Ellen Arkbro: CHORDS for chamber organ

Composer and musician Ellen Arkbro returns to Blank Forms for an evening of new work for chamber organ and synthesis. Since 2019, Arkbro has presented a number of variations of her ongoing CHORDS series, a compositional practice that explores the timbral and acoustic characteristics of slowly evolving, just intonation chord progressions. This new iteration will be particularly subtle and intimate, intended to compliment the starkness of the Blank Forms listening space.  

Ellen Arkbro has been working with lengthy, careful, elegiac duration for over a decade. Despite her works’ scale and precision, the result is rarely a dry exercise in process, drawing from a vivid array of musical vocabularies—Arkbro’s studies in just intonation with La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, and Jung Hee Choi; jazz and blues scales and pop modalities; electroacoustic music and sound synthesis. Across her work, Arkbro prompts an active form of listening: time slowly morphs harmony into a three-dimensional and tactile layer, giving way to subtle, free-flowing, and highly idiosyncratic psychoacoustic phenomena.