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.

This Friday morning, visitors got to listen to music by Swedish composer Maria W Horn, thanks to a new collaboration between the Oude Kerk and the FIBER Festival. The collaboration facilitated the worldwide development of new organ music, which slowly unfolded in the magnificent acoustics of churches and cathedrals. In addition, the famous Vater-Müller organ resonated for the first time since the extensive restoration of the Oudekerk tower was completed.

This concert was a meeting of the eighteenth-century Vater-Müller and electronic musical instruments. Horn and organist Mats Erlandsson played a continuous set in which they superimposed two layers of sound: that of the organ and the one the computer composed. Thus, they created a site-specific and hybrid instrument that amplified and transformed the timbre of the organ and the acoustic properties of the space. The anchoring of new sounds in the harmonic language of traditional organ music is unique to Horn and Erlandsson’s approach. How does the 1724 Vater-Müller organ sound in dialogue with computer-generated sounds and how do the two fuse in the acoustics of the Oude Kerk?

Materials

Organ pipes, speakers

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