Pfeiffertag. Musarc Folk Meet on a Midsummer Day until Dusk IV

Saturday 24 June 2023

6.30–9.30pm

St Paul’s Bow Common Burdett Road London E3 4AR

New works and music by Ashmi Thapar, Jan Hendrickse, Neil Luck + Lin Chiwei, Olivier Messiaen and Terry Riley

Poetry by Anna Schabel, Amy Teh, Carol Mancke, Chrys Papaioannou, Ian Blake, Jeni Be, Joanna Ward, Judith Lösing, Łukasz Kopec, Paul Martin and Rebecca Faulkner

Foraging leaves by Derk Ringers, Mark Couzens, Neil Luck and Paul Martin

Food by Anna Schabel, Agnieszka Cybul, Alice Watson, Belen Duran, DanKnight, Derk Ringers, and Helene Lomenech

Glockenspiel Darius Paymai

Pfeiffertag (Piper’s Day) is Musarc’s fourth Folk Meet on a Midsummer Day Until Dusk. Doors open at 6.30pm to a space flooded by afternoon light. As evening falls, audience and singers attune to the darkness, their senses seeking out different, smaller sounds and other objects in the changing atmosphere of the auditorium. The event ends by candlelight, just after sunset.

The programme this year brings together works Musarc has traditionally performed on the occasion – including a solfège version of Terry Riley’s In C (Riley was born 88 years ago on the concert day), Olivier Messiaen’s O Sacrum Convivium and Lin Chiwei’s Tape Music, Score for Musarc (2015) – with new works by long-standing collaborators and members of the ensemble.

Composer and flautist Jan Hendrickse has written a new piece for choir and overtone flutes which he has been making with the choir from pvc pipe and wooden dowels. Neil Luck’s LIEF is a meditation on the efficacy of leaves and grasses as instruments – a new folk tradition, part lecture, part conversation. Ashmi Thapar has written a number poem for the choir that changes according to which hymns were sung during morning worship that day. The ensemble, which has been engaging in forms of social writing since 2016, has written a new text to be performed with the audience in a congregational reading.

Pfeiffertag takes place in one of the country’s most beautiful modernist churches. The performance starts at 7pm. The setting is informal and convivial. Breaks between performances offer time to talk and eat. There is no fixed stage, and the performance arrangements will change as the evening progresses. The audience is invited to move around, stand or sit on the floor. Blankets will be provided in addition to benches.

The bar and food stall will be open all evening. There will be no artificial lighting in the space. The audience will be given candles to illuminate the auditorium as darkness falls. The concert is expected to finish after sunset, which on the day is around 9.30pm.

Doors and bar open 6.30pm Performances 7–9.30pm

Doors and bar close 10.30pm

Pfeiffertag has been conceived by Joseph Kohlmaier, Musarc’s Artistic Director, in collaboration with the ensemble and artists. Patricia Auchterlonie is Director of Music for the programme. We would like to thank St Paul’s for being so generous and welcoming.

Agnieszka Cybul is a designer, maker and architect. She has been a member of Musarc since 2022. Agniezska is currently completing a postgraduate RIBA Part 2 Architecture degree at London Metropolitan University where her unit is working on an urban regeneration project in Florac, France led by Stephen Taylor Architects. Alice Watson is a maths teacher and a dancer. She likes playing accordion and cooking and numbers and walking in the sun. Amy Teh is halfway through her Architecture masters at Central Saint Martins. This year she has been researching ‘hairiness’ in terms of body politics, ecological empathy and straw construction. She loves making things from found materials - most recently wiring old glass bottles into lamps. Anastasia Glover is a inging 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 and Toby. In a previous life she was a Japanese and Chinese linguist. She is happiest bathing in a bubble bath of choral sounds. Andrew Price is an independent curator and gallery worker. He has worked on exhibitions, publications, commissions and live programmes for arts organisations including Lisson Gallery, Goldsmiths CCA, Barbican Art Gallery, Chisenhale Art Place and artists’ studios. 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-trown ceramics. As a long-standing member of Musarc she’s been involved in the inception, development and performance of many of its concerts and other rojects. Aranzazu Fernandez 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. Belen 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 living in London with her son. She is an improviser, teaches at Trinity Laban and also writes. She would like to be a publisher and maker of books. Chrys Papaioannou is a critical theorist, activist, and facilitator living in London. They are currently engaged in a series of projects and collaborations, including the design of a fluvial soundwalk on the theme of hydrofeminism, and a dialogic autoethnography of the dance form of Contact Improvisation. 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 decision-making 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. 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 can’t play anything, that’s why he’s in a choir. In his spare time he is a photographer, webmaster, blogger, grandfather and disco dancer. Founded z360.com Volcanologist by day and artist by night, Ginevra Chelli has a degree in earth sciences and is an editor and freelance science writer. She is passionate about music, she has been playing the flute since she was a child and sings in bands and choirs until the loving encounter with Musarc of which she has been part of since the beginning of 2019. She has also been a dancer since she was little, practising different types. However, contemporary dance has always been her favourite. To date Ginevra dances at the European College of Dance in London and she loves integrating her knowledge of the body and movement with other disciplines such as singing and the use of the voice, exploring the naturalness of movement as a call to inner voices. Hannah Zafiropoulos works as a researcher, designer and curator. She spends most of her time bringing people together to try and solve complex problems. Hélène LomenechIs a Breton in London since 1996. Nurse, Massage Therapist and currently Occupational Therapist in a psychiatric hospital. Interested in people, life and death, spirituality, philosophy, health and well-being and the intricate relationships between body-mind-predispositionenvironment-circumstances-habits, etc. 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. Ilenia Cipollari is a theater artist and singer with expertise in experimental physical theater and choral singing. She holds an MA at Goldsmiths University that covers historical and philosophical bases of theater and performance practices from Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe. Currently part of Musarc Choral Collective, she is due to start her PhD in Applied Theatre in September 2023. Jamie Wignall is a London-based sound artist and composer, whose work has been shown at the V&A, The London Festival of Architecture, Kings Place, and The Horniman Museum, among others. As a musician he has toured extensively in Europe and North America, and has played at festivals including Primavera Sound, Le Guess Who?, La Route du Rock, Paredes de Coura, and End of the Road. He is currently studying for a PhD in Music. Joanna Ward is a musician and artist. Her work ranges across score-making, sound-making, experimental performance, improvisation, writing words, and organising events and people. She also loves food, wine, swimming outdoors, and orange things. Jeni Be has a connection to horses and remembers most of her dreams. She sings and performs with Musarc, with her queer fam F*choir, on her bike & with bands Jenny Moore’s Mystic Business, Trash Kit and Rubie. She works in child rights advocacy and programming for the UN and occasionally in film production. She loves nature and people, in that order. She is an aunty, with open arms. Jeni is known for her salads and playlists. Jessica Smulders-Cohen is a garment repair specialist with a background in woven textiles and sustainable design. She specialises in visible mending and currently works for fashion and lifestyle brand TOAST. Jess considers herself a Londoner, having found a home here almost as long ago as she found this choir. 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. Łukasz Kopec Likes to play with words, sometimes sounds, once weekly with sourdough, and numbers.

Mark Couzens (they/he) is an artist from the mud flats of Essex who is exploring their voice. Marks also sings shapes with London Sacred Harp Choir and is a member of the South London band Bulkwash.

Mercedes Vicente is a curator, writer, researcher and lecturer of Critical and Contextual Studies at London Met. She previously taught at the Royal College of Art and held positions at Whitechapel Gallery, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Zealand, and the Whitney Museum in New York. Nancy Costello is generally creative and wants to keep being creative. 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 cofounded 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 WallLYC 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. Rebecca Faulkner is a sea-loving Norfolk-dumpling, on occasion she sings, boogies, collects, compiles, writes, teaches, ponders, gardens, designs, draws, drifts, walks, reads, cries, laughs and breathes. 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). 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. Telling stories on her piano, Saori Miraku is a self-created pianist composer, improvisor and performer. Her musical work includes her piano solo, improvisation based collaborations with instrumentalists and sound artists. She also appears in short films, videos and photographic projects. As for her piano fairy duties, she teaches piano and dreams full time! Sara Mognol is an Italian book designer, illustrator and visual artist with a talent to find meaning and beauty in the most irrelevant things. She designs children’s books at Little Tiger and occasionally lectures at the London College of Contemporary Arts. Her projects have been exhibited in Italy and London. Toby O’Conor enjoys swimming, sound recording, vocal performance and ceramics. He is interested in exploring relationships between humans and nature and is currently teaching and practicing architectural and urban design in universities and local authorities in London. 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.

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. Darius Paymai is an IranianAmerican composer and performer currently based in London. He recently completed his BMus at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, learning with Paul Newland and Paul Whitmarsh. He will continue his studies there in the autumn. He has had the good fortune to work with such ensembles as the London Chamber Orchestra, Britten Sinfonia, and Quatuor Bozzini, and have his music performed at St. John’s Smith Square, Hundred Years Gallery, and The Courtauld Gallery. His work often engages with static, cyclical, re-used, and severely limited musical material in various forms of ‘open’ scores. As a performer he is interested in experimental repertoire, drone, and group improvisation, often with harmonium, percussion, or live electronics.

Jan Hendrickse is an artist, performer, researcher and educator, receiving commissions for concert performance, installation works and dance scores. He has appeared with a range of artists from electronic and freely improvised musics, such as Ornette Coleman, Mark

Fell, Rian Treanor and David Toop, as well as featuring regularly as a soloist on traditional instruments for major film scores. He designs, makes and modifies instruments for performance and workshop processes. He trained as a western Classical flute player, but has researched and studied many other flute traditions. He now performs mostly with self-made and traditional instruments including Turkish Ney, Tanzanian Filimbi, Chinese Xiao and Dizi as well as Rajasthani Satara and Alghoza. He has taught Turkish Ney at the Yunus Emre institute in London as well as in private classes. Jan teaches socially-engaged practice and practicebased research at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and has also led creative projects for in communities around the world including Gambia, Thailand, Germany and Gaza and the West Bank. His PhD research examined the epistemic models adopted in creative practice. He is experienced in facilitating conversations and interviews and has chaired discussions with the musicologist Georgina Born and artists Mark Fell, Michael Gordon and CC Hennix, amongst others. He has recently been a visiting lecturer at ZKM in Karlsruhe as well as Trinity Laban in London. He has just returned from Nepal where he was collaborating with leading UK electronic producers and Nepali musicians. Neil Luck is a musician based in the UK. His work often explores the pathos and interaction between live human performance and multimedia, and attempts to frame the act of music making as something curious, or weird, or useful, or spectacular in and of itself. Neil’s work takes a range of forms from music-theatre, to concert works, radio, public projects and recordings. Neil is the founder and director of the music-theatre ensemble ARCO, and a co-founder of artist cooperative squib-box. He performs with artist Jennifer Walshe in the duo WACK. Independently, he has also worked with and written for people and ensembles in the UK and abroad, and presented work at music venues, festivals, and galleries internationally including the ICA, Whitechapel Gallery, MATA Festival (NYC), Tate Britain, Tate Modern, BBC Proms, Palais de Tokyo (Paris), in Vilnius and Aarhus Capital of Culture festivals, and the Tokyo Experimental Festival. His music has been released on several labels including Entr’acte, Nonclassical, Accidental Records, and squibbox. Joseph Kohlmaier is the founder of Musarc and has acted as creative director for the ensemble 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,

7pm 9pm

Section I

Petrified petrochemical chor choir tri trick Congregational Reading

Jan Hendrickse, Respiratory intra-actions, 2023

Section II

Ashmi Thapar, Ringing Figure Hymnal, 2023

Neil Luck, LIEF, 2023

Section III

Terry Riley, In C, 1964

Section IV

9pm Olivier Messiaen, O sacrum convivium, 1937

Lin Chiwei, Tape Music, Score for Musarc, 2015

10–20 minute intervals between sections

London Metropolitan University, and the founding director of graphic design practice Polimekanos (2001–2020). Patricia Auchterlonie is a passionate performer of new, experimental and unheard music, equally at home on the opera stage, in the concert hall, and beyond. She is interested in playing with the voice, experimenting with performance practice and cross-arts collaboration as well as more traditional forms of music-making. She is Canadianborn but living and working in the United Kingdom. Selected ecent work includes premieres of the role of Superfan in Oliver Leith’s Last Days for ROH Linbury and of new works for voice and piano by Evan Johnson at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival with pianist Ben Smith, Knussen’s Where the Wild Things Are with Shadwell Opera and the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, Stockhausen’s Sternklang with Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, and covering the title role in Violet by Tom Coult for Music Theatre Wales & Britten Pears Arts. She has performed with Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, London Contemporary Music Festival, An Assembly, Borough New Music, Orpheus Sinfonia, Illuminate Women’s Music, and in the LSO’s 2018 This Is Rattle Festival. Patricia has also been broadcast on BBC Radio Three and Resonance FM’s Sound Out. She has performed in venues all across the UK including Wigmore Hall and The Barbican Centre while regularly working in non-traditional performing spaces including Colourspace, the Courtauld Gallery, The Drawing Room and APT Deptford. Patricia was the 2017/18 Carne Junior Fellow at Trinity Laban. She holds a master’s degree with distinction from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and a Bachelor of Music from the University of Toronto with honours. Patricia is also an avid reader, an amateur seamstress, indomitable knitter, and a shameless lover of the banjo (which she plays with enthusiasm rather than skill).

Musarc is one of the UK’s foremost experimental choirs. 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, openminded 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 100 artists and composers, including Jennifer Walshe, Peter Broderick, 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 the 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 wbe part of contemporary art and music in the making. Musarc is based at and supported by 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 visit musarc.org