How is music shaped by the architectures and geographies we hear it in? What are the resonances between the politics, acoustics, memories, and publics that constitute spaces, and the music that is composed for them? Classical music has co-evolved with the infrastructures for its dissemination — the church, the chamber, the concert hall, radio, and digital recording. Now, in the search for new audiences and ways of listening, the classical tradition is increasingly being taken beyond chambers and concert halls into spaces not designed for it, and parts of the city it was previously absent from. Can old music be transformed by bringing it into new settings with rituals that disrupt the concert format, or do these places require radical new sounds that respond to their own resonances? In this three-day colloquium, we debate and experiment with the ways that classical music resonates with architecture. A series of panel-led discussions, performances, interventions and working groups bring together composers, architects, researchers, artists and acousticians to discuss the potentials and problems in new geographies of classical music.

With:

Haig Aivazian, Sarah Jane Barnes, Ruth Bernatek, Laura Cannell, Christos Carras, Louis d’Heudieres,  Julia Eckhardt, Brian Eno, Gareth Evans, Ella Finer, Freya Jarman, Alexandra Lacroix, Sam Mackay, Lia Mazzari,  Elaine Mitchener, Gascia Ouzounian, Richard Sennett, Jennifer Walshe, Flora Pitrolo and John-Bingham Hall.

See here the full programme!

New Resonances is organised by Theatrum Mundi and the Onassis Stegi, Athens, as part of the Interfaces project supported by the Creative Europe Program of the European Union. Additional programming and advisory support has been given by Sound and Music.

About Teatrum Mundi

Theatrum Mundi is a network of people from the performing and visual arts, the built environment disciplines, from across the academy and community and social collectives. Based in London, with partnerships in New York, Paris and Beijing, it activates projects, meetings, and research in cities around the world. Theatrum Mundi asks questions about urban culture. Who makes it? Where does it take place? What are the politics of production and display? What are the connections between performance, design and politics, and how can those connections help us understand cities? The aim of Theatrum Mundi, across its diverse activities, is to afford vulnerable provocation between people involved in confronting these and other questions about the condition, inequalities, and politics of urban culture today.