We Are Participating. Musarc Winter Konsert 2023. Walshe + Prouvost + Schimana + Dart + Lim + Boulanger. 16 Dec, 7–9pm

Musarc’s Winter Konsert 2023 opens with a performace of Zwiebelfäden, a multi-channel sound piece by Austrian electronic music pioneer Elisabeth Schimana that draws threads between the composer and six protagonists – Eliane Radigue, Pauline Oliveros, Beatriz Ferreyra, Heidi Grundmann, Maryanne Amacher and Helga de la Motte – whose heartbeats pulsate asynchronously as Laure Prouvost’s flags draw undulating lines through space with their slogans: Out of Rubbish Oui Grow.

We Are Participating is an evening of entrainment, questions, assemblage, hope and poetry. The choir has been practicing social writing, which we will perform with the audience. Hester Dart invites a wasp into her mouth in Enno Poppe’s Wespe. In Sylvia Lim’s flare, pianist Ben Smith turns the resonant apparatus of the piano into a giant Doppler machine, pulling sound from here into the distance and back again. Birds call from a woody undergrowth in Lili Boulanger’s Sous Bois.

The evening ends with a performance of Jennifer Walshe’s The White Noisery (2013), a ten-movement assemblage of sound, language and events premiered in the UK by Musarc at LCMF in 2019 – sliced from the full frequency band of what we call the world, in all its mediated strangeness, a social image, a bright illuminated sphere.

We Are Participating also marks Musarc’s inaugural performance with David Young. David was appointed Musarc’s new Director of Music this November from a stellar long-list of applicants with many of whom Musarc will develop new friendships and projects. We are Participating was conceived by Sam Belinfante with Joseph Kohlmaier and the ensemble.