Early in the morning, the Oude Kerk is a meditative oasis in the city. Since 2017, on every first Friday of the month at 8 a.m., when the rising sun casts its light through the church’s towering windows and the neighbourhood slowly wakes up, visitors can enjoy the Silence music programme. The concerts celebrate the acoustics and space of the Oude Kerk, which invites mostly young, experimental musicians. There are no fixed seats; visitors are welcome to walk around and discover what the music sounds like in different places in the church.

For Silence #24, Ellen Arkbro performed her new composition CHORDS. CHORDS sees Arkbro adopt a more minimalist approach, focusing on the immediate qualities of sound and elegantly expanding the tonal capacities of acoustic instruments using precise, subtle synthesis. Composed of a carefully selected combination of tones, CHORDS stretches, extends and obscures the timbral character of the instruments it is performed on. Arkbro examines the sonic materiality and harmonic quality of chords. She considers how the compositions occupy space rather than time – transposing theoretical possibilities into the phenomenal realm.

The artist on her music, organs, and churches: ‘I think about it as slow music focusing on a certain type of sound, or rather a very specific experience of it: that moment when an in-tune-sound somehow becomes one with the space which you are listening in.’ Arkbro regularly performs her site-specific compositions in churches. ‘Something happens when people enter a church. They get a little bit quieter and a little bit more aware of their surroundings, and of other people.’ And it is where one finds organs: ‘It’s such an interesting object, such a complex instrument, that has taken people so many many years to build. Every instrument is different and is built for a specific space. Somehow it made so much more sense than bringing your laptop and plugging it into two speakers.’

Materials

Organ pipes

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