Still think this is a dream?
Food + Drink
Andy Cowton
Still think this is a dream?
Musarc Winter Konsert 2024
Saturday 14 December, 4–6pm
The Wash Houses
London Metropolitan University
*
Doors and bar open 3.30pm
Concert 4–6pm
Directors of Musarc
Carol Mancke
David Young
Joseph Kohlmaier
Sam Belinfante
Director of Music
David Young
Associate Conductor
Oli Kitching
Voice Coaches
Jessica Gillingwater
Stephen Jeffes
Repetiteur
Maria Levandowskaya
Photography & Lighting
Yiannis Katsaris
Anna Cséfalvay
Anna Schabel
Belen Duran
Carol Mancke
Carolyn Roy
Dan Knight
Hélène Lomenech
Łukasz Kopec´
Mercedes Vicente
Michael Guggenheim
Teresa Hackel
Zeina Nasr
Event Support
Ada Kohlmaier-Sims
Agnieszka Cybul
Carolina Fernandes
Esther Kohlmaier-Sims
Mercedes Vicente
Molly Astley
Richard Spencer
Musarc’s annual Winter Konsert goes in search of the voice and its double, the voice that speaks, ventriloquises, and hallucinates; the voice that issues from the sun and travels along wires; the irreverent, syncopated, trippy, and relentless voice; the voice of protest, destruction, and rebuilding, dissonant and hopeful; the voice that stays on it, and the voice that keeps saying it, together, beatless and anarchic.
The programme, for which Musarc is returning to The Wash Houses at London Metropolitan University, opens with a screening of Imogen Stidworthy’s Dummy (1998), a monologue travestied as a dialogue, stripping bare the secret machinations of the ventriloquist act. In Gavin Bryars’s On Photography (1983), the voice apparatus hones in on vocal flares emanating from a distant sun, gigantic and slow, accompanied by a video score concocted from the choir’s many ways of seeing. Ventriloquism, anarchy, and the aftermath of protest animate the world première of VENT, a new work by composer Benjamin Oliver and puppeteer Rachel Warr for staged objects, electronics, and choir, before the evening dissolves, disintegrates, consolidates in the phase-shifting, irreverent riffs and joyful patterns of Julius Eastman’s Stay On It (1973), a dream, still.
Gavin Bryars (b. 1943) is an English composer born in Goole, a port town in Yorkshire. His first musical reputation was as a jazz bassist working in the early ’60s with Derek Bailey and Tony Oxley. He abandoned improvisation in 1966, his distaste for the practice being laid out in Bailey’s Improvisation (1980). Afterwards he went to the United States, working alongside composers such as John Cage, Cornelius Cardew, and John White. Some of Bryars’ most significant early works were published by Obscure, a record label started by Brian Eno that ran from 1975 to 1978. His most famous early works are The Sinking of the Titanic (1969) and Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet (1971). Bryars has also composed prolifically for theatre and dance, and has written five full-length operas along with countless other pieces throughout his career.
Julius Eastman (1940-1990) was a composer, conductor, singer, pianist, and choreographer. A singular figure in New York City’s downtown scene of the 1970s and 80s, he also performed at Lincoln Center with Pierre Boulez and the New York Philharmonic, and recorded music by Arthur Russell, Morton Feldman, Peter Maxwell Davies, and Meredith Monk. ‘What I am trying to achieve is to be what I am to the fullest,’ he said in 1976. ‘Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, a homosexual to the fullest.’ Despite his prominence in the artistic and musical community in New York, Eastman died in obscurity in a Buffalo, NY hospital. His death went unreported for eight months, until an obituary by Kyle Gann appeared in the Village Voice. Eastman left behind few scores and recordings, and his music lay dormant
for decades until a three-CD set of his compositions titled Unjust Malaise was issued in 2005 by New World Records. In the years since, there has been a steady increase in attention paid to his music and life, punctuated by newly found recordings and manuscripts, worldwide performances and new arrangements of his surviving works, and newfound interest from choreographers, scholars, educators, and journalists. ‘The brazen and brilliant music of Julius Eastman … commands attention: wild, grand, delirious, demonic, an uncontainable personality surging into sound’, writes Alex Ross for The New Yorker
Benjamin Oliver is a composer, conductor and jazz pianist. He is Associate Professor in Composition at the University of Southampton. More than sixty of his works have been performed by Ensemble Paramirabo (Canada), London Sinfonietta, Yshani Perinpanayagam, Dorothy Chan (USA), Riot Ensemble, Elizabeth Kenny, Ivo Neame, the BBC Symphony Orchestra among others. He often collaborates with practitioners from other artforms such as poet Luke Wright, theatre-maker Rachel Warr, filmmaker and audiovisual artist Moe Myat May Zarchi (Myanmar), and with researchers outside music. Ben’s work has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3, recorded and released by labels including Linn, Prima Facie, and Coviello Contemporary, and selected by scorefollower. His piece Loop Concerto was nominated in the Contemporary Jazz category of the British Composer Awards 2017. In April 2024, Birmingham Record Company (distributed by NMC) released Benjamin’s debut portrait CD, TOO MANY SWEETS.
Ada Egg Koskiluoma is a Swiss/ Finnish artist, musician and composer. Their sound practice is rooted in experimental, electronic music production and incorporates field recordings and the writing of words. They are currently working on a new album. Pickling and fermenting food, as well as gardening makes their heart full. Alice Ortona Coles is an Anglo-Italian dancer, choreographer and costume designer/maker. She uses design to drive and shape choreography. Alice Watson is a maths teacher and also enjoys dancing and playing accordion and bass in a punk band. Amy Teh has recently finished her Masters in Architecture at Central Saint Martins. Currently working as a joiner, she is also excited to develop her sculpture-making practice which includes ambitions for a critterly crowd of scrappy stools and a series about architectural accessories connecting us to the elemental and electromagnetic atmosphere. Anna Cséfalvay is a cognition architect exploring how language, embodiment and spatial understanding are intertwined, perpetually trying to measure the distance between ‘here’ and ‘there’. 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. Annelie Kops runs her own architectural practice and is a lecturer at Central Saint Martins. Beyond architecture, she has a passion for making beautiful objects, especially wheel-thrown ceramics. As a long-standing member of Musarc, Annelie hasii been involved in the inception, development and performance of many of its concerts and other projects. 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. Belén Duran is an adopted Londoner originally from Seville. She is a systemic psychotherapist working in an NHS organization. She is fascinated by the creative possibilities which evolves in diverse human systems. Belen joined Musarc in 2022 and relishes the opportunity to engage in the co-creation and performance of irreverent and subversive artistic expressions. After 25 years in architectural practice and 10 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. Clara Meyer is a creative who spends most of her time enjoying music of all kinds and the beauty that nature has to offer — oh, and she’s obsessed about eating delicious food. 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. Derk Ringers is a designer and researcher with a strong background in industrial systems. After completing his MA in Industrial Design at Central Saint Martins, he has been working on projects that reimagine systems of material production and social organisation. His work has a strong anthropological focus, and he uses aesthetic decisionmaking to engage with complexity. Through an analytical approach, playful investigations, and speculative provocations, Derk’s work aims to
express deverse perspectives and imaging resilient futures. Douglas Cape directed or created the following shows: Zone by Guillaume Apollinaire (1978) Sherman Arena Theatre, Cardiff; No Judgement (1979) Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff; Life and Death Show (1982) ICA Videotheque; The Working Party (1992) Serpentine Gallery and ICA; What We Will (2001) Platform Gallery, Spitalfields; The Exchange (2003) Modern Art Oxford; Making Ends Meet Cultured Rainforest (2013) Cambridge Museum of Archaeology. Emily Foster is Programme Manager at Thornton Education Trust. Having recently completed an architectural 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 Böhm 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 bodymind-predisposition-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 ats. Henrietta Hale has worked in performancemaking, contemporary dance and movement research in higher education. She is currently doing doctoral study using artistic practice to research the archive of a social science organisation. Joining musarc is meeting her new interests in voice practices, and the dynamics of group relations. Isabelle Pead is an artist working across sculpture, sound, video and performance. Often utilising large scale installation, her work is informed by actions of storytelling and collectivism, exploring the relationship between the voice and the sounding body. She is interested in how sound and the voice can work as social tools for creating community through shared noise making and sonic experiences.
Ivo Krankowski is a film director, writer and producer based in London. 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. Joanna Ward is a composer and performer. Her 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, and to use recorded sound and video alongside making scores. 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 an artist, designer, and Associate Professor in Critical and Contextual Studies at the School of Art, Architecture and Design, London Metropolitan University. Joseph is the founder of Musarc and has acted as its creative director since 2009. Kirsty Fergusson-Lewis is a singer, composer, performer and producer from London. She combines an experimental and explorative 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. 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 Guggenheim is a sociologist, who likes to take experiments seriously and would like to be a cook. He is interested in the expertise of others. 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 Kunshalle 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). Samara Lou Willis is a London born and based designer and maker whose work explores playful craftsmanship. Telling stories on her piano, Saori Miraku is a pianist-composer, 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. Sophie Barshall is an artist and the founding editor of The Toe Rag magazine. She tries her best to be a good maker (words, food, music, friends) and is otherwise an enthusiastic observer (currently: Twin Peaks, animalic perfumes, winter lakes). Teresa Hackel is a German recorder player, based in Switzerland. From July to December 2024, she stayed in London as an artist in residence. Her focus is free improvisation – listening and playing. 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, analog synth devotee, and lover of cats.
Imogen Stidworthy’s installations and films are shaped by verbal, non-verbal, even non-vocal forms of voicing through sound, body, spatial, and temporal relationships. She works with people whose language is shaped by a powerful experience, developmental or neurological conditions such as aphasia, or cultural practices such as shamanism. More recently, Stidworthy’s work engages with non-verbal being. ‘What happens to language and sense-making in encounters with unfamiliar or even unknowable forms of voicing?’ she asks. ‘What different forms of relationship and understanding emerge in the spaces between languages? My work grapples with the impossibility of glimpsing language from the outside. It takes the form of films, sound works, and multi-part installations involving sound, video, sculptural, and technological elements. I engage with these questions through encounters with people whose relationship with language is in some sense radically affected, whether by life experiences, cultural practices (shamanism, ventriloquy), or neurological or physical conditions (aphasia, non-verbal autism). My current work engages with relationship between verbal and non-verbal being and involves people who have no practice of verbal language at all.’ Imogen Stidworthy completed her PhD Voicing on the Borders of Language at Lund University (SE) in September 2020. In 2018 she was awarded the Special Prize for the inaugural David and Annely Juda Award. She was one of five women shortlisted for the Freelands Award 2023.
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.
David Young is Musarc’s 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-deGaume 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.
Musarc is one of the UK’s foremost experimental choral assemblies. 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 is 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.
Gavin Bryars On Photography (1983)
Benjamin Oliver, harmonium
Ben Smith, piano
15’ interval
Benjamin Oliver and Rachel Warr
VENT (2024, world premiere, Musarc commission)
Benjamin Oliver music
Rachel Warr libretto and dramaturgy
Ben Smith piano/electronics
Makers & Puppeteers
Alice Ortina Coles
Amy Teh
Anna Cséfalvay
Carol Mancke
Dan Knight
Derk Ringers
Henrietta Hale
Jakub Modrzejewski
Joseph Kohlmaier
15’ interval
Julius Eastman Stay On It (1973)
Musicians
Ben Smith piano and synth
Franziska Böhm flute
Ian Blake soprano saxophone
Kiyomi Seed percussion
Reuben Esterhuizen electric guitar
Sam Belinfante cello
Saori Miraku keyboard
Teresa Hackel recorder
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.