Ellen Arkbro: Selected Collections

Ellen Arkbro will present Selected Collections, a work for synthetic tones originally commissioned by the Swedish National Radio in 2020. Constructed from deceptively raw, phase-locked sawtooth waves in just intonation, the piece is a study of large harmonic structures—intervals, chords, and modulations—and how these sonic relationships interact with the room’s acoustic architecture. 

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.