We Are Participating: Musarc Winter Konsert 2023

I II

Elisabeth Schimana & Laure Prouvost Flags, Zwiebelfäden (2023) Musarc It was cold and the radio was on (2023).

Poems by the ensemble, performed with the audience

III

Enno Poppe Wespe (2015) — Hester Dart, voice Sylvia Lim flare (2021) — Ben Smith, piano

IV

Lili Boulanger Sous Bois (1911) 20’ interval

V

Jennifer Walshe The White Noisery (2013)

VI

Carols

Director of Music David Young Programme Directors Joseph Kohlmaier Sam Belinfante

We Are Participating Musarc Winter Konsert Saturday 16 December 2023, 7–9pm

Associate Conductors Patricia Auchterlonie Oli Kitching Piano (Lim + Boulanger) Ben Smith

The Wash Houses London Metropolitan University 25 Old Castle Street London E1 7NT * Doors and bar open 6pm Concert 7–8.30pm Doors and bar close 9.30pm

Alto (Poppe) Hester Dart Rehearsal Accompanist Alex Norton Photography Thierry Bal

Food + Drink Sophie Barshall Douglas Cape Liz Chan Nancy Costello Agnieszka Cybul Mia Damerum Belén Duran Dan Knight Łukasz Kopeć Annelie Kops Zeina Nasr Carolyn Roy Anna Schabel Amy Teh Mercedes Vicente Event Support Neil Luck Cathy Heller Jones Ania Dabrowska Laura Guevara Morales Tom Kellet Jess Parker Isaac Winter-Pearl Aleksandra Szwarczak Joseph Strathern

Musarc’s Winter Konsert 2023 opens with a performace of Zwiebelfäden, a multi-channel sound piece by Austrian electronic music pioneer Elisabeth Schimana that draws threads between the composer and six protagonists – Eliane Radigue, Pauline Oliveros, Beatriz Ferreyra, Heidi Grundmann, Maryanne Amacher and Helga de la Motte – whose heartbeats pulsate asynchronously as Laure Prouvost’s flags draw undulating lines through space with their slogans: Out of Rubbish Oui Grow.

We Are Participating is an evening of entrainment, questions, assemblage, hope and poetry. The choir has been practicing social writing, which we will perform with the audience.

Hester Dart invites a wasp into her mouth in Enno Poppe’s Wespe. In Sylvia Lim’s flare, pianist Ben Smith turns the resonant apparatus of the piano into a giant Doppler machine, pulling sound from here into the distance and back again. Birds call from a woody undergrowth in Lili Boulanger’s Sous Bois.

The evening ends with a performance of Jennifer Walshe’s The White Noisery (2013), a ten-movement assemblage of sound, language and events premiered in the UK by Musarc at LCMF in 2019 – sliced from the full frequency band of what we call the world, in all its mediated strangeness, a social image, a bright illuminated sphere.

We Are Participating also marks Musarc’s inaugural performance with David Young. David was appointed Musarc’s new Director of Music this November from a stellar long-list of applicants with many of whom Musarc will develop new friendships and projects. We are Participating was conceived by Sam Belinfante with Joseph Kohlmaier and the ensemble.

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 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 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. 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. 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 Elizabeth Chan is a performer and writer working across stage, screen, live art and recorded media. She has a London Writers award for narrative nonfiction and received a Clore Fellowship to explore the intersection of art, healing and social justice. She is currently developing work centered on the themes of land, nature, language and belonging. 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 RIBA, Open City and HomeGrown Plus. 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-mindpredisposition-environmentcircumstances-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 physical theater and choral singing. She holds an MA in World Theatres at Goldsmiths University and she just started her PhD at UAL investigating around how questions of care, connection, and shared intimacy intersect in contemporary performance.

Currently part of Musarc and Idrîsî Ensemble. 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.. Jamie Wignall

The night is cold and the radio seems to be on A psalm written on the occasion of We Are Participating, Musarc’s Winter Konsert 2023 Sat 16 Dec 2023, The Wash Houses, London Metropolitan University Molly Astley Serena Braida Douglas Cape Elizabeth Chan (the caller) Joseph Kohlmaier Margit Kraft Carol Mancke Paul Martin Derk Ringers Carolyn Roy Anna Schabel Amy Teh

1

The caller speaks the text printed in serif type

2 The audience speaks the text printed in bold type

3

Instructions for actions or how to speak are rendered in [ brackets ]

The night is cold and the radio seems to be on.

We listen to our squish of need Still going south and stark Takes a deep reimagining Languishing, then collapsing, languaging Will there be singing in the dark?

Mostly we can’t go back.

Between lips there is desire Migrating south in solitude This bird, it doesn’t sleep Beleaguered are the octopi We gape-hallucinate A world in which cicadas rule Steeped in lichen and heather

I hear the surf, the dark and light Are indeterminate The great globe itself shall dissolve Bliss symbols shared, heart beats The post-human.org thank you For your kind attention A smug discovery of late The slow expanding squish of need Of those soft dispenser ear plugs Malleable objects Making the world malleable This roaring world of sounds A foamy muffle soft cuddle: The gateless gate opens To reveal no sound Except the hum of life These are our eons Cast all around us We are blind to them I hear the sound of surf Sweeping all mind away But there is great unity Let’s all move in time Above the morass We call human life

Eyes shut Mouth open O melt into air Meets O air moves with the purple sea lying quiet Between lips a New thing is forming O for the first time A circle is so Wishful Mostly we can’t go back To the beginning.

Somewhere birds are.

Is this desire? I asked.

Abandonment, she replied.

Think of us bacterial-we-many Our cyborg technology biographies Our micro-organismal subjectivity Pluses and minuses pluses and minuses Not as one human, but many in relation Natures, cultures, anthropos, barbarios, reasonable emotions Gods, goddesses, ecos, orcas, Micro-organisms, avatar pacemakers

O walked through the land mines I strapped to her chest, child After a while we stopped reading And learned to listen instead And taste not just with our ears and tongues But with our whole shattered selves.

[ whisper to yourself, in your own time ] A city bird crafts a nest out of twigs Cigarette buds, plastic wrappers, old rope Anything in the public domain Is there to be assimilated into the whole Take a deep reimagining Share some of the sights and sounds Perpetuating tradition and resistance Collective anonymous achievement was the first fruit Orchids are the master perfumer O–I are more vivid in colour

The effect is lost if words with meaning are sought To seek assonance rather than rhyme To be at variance with different morphologies and Roles in the colony I do not survive if isolated, I said

Keep the organism distinct from the description of its behaviour Be on watch in this everything You turning small being

Isn’t there still something singing?

Rounded with sleep as she is,

Languaging, then collapsing, languishing Truly believing she loves them

The squirming green neon skies So whistling and screaming her wounds

She calls down that cold green Collapsing the lungs between us

And cutting off our heads Shards of evidence march backwards

Leaving reluctantly Seeking songs, voice, mitigation

White noise, nu no vi na I come so often to the lake as

Fish after fish come back belly up Still is there someone singing

I wait half an hour for him to sing [ chant slowly, on a single note, in your own time; wait for others to arrive at the end of each line before beginning the next ] The night is cold and the radio seems to be on Can you still hear singing?

Or is it just cicadas Languishing, then collapsing, languaging Let’s see what we can hear Let’s hear what we can see The harpoon hitting the snow

The night is cold and the radio seems to be on.

We leave reluctantly.

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 scoremaking, 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 SmuldersCohen 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. 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, 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 Ferguson-Lewis is a singer, composer and performer from London. Her practice combines an experimental and explorative approach to vocal composition and performance with electronic music production. Kirsty graduated from Goldsmiths University with a masters degree in Music, Creative Practice, culminating with her most recent work Sirena, a feminist opera for three women retelling the sirens from Homer’s Odyssey. She is currently working on her debut EP. Łukasz Kopeč 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. As part of the newest cohort to join Musarc, Mia Damerum enjoys rekindling her love of group singing and push my musical capabilities. When Mia is not singing, she can usually be found baking, outdoor swimming, or trying to string together a dissertation on Japanese feminist sci-fi. Molly Astley is an artist who works with painting, poetry and music. She is currently studying for an MA in Art and Ecology at Goldsmiths. 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 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. 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. Sophie Barshall is an artist and writer from London. Stephen Graham is a musicologist based at Goldsmiths. 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. Zeina Nasr is a musician from Beirut, Lebanon. Her favourite poet is Emily Dickinson, and she spends most of her time writing songs, taking walks and hanging out with her cat. Zsófia Varga joined Musarc in 2023 after over a decade of singing traditional choral pieces and folk songs. Most recently, she performed Carlisle Floyd’s opera “Susannah” at the Bloomsbury Theatre in Spring 2023.

Musarc, December 2023

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, 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.

Hester Dart is a London based alto/mezzo with an interest in baroque, contemporary and new music repertoire. They completed an MMus with distinction at Trinity Laban in 2023, where they studied under Neil Baker and Robert Bottriell. Hester made their debut on the alternative opera stage at the 2019 Grimeborn Festival, in Verity Lane’s The Crane. In January 2022 they created the role of Elem in Edward Jessen’s sonic theatre work, Syllable. In summer 2021 and 2022 Hester was generously awarded bursaries to study with Juliet Fraser and members of House of Bedlam at Dartington Summer School, where they explored contemporary vocal technique and collaborative composition. While at Trinity Laban, Hester was an avid participant in the creation of new work, collaborating with various composers including Georgia Barnes, Josh Kaye and Nneka Cummins. Hester is a founding member of The Ruffians, a new music collective with a taste for the experimental and the absurd. Since their debut in April 2023, The Ruffians have been busy growing an audience in a variety of performance platforms across London. They were the recipients of an honorary mention at the 2023 Gladys Puttick memorial prize for improvisation. Hester is also a member or Vox Urbane, a vocal ensemble led by Helen Meyerhoff and Dan Ludford-Thomas,which launched in April 2023. They are excited to be joining the inaugural 2023–24 VOICEBOX programme, delivered by Juliet Fraser in partnership with Britten Pears Arts; City, University of London; Sound Festival and Dartington Music Summer School.

Laure Prouvost was born in Lille, France (1978) and is currently based in Brussels. She received her BFA from Central St Martins, London in 2002 and studied towards her MFA at Goldsmiths College, London. She also took part in the LUX Associate Programme. Prouvost won the MaxMara Art Prize for Women in 2011 and was the recipient of the Turner Prize in 2013.

Recent solo exhibitions include: Above Front Tears Oui Float at the Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo, Norway (2022); Laure Prouvost: Theatergarden and A Be(a)stiary of the Anthropocene, Longlati Foundation, Shanghai, China (2022); Deep Travel Ink, Atelier Hermès, Seoul, South Korea (2022); The Long Waited, Weighted, Gathering, Manchester Jewish Museum, Manchester, UK; Our elastic arm hold in tight through the claouds at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Denmark (2021); Re-dit-en-un-inlearning CENTER at Lisson Gallery London (2020); Melting into one another ho hot chaud it heating dip, Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon, Portugal (2020); Deep See Blue Surrounding You / Vois Ce Bleu Profond Te Fondre, Les Abattoirs, Toulouse, France, LAM – Lille métropole, Villeneuve d’Ascq, France (2020), and Bonnefanten

Museum, Maastricht, Netherlands (2021); AM-BIG-YOU-US LEGSICON, M HKA – Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Belgium (2019); Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2018); BASS Museum, Miami, FL, USA (2018); They Are Waiting for You, Performance for stage at the McGuire Theatre, Minneapolis, MN, USA (2018); SALT Galata, Istanbul, Turkey (2017); Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland (2016); Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, Italy (2016); Museum Für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt Am Main, Frankfurt, Germany (2016); Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing, China (2016); Haus Der Kunst, Munich, Germany (2015); New Museum, New York, NY, USA (2014); Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico City, Mexico (2014); Max Mara Art Prize for Women, Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK and Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy (2013); Laure Prouvost / Adam Chodzko as part of Schwitters in Britain, Tate Britain, London, UK (2013); The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield, UK (2012); and Flat Time House, London, UK. Prouvost represented France at the 58th International Art Biennial Venice, May-November 2019 and was included in NIRIN, the 22nd Biennale of Sydney (2020). June 2019 saw the artist’s first public commission in the UK through Transport for London’s Art on the Underground.

Since the 1980s the musician and composer Elisabeth Schimana has been active as one of the Austrian female pioneers of electronic music with projects marked by a radical approach and equally unconventional aesthetics. After completing vocal training, she earned degrees in composition, computer music, musicology, and ethnology. She has worked intensively with the theremin in Moscow and with the Max Brand Synthesizer in Vienna. Not only has she created countless radio works in cooperation with ORF Kunstradio but numerous sound installations and interdisciplinary and performative projects as well. Her concepts for experimental set-ups fathom the social field and put to the test new ways of interacting musically on the Internet. In her artistic work, Schimana examines questions of space, communication, or the body in its presence or absence, especially the imparting of compositional concepts (scores), which gives rise to completely new approaches that experimentally explore how we hear and demand a heightened musical presence on the part of the performer. Her probing approach also led her to found the IMA Institute of Media Archeology, which has dedicated itself to acoustic media at the analogue/digital interface and to the subject of women, art, and technology since 2005. Schimana’s award-winning and internationally performed work spans the gamut of composition and free playing, is inextricably bound to her as a live performer, makes reference to historical positions, but resists all attempts at categorization, and stands out, strikingly and reduced, with tremendous intensity. (Milena Meller) Ben Smith is a London-based pianist and composer specialising in contemporary music. His compositions and writings are often concerned with phenomenological and semiotic approaches to material and repetition, the foregrounding of silence as a formal parameter, and objects from visual art and poetry. His music has been featured on Score Follower (islands) and One Glass Eye Records (thirty-six views of the same thing), and his performances have been featured numerous times on BBC Radio 3. Ben was a Junior Fellow at Guildhall School of Music & Drama from 2020-2022, where he previously studied with Laurence Crane, Rolf Hind, and James Weeks. In demand both as a soloist and chamber performer (An Assembly, Explore Ensemble, London Sinfonietta, Uproar Ensemble) he is known for daring and virtuosic performances which traverse the extremes of the contemporary repertoire, ranging from New Complexity to Wandelweiser. He has performed across the UK and

internationally, including London venues Ambika P3, Barbican Hall, Hackney Round Chapel, Kings Place, Milton Court Concert Hall, St John’s Smith Square, Queen Elizabeth Hall, and Wigmore Hall.

Ben has given world and UK premieres by Peter Ablinger (Silk Street Music Hall), Patrícia Sucena de Almeida (Transit: Festival voor nieuwe muziek), Sarah Angliss (Aldeburgh Festival), Eric Egan (inn:pust festval), Michael Finnissy (Spitalfields Music), Anders Hillborg (BBC Total Immersion), Eva-Maria Houben (Borough New Music), Evan Johnson (Cafe OTO, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival), Ragnar Kjartansson (London Contemporary Music Festival), Helmut Lachenmann (BPSE), Sylvia Lim (Musicon) Rebecca Saunders (Musicon), Alastair White (Tête-à-tête Opera Festival), and Rasmus Zwicki (Ny Musik i Birkerød). Recording projects include works by Nomi Epstein and Paul Newland (another timbre), Brian Ferneyhough and Alastair White (métier), and the complete piano works of Evan Johnson (all that dust).

“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.

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 (Mozart Symphony No. 40, Fauré Masques et Bergamasques) and recorded Paul Frost’s orchestral suite The Burning of Cork with RTÉ Concert Orchestra. He has had extremely successful 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. Orchestral concert highlights have included Handel Messiah in St David’s Hall, Elgar The Dream of Gerontius in Lichfield Cathedral, Monteverdi Vespers in Llandaff Cathedral and Handel Dixit Dominus at the RWCMD. 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. He previously held the post of Sir Alexander Gibson Fellow with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra Chorus, where he has also been invited back as guest chorus master.

David studied at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama and the University of Manchester. In Manchester he prepared the University Chamber Choir for work with BBC Television and a role alongside the Hallé Choir and Orchestra in Wagner Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg under the baton of Sir Mark Elder, and conducted a huge variety of music including works by Ligeti, Poulenc, Josquin, and Maija Einfelde. He has prepared choirs for Jaime Martín, Kenneth Montgomery, David Hill and Patrik Ringborg (all with NSO), Michael Sanderling (Beethoven Symphony No. 9), Eric Whitacre (Whitacre Deep Field, Five Hebrew Love Songs), Justin Doyle (Brahms Requiem) and James Burton (Walton Belshazzar’s Feast), as well as acting as Chorus Master for both Peter Oundjian and Christopher Bell with the RSNO.

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

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 and how to join visit musarc.org

Musarc would like to thank Skylite Baloons and Bell Music Hire LSO for their generous support