Ellen Arkbro: Sculptures

Ellen Arkbro’s Sculptures is a major new work by the musician and composer, and a focused extension of her long-standing interests in tonality, temporality, and resonance. Presented at the fulcrum between concert performance and sound installation, the piece grows out of the Arkbro’s personal practice of diffusing sustained chords into canorous spaces and listening closely to the results. Using the pipe organ at the Church of St. Luke and St. Matthew, Arkbro will build lush, spatially-contingent textures inviting audience exploration and contemplation, capped by an extended, seated activation of the sonic environment.

For nearly ten years, Arkbro has been working with lengthy, careful, elegiac duration, a quality seen across compositions such as Listening (2017), originally presented as a twenty-six-day long outing at the Stockholm Concert Hall, and the hyper-minimalist CHORDS series (2019). Despite her works’ scale and precision, the result is rarely dry conceptualism, 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.