (with fan) Film: River Film, Mist on Mountains etc. Competitions: Botanic Gardens Station, Glasgow; Bellevor Tor, Dartmoor; River Crossings, London. Book: Spirals through Eye. Exhibition: Along the Roman Wall – LYC Museum, Banks (photographs). Sound: Crossness Pumping Station. Field Studies 2012 and following with Davide Tidoni, Aki Onda and Akio Suzuki, Joseph Kohlmaier and others. Musarc Choir since 2013. Unbuilt roads. Reuben Esterhuizen is a London-based composer and performer of acoustic and electronic music. His music often deals with minimal materials and repetitive gestures, with a focus on exploring the implications of placing these materials in interesting relations to each other and in time. Sam Belinfante is a London-based artist. Along with filmmaking and photography, his practice incorporates curating, sound and performance. Recent exhibitions include On the Heights, Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2017); This is a Voice at MAAS Sydney and Wellcome Collection, London (2016-17) and To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells, Radar at Loughborough’s Carillion (2018). Recent performances include The Long, very long Journey with Laure Prouvost at Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Feedback at Palais De Tokyo, Paris (2017) and On the One Hand and the Other at Camden Art Centre where he was artist in residence 2015-16.In 2021 Belinfante presented On the Circulation of Blood, a major sculptural and performance commission for Creative Folkestone Triennial. He is currently Artist in Residence at Sir John Soane’s Museum, London (2023). Sandra Djukic is a visual artist, designer and educator from Serbia/Croatia/UK. Intertwining thoughts, emotions and play in design, art and craft, the goal is producing authentic and engaged results both in

her own practice and helping nurture a student’s path to find those qualities as well. Saori Miraku is a pianistcomposer, improviser and performer. Her musical work includes her compositions, piano solo, improvisation-based collaborations with instrumentalists, sound artists and visual artists. Her music is an invitation to transcend, to reach beyond the everyday world and into a place of stories, memories, imagination, dreams and transformation. Saori released her piano solo album Many Times on Earth in December 2023. She also appears in short films, music videos and photographic projects. Serena Braida is a writer, performer and academic based in London. Sophie Barshall is an artist and writer from London. Stephen Graham is a musicologist and academic based at Goldsmiths. Toni Gutman, happily in Hackney since 1973, now spends her time in Musarc, and Maspindzeli (the London Georgian Choir), gardening on her balcony and in Hackney Tree Nursery, Balkan dancing, chatting to neighbours, and (in vain) trying to keep up with all the music, theatre etc. that London offers. Zeina Nasr is a songwriter, improviser, analogue synth devotee, and lover of cats. Zsófia Varga trained as a linguist but now works in finance. She likes to collect shirts from concerts she goes to (relatively recent ones include SunnO))), Current 93 and High On Fire); walking around the City of London late at night while listening to music; and planning which books to read (and occasionally reading them as well).

Pat Thomas began playing piano at the age of eight. He studied classical music and Reggae was an early interest. Thomas was inspired to take up Jazz after seeing legendary pianist Oscar Peterson on television. By 1979, Thomas was performing seriously as an improviser. Current activities include playing in Shifa with Rachel Musson and Mark Sanders (album Live at Cafe Oto, 577 Records 2019), solo piano, Black Top with Orphy Robinson, duo with Han Bennink, trio with William Parker and Hamid Drake and a duo with Matana Roberts. He received the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Composers in 2014.

Rachel Warr is a theatre director and dramaturg who specialises in puppetry, including work with string marionettes, rod, glove and shadow puppets, light manipulation and object theatre. She has created work for small, mid and large scale venues. Her work has been presented at venues across the UK and in London including The Barbican Centre and Little Angel Theatre, and internationally in France, Germany, Norway, Netherlands, Czech Republic, Romania, Bosnia, Turkey, Singapore and Canada. Recent awards include a Royal Television Society Craft and Design Award for shadow puppetry idents for Film Four; winner of the Children’s Jury Award at Flum Festival, Bosnia; finalist of Falling Walls Award, Berlin; A Digital Pioneer Outstanding Award Hands on Humanities Festival Southampton. She is involved in several cross-discipline research projects with medical clinicians, scientists and product designers, exploring the application of techniques from puppetry in different professional domains.

Musarc’s Writing Group is an open space for ideas that evolves, forms and dissolves with the curatorial and speculative ideas that enter the ensemble’s practice as time goes by. It materialises the preoccupations of the choir, particularly those that arise from Musarc’s parliaments and open fora for debate. Being a chorus in itself, it looks in from outside and gives its commentary. Sometimes this commentary enters into new works, acting as a form of libretto. To date in 2024, the members of the writing group were Anna Schabel, Carol Mancke, Carolyn Roy, Chrys Papaioannou, Derk Ringers, Hanna Archimbault, Ian Blake, Łukasz Kopeć, Manu Wachter, Mercedes Vicente, and Serena Braida who co-faciliated the sessions with Joseph Kohlmaier.

St Paul’s Bow is one of London’s most beautiful and welcoming public spaces. Designed in 1960 by Maguire and Murray, the building is considered a Brutalist masterpiece. In 2013, it won the National Churches Trust Diamond Jubilee Award for best Modern Church built in the UK since 1953.

Unlike other churches in London, St Paul’s remains a civic space and a continuation of the city, open all day to the community and passers-by for contemplation or as a refuge. It is is a town square, able to process the assembled detritus of the people and things that pass through it. Benches surround the altar, alongside crayons and nursery chairs, two pianos, a coffee machine, a box of home-made instruments, cushions, cleaning paraphernalia, stacks of chairs and trestles, extension leads, Ikea bags overflowing with stuff for the next jumble sale, balloons from a christening, flowers. From the ceiling issue two bell pulls and salt weeps through two cracks in the concrete, forming small stalagmites on the floor that look like patches of snow.

Its dignity lies in its complete disregard for barriers, security and corporate balance sheets. St Paul’s has offered Musarc time and space to rehearse and perform in return for a donation. The choir would like to thank the church and its guardian, Mother Bernadette Hegarty, for its generosity and welcome.

projecting shapes into the sky of a parallel, kindred choral universe. After Musarc’s recent performances of The White Noisery in December 2023, and then March 2024 at ICA Instutite of Contemporary Arts, the choir has been in a room with the composer to conjure and test ideas, working into different directions from a shared conception of embodied practice. For Choir as Method, Musarc is performing Walshe’s Zusammen i (2014), a piece that casts a group of ten or more performers playing sounds, walking around the space erratically, firing imaginary pistols and slow dancing – together, or rather, containted, according to precise timings. In this version, three groups of ten or more singers perfrom the piece in parallel, multiplying its effects, layers and actions as if they are playing out behind lit windows in multiple rooms across a noisy city at night.

In 2019, Heleen van Haegenborgh’s piece Material Affordance saw the choir playing recorders as if they were found objects, intelligence abstracted from nature, to be intuited and animated by blowing and tapping. In the end, the piece had the choir shuffling, recorders held in front of their chests, singing and marching to an onomatopoeic canon into the dawn of evolution. Post onomatopoeia, van Haegenborgh’s new work Hidden Affordance is seeking out the materiality of language. Set to words from Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu and short phrases foraged from folk stories and tunes, Hidden Affordance requires the ensemble to make their own translations and to manipulate them so they may align with the melody set to the original French text, wherever the instruction stipulates: ‘Mother Tongue.’ In the piece, waves of sound migrate between voices and a small orchestra with open instrumentation, only pitch ranges are given. The orchestra is constructed from whatever singers can bring and play to a sufficient standard, as long as they are willing to join the band. Two cymbals, or gongs, are bowed and struck by percussionists who are explicitly stipulated not to be professional musicians. The artist’s works for Musarc take the form of vignettes, or short essays in which the choir sees itself and its embodied inventory reflected, first in dialogue with the material affordances of its environment, then as affordance itself – constituted by the languages, memories and histories we each afford to the chorus, the instruments we play, and the poetry that emerges between them, organising the choral language-music apparatus.

The choir first performed Lin Chiwei’s Tape Music at Cafe OTO on 2 April 2015. During a performance of the piece, a 120m-long ribbon embroidered with syllables moves through a spiral of singers who transport the tape collectively, enunciating each syllable as it passes by. A performance of Tape Music does not require preparation, practice or specific skills. The score itself materialises the performance, as long as the performers can form a consensus on the nature of objects and movement, language, tension, space, alignment and misalignment, the voice, or the nature of time and sound. The idea that animates Tape Music, a project Lin Chiwei has been working on since 2004, is exceedingly simple but its effect is quietly radical and subversive. In 2015, the artist created a version of the score for Musarc which was painstakingly constructed and stamped by architect Neil Evenson, then a member of the ensemble, using curtain ribbon. The score and its symbolic charge shifted the choir’s practice dramatically. It is the only work the choir has performed often, at least once a year. Many singers who join the ensemble experience it as an initiation to the choir’s practice, pedagogy and way of working. But it also represents a different epistemology, a different form of practice-intelligence that is still being absorbed and fermenting in its body. In 2024, Lin Chiwei has created a new tape score for the ensemble based on the quipu (or khipu), a recording device fashioned from string historically used by the Inca peope and other cultures in the region of Andean South America. The quipu stores information in the form of knots on coloured string, from tax obligations or census records to personal and social calendrical events. Lin Chiwei’s Quipou Sonore 1.5 Stéréo employs two string scores which are read simultaneously by a double choir. Unlike Tape Music, the score relies entirely on touch, and can be performed in complete darkness. Information on which consonant to perform, and when to perform it, is given by the texture and braid of the string and the placement of the knots.

6.30pm

7.30pm

7.45pm 9pm

Doors and bar open

Anna Schabel, ‘Talking from/with the mosaics’ Lukasz Kopec, ‘I am not the chorus’

Pat Thomas + Musarc, Cheap Vegetables (2024)

Carol Mancke, ‘Consent’

Manu Wachter, ‘Who are you seeing?’

Rachel Warr + Musarc, Work in Progress

15’ interval

Serena Braida, ‘As jumpy as a cat & as cross as two sticks’

Jennifer Walshe, Zusammen i (2019)

Zeina Nasr, untitled

Heleen van Haegenborgh, Hidden Affordance (2024, world premiere)

Amy Teh, violin; Ian Blake, bass clarinet; Franziska Boehm, flute; Margit Kraft, cello; Reuben Esterhuizen, electric guitar; Rowan McIrive, synthesizer; Sam Beinfante, cello; Saori Miraku, flute organ; Andy Cowton and Natalie Savva, percussion

15’ interval

Derk Ringers, ‘Shower before the rain’ (read by Joseph Kohlmaier)

Carolyn Roy, ‘Consonants mark the edges of sound’

Lin Chiwei, Quipou Sonore 1.5 Stéréo (2024, world premiere)

9.24pm

8.30pm 8.15pm 9.35pm

Sunset

Ian Blake, ‘Divisible’

Musarc is part of The Centre for Creative Arts, Cultures and Engagement (CREATURE) at the School of Art, Architecture and Design, London Metropolitan University. The choir rehearses near Aldgate East on Tuesday evenings from September–July. To find out more about the choir and how to join visit musarc.org

Musarc is grateful to the Hinrichsen Foundation for supporting this concert and the choir’s programme of new commissions.