How is music shaped by the architectures and geographies it is made in? Listen to the resonances between contemporary musical culture and new spaces for performance across three days of debates, performances and workshops. Read more here...

 DAY 1_11/10/2018: When do i Disappear?
DAY 2_12/10/2018: Publics and Politics
DAY 3_13/10/2018: Acoustics and Memories

Thursday, 11/10/2018: When Do I Disappear? Brian Eno and Richard Sennett
Ticketed – £9.50/£7.50 concs.
Click HERE for tickets.

19:00
Brian Eno changed what it means to compose and perform music with experiments in generative and ambient sound, often designed with architectural spaces in mind.

Richard Sennett has spent a lifetime both performing music and writing about the way cities and urban cultures are crafted.

As we open two days of discussions about the ways music is shaped by the architectures and geographies it is made in, join us for a broad ranging discussion between the two thinkers, asking: when does the composer, performer, architect, or audience disappear?

 

Friday, 12/10/2018: Publics and Politics
Free admission
Booking required
Book here.

Should new music pacify or stimulate discord? Should it echo or challenge its audiences? Featuring artist Elaine Mitchener and music theorist Freya Jarman, two panels will debate how new music engages with the politics and publics of places, followed by workshops and performed interventions.

11:30 OPENING REMARKS
John Bingham-Hall, Director, Theatrum Mundi
Christos Carras, Executive Director, Onassis Stegi

11:45-13:15 PUBLICS
Can new music ever reflect the cultures of its heterogeneous publics, and should it attempt to? Are new spaces for performance bringing new relationships between audience and performer, or replicating those staged by the concert hall? What are the values in different formations of public that are gathered by new rituals of performance?

Louis d’Heudieres, composer and PhD candidate at University of Bath
Lia Mazzari, artist and founder of Silver Road
Sarah Jane Barnes, research student, Queen Mary University of London
Chaired and curated by Sam Mackay, Sound and Music, London

(Additional programming and advisory support has been given by Sound and Music.)

14:30-16:00 POLITICS
What are the structures of music’s engagement with the politics controversies of the sites it is performed in? Should it recount, mediate, pacify, or stimulate discord? How do geographies like those of exclusion and inclusion shape what is written and heard?

Freya Jarman, music theorist, University of Liverpool
Alexandra Lacroix, opera maker, CieMPDA (Paris)
Elaine Mitchener, performer (London)

Chaired by Julia Eckhardt, Q-02 Brussels

16:00-17:30 PERFORMED INTERVENTIONS

16:15 University of the Ghetto
in memorial of the Whitechapel Library

An oral tribute by Elaine Mitchener
main staircase, duration: 15min

16:30 non-curated (summertime)
Gallery 4,
duration: 10min,
spaces limited
Ella Finer and Flora Pitrolo of the collective The International Western present a performance-composition based on the electromagnetic resonances of the Whitechapel Gallery. An experiment in listening to the non-curated sonic dimension of the building and in bringing the building as sonic document into the archive.

16:45-17:45 Workroom Conversations: on ritual /on voice
How other artistic practises deal with questions of architectures and geographies? Does site shape dance, sculpture, installation or writing in a similar or different way to its resonance in music? Two smaller conversations between practitioners from different disciplines drawing on Theatrum Mundi’s regular sessions looking at how ideas become form.

Saturday, 13/10/2018: Acoustics and Memories
Free admission
Booking required
Book here.

How do composers respond to the way architectures sound? Can composition make history audible, and if so, whose history? Featuring artists Haig Aivazian and Ella Finer, two panels will focus on the acoustics and memories of places, followed by workshops.

11.30 INTRODUCTION

11.45-13.15 ACOUSTICS
How does new writing respond to the sonic resonances of ex-industrial and infrastructural spaces? How does the design of new spaces for music enable or constrain new music cultures? What are the values in different kinds of acoustic?

Ella Finer, lecturer, QMUL (London)
Laura Cannell,performer and composer
Gascia Ouzounian, associate professor, Oxford University

Chaired by Christos Carras Onassis Stegi, Athens

14:30-16:00 MEMORIES
How does composition make the past audible? Should music be shaped by histories of sites, or resist and reinvent them? What is the difference between working with personal memory and canonical history, which can often be in conflict with one another?

Ruth Bernatek, architect, UCL Bartlett
Haig Aivazian, artist (Beirut)
Jennifer Walshe, composer

Chaired by Gareth Evans, Whitechapel Gallery

16:00-17:30 PERFORMED INTERVENTIONS

16:15 Worlds within Walls: Internal Music
Solo Acoustic performance – Overbow Violin & Double Recorders

Laura Cannell performs three short site specific pieces inspired by fragments of medieval music and shaped within the space of the Whitechapel Gallery walls. Wherever we travel each of us brings our own internal playlist and history of music. Inside every performance space or building, we hope that sounds of a performance strike a chord within our physical human framework as well as within the walls in which we listen collectively. We think in sound, speech, pitch, colour, pattern and rhythm. Do our eyes determine our responses to music and the architecture in which we hear it? You are invited to close your eyes.
(duration: 15min)

16:30 non-curated (summertime)
Ella Finer and Flora Pitrolo of the collective The International Western present a performance-composition based on the electromagnetic resonances of the Whitechapel Gallery. An experiment in listening to the non-curated sonic dimension of the building and in bringing the building as sonic document into the archive.
Gallery 4, duration: 10min, spaces limited

16:45-17:45 Workroom conversations: on traces / on found spaces
How other artistic practises deal with questions of architectures and geographies? Does site shape dance, sculpture, installation or writing in a similar or different way to its resonance in music? Two smaller conversations between practitioners from different disciplines drawing on Theatrum Mundi’s regular sessions looking at how ideas become form.

18:00 Drinks Reception