In Gesture and Speech (Le Geste et la Parole, 1964–65), French archaeologist André Leroi-Gourhan suggested that for millions of years, human culture and technology evolved without complex language or rational planning. Our capacity to imagine and transfer information about things that are not there appears late in human history. According to Leroi-Gourhan, what materialised and stabilised human culture over vast temporal distances was not intellectual debate and deliberation, but ecological rhythm: the rhythmic performances of embodied minds in dialogue with the affordances of their environment.
It is tempting to think that this may still be true, and that language may be obscuring the de facto chorality of human nature. In July 2019, Musarc commissioned nine artists to create new works in response to this idea, as part of a concert programme with the title Le Marteau Sans Maître, ‘the hammer without a master’. There is an elliptical connection between René Char’s eponymous collection of surrealist poetry, which Pierre Boulez set to music in 1955, and Gary Tomlinson’s use of the phrase as the opening line to the first chapter of A Million Years of Music (2015), a text which engages extensively with Leroi-Gourhan’s ideas.
Heleen van Haegenborgh’s Material Affordance was one of these nine works. The piece sees a group of singers playing recorders as if they were found objects, testing their bone-like bodies with curiosity, gently blowing over openings, and listening to the instruments’ sympathetic responses. The counterpoint melody that animates this inquiry slowly, but irreversibly, appears to propel the players through layers of archaeological time into the present. Here, they march to the rhythm of tradition and progress, shuffling away from something that seems to haunt them.
Four years later, when we invited Heleen to create a new work for us, the theme of affordance still resonated. Both Hidden Affordance (2024), and its Implicit and Possible companion pieces (2025), which emerged through the process of making this album, rest in this present absence of language; and the singular/plural polyphonies that emerge from the language apparatus of which the choir can be seen as an oracular instance.
In Hidden Affordance, van Haegenborgh first began to experiment with the idea of mother tongues, taking the language body as affordance itself. The piece allows singers to align words and syllables of their own choosing with phrases in the melody. The blurred effect that results, which van Haegenborgh likens to a photograph that is out of focus, is antithetical to how the chorus is traditionally perceived. It conceives of the music as a conduit for the construction of deeply personal landscapes: not having sung in Cypriot since childhood, lamenting the extinction of animals and plants, quoting from John Cage, or taking fragments from a eulogy. The instrumental part in Hidden Affordance travels through these landscapes obliquely, attesting to how, à la longue durée, all these stories will become dispersed and disordered, consumed by entropy. For the chorus, there is comfort in this dispersal, and joy in the labour that wants to resist it. The two are inseparable.
In Possible Affordance, the choir is moving ahead, occasionally seeing glimpses of beauty in the presence of others, surrounded by mnemonic objects, which it assembles into abstract, flowing textures and triumphant concoctions. There is stillness and rest in Implicit Affordances, where the choir begins to pay attention to the single voice of a violin, which seems to be speaking from the middle of everything, like a chorus of one. We see what we have been making, from the centre of the earth circle.
‘This is the time. And this is the record of our time,’ goes one line in Laurie Anderson’s Big Science. This is a record, and it makes present the thick and swaddling embrace the choir affords us, staking out a place where knowledge is made, then consumed, eaten practically. What the choir carries is given by the expansive imagination of a composer whose work is so stirring, beautifully ambiguous, and full of concentration.
Affordances also makes audible a string of friendships that go back to the choir’s foundation in 2008. Allon Kaye, of experimental music label Entr’acte (1999–2022), introduced us to artist and composer Esther Veenroij, who introduced Heleen to Musarc. Allon took us to Antwerp, where we recorded our first album together with Neil Luck in 2016, Bloody Sirens (2018). Yiannis Katsaris, who has been documenting our work since 2010, came along. The opening line to Luck’s eponymous piece goes: ‘Let’s get something straight, from the beginning, yeah? There is a friction between the individual and the mayuss ’, ushering in a different way of looking at what a choir is. Veenroij, who, like van Haegenborgh, teaches at LUCA School of Arts, Ghent, introduced us to Wim Lambrecht in 2017, who was then Head of Visual Arts. Lambrecht welcomed us at the school and opened the spaces where we recorded this album with sound engineer Christophe Albertijn. Oli Kitching, who joined Musarc as Director of Music in 2024, stood on the conductor’s podium with so much love and passion, making this incredible music real. Adrian Corker, SN Variations, became the friend who now publishes our music. Sam Belinfante, a member of the ensemble since 2009, produced the album with me. We have been working together, across time, keeping so many questions alive. This is a record. And this is the record of our time, together.
With gratefulness to everyone, especially Heleen. Joseph Kohlmaier, June 2025
Instrumentalists and Soloists
Molly Astley, Sophie Barshall, Sam Belinfante, Mariam Bergloff, Franziska Böhm, Douglas Cape, Andy Cowton, Anna Cséfalvay, Agnieszka Cybul, Belén Durán, Ada Egg Koskiluoma, Rebecca Faulkner, Kirsty Ferguson-Lewis, Aranzazu Fernandez Rangel, Emily Foster, Anastasia Glover, Michael Guggenheim, Toni Gutman, Henrietta Hale, Joseph Kohlmaier, Łukasz Kopeć, Annelie Kops, Ivo Krankowski, Margit Kraft, Judith Lösing, Carol Mancke, Tara Marshall-Tierney, Paul Martin, Saori Miraku, Zeina Nasr, Michael Poole, Henry Proudlove, Derk Ringers, Carolyn Roy, Natalie Savva, Anna Schabel, Ashmi Thapar, Fiona Thendean, Dominic Thurston, Mercedes Vicente, Max West, Lola Wilson
Instrumentalists, Hidden Affordance: Andrea Bacallado Rivero, violin + Franziska Böhm, flute + Toon Callier, electric guitar + Andy Cowton, percussion + Ada Egg Koskiluoma, percussion + Paul Klinck, viola + Margit Kraft, cello + Iñaki Marcos Bueno, clarinet + Saori Miraku, synthesizer Soloists, Possible Affordance: Sophie Barshall, Sam Belinfante, Franziska Böhm, Joseph Kohlmaier, Kirsty FergusonLewis, Michael Poole Pieces for Violin: Paul Klinck, violin
Heleen van Haegenborgh and Musarc, Affordances
Works for Mixed Choir, Instruments and Percussion, 2019–25
Recorded at LUCA School of Art, Ghent, April 2025
Music composed by Heleen van Haegenborgh
Performed by Musarc
Conducted by Oli Kitching
Recorded and mastered by Christophe Albertijn
Mixed and edited by Christophe Albertijn and Heleen van Haegenborgh
Joseph Kohlmaier, Artistic Director
Produced by Sam Belinfante and Joseph Kohlmaier
Photographs by Yiannis Katsaris
Album design by Joseph Kohlmaier
A special edition of 40 signed and numbered copies of this album was lathe-cut by Bladud Flies! in Wales, with a cover screen-printed by Ghost Editions, London. The standard vinyl edition of the album (300 copies) was pressed and printed by Vinyl Factory, London
With special thanks to Wim Lambrecht, Luca School of Art + Adrian Corker, SN Variations + Douglas Cape + Aliya Ebo + Johan de Wilde + Yiannis Katsaris + Carol Mancke + Lois Pluymers
Released 21 June 2025
SN Variations and Cours de Poétique
© all rights reserved