Listen With Others No.5 – November 7th 2025
1. Ellen Arkbro – For organ and brass 20’08’’
Stockholm-based composer Ellen Arkbro’s ‘For Organ and Brass’ is comprised of works that focus on tuning, intonation and harmonic modulation. The title composition was written for an organ with a specific kind of historical tuning known as meantone temperament. It was only after locating an appropriate instrument—the Shererorgel dating back to 1624 in St. Stephen’s Church in Tangermünde, Northeastern Germany – that Arkbro set about recording both for organ and brass and its counterpart, three. “Hidden within the harmonic framework of the Renaissance organ are intervals and chords that bare a close resemblance to those found in the modalities of traditional blues music,” explains Arkbro. “The work can be thought of as a very slow and reduced blues music.”
https://ellenarkbro.bandcamp.com/album/for-organ-and-brass
2. James Tenney – Having Never Written a Note for Percussion 13’54”
A work for a solo percussionist. The only instructions are that the performer must roll a single note from quadruple pianissimo through to quadruple fortissimo and that it should be “very long”. “In the early 1960s it was difficult to tell the visual artists from the composers. La Monte Young created conceptual art. Yves Klein composed symphonies. James Tenney did both. He was an integral part of the first generation of Minimalists (an early member of the Philip Glass Ensemble), as well as a founding part of the sound art scene. Both artists and Minimalists were questioning the fundamentals. And when artists like Tenney began to examine the fundamentals of music, they often came up with very minimal results. Tenney’s Postal Pieces are the perfect example of this experimental Minimalism. They came about from Tenney’s aversion to writing letters. Short compositions would instead be sent on backs of postcards. The last, Having Never Written a Note for Percussion, is a work for a solo percussionist. The only instructions are that the performer must roll a single note from quadruple pianissimo through to quadruple fortissimo and that it should be “very long”. The point of this seemingly simple act is to train the ears on the sounding process itself – on the instrument’s overtones and the hall’s sympathetic resonances.” (source)
https://editionsblume.bandcamp.com/album/postal-pieces
3. Long Gradus by Sarah Davachi 15’??
“Long Gradus’ began in 2020 when Sarah Davachi was selected to participate in Quatuor Bozzini’s Composer’s Kitchen residency, which was to be a joint production with Gaudeamus Muziekweek in the Netherlands. With the postponement of the residency to the following year, the composer was given the opportunity to take a step back and look at the piece over a much longer period of time than would have ordinarily been possible. The resulting longform composition in four parts, written in its initial form for string quartet, was developed as an iteration of an ongoing preoccupation with chordal suspension and cadential structure. In this context, horizontal shifts in pitch material and texture occur on a very gradual scale, allowing the listener’s perceptions to settle on the spatial experience of harmony. A system of septimal just intonation helps to further the production of a consonant acoustic environment. ‘Long Gradus’ uses a formalized articulation of time-bracket notation alongside unfixed indications of pitch, texture, and voicing that allow the players some discretion in determining the shape of the piece. A sense of pacing that is markedly different from that of mensural notation emerges accordingly, while the open structure of the composition results in each performance having a unique and unpredictable configuration.”
https://sarahdavachi.bandcamp.com/album/long-gradus
4. Piriforms by Laura Steenberge 10’17’’
“In medieval chant, music seems to have come from elsewhere. It is the angels that are singing, they said, like gourds hung up for purple martins. By the time notation started coming around, hundreds of chants were already hundreds of years old. New chants followed in their footsteps, trying to seem unwritten. In some monasteries, the monks sang for six hours a day. Through the daily toil of reenacting eternity, subtler shapes become audible. Sometimes the angels show up when the consonants are taken away, or some other change is made that renders the language unintelligible. Swedenborg said there are some angels who speak with U and O and other angels that speak with E and I, but that in the center, inmost heaven, language is made of patterns of numbers. The labor required to hear the angels is mundane and physical. Singing for hours a day sounds idyllic but also laborious. Singing for so long in such reverberant spaces, I wonder about the complexity of harmonics, combination tones or whatever other sonic artifacts that the monastic singers gained sensitivity to. In this collection there is a piece for one performer, a piece for two performers, a piece for three performers, and a piece for four performers. But even in the solo it is about relationships, as the two parts are created with the same breath. The demonic energy is in between things, the sounds cast shadows upon each other.” – Laura Steenberge
https://laurasteenberge.bandcamp.com/album/piriforms
5. Phil Niblock – Disseminate Ostrava 22’24’’
“A key shift in Niblock’s approach occurred in 1993, with Five More String Quartets. Rather than recording various instruments singly and then combining them, he recorded a string quartet playing together in real time, with the microtonal beatings generated through slight differences in tuning. The 1998 piece Disseminate, commissioned by Petr Kotik, goes one step further. For the first time, Niblock wrote an actual score (with the assistance of Ulrich Krieger) that could be played live with no pre-recorded element. This led to other scores for live performance throughout the second half of his career. The first version of Disseminate on this album was performed by a 60-piece orchestra in Ostrava, Czech Republic consisting of the Ensemble OCNM and members of the Janáček Philharmonic. From his earliest compositions, Niblock was interested in creating microtones through the sheer number of tracks involved as well as through carefully calibrated intervals. That idea is taken to extremes here: the 60 instruments involved begin in unison on a sustained D note before gradually diverging, creating one of the densest but most dynamic drones of Niblock’s career.” (source)
https://moderecords.bandcamp.com/album/disseminate-mode131
6. KALI MALONE – Living Torch I 18’33’’
Departing from the pipe organ that Malone’s music is most notable for, Living Torch features a complex electroacoustic ensemble. Leafing through recordings from conventional instruments like the trombone and bass clarinet to more experimental machines like the boîte à bourdon, passing through sinewave generators and Éliane Radigue’s ARP 2500 synthesizer. Living Torch weaves its own history, its own genealogy, and that of its author. It extends her robust structural approach to a liberated palette of timbre.
https://kalimalone.bandcamp.com/album/living-torch
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