Cello Musique Concrete

Tanja Orning I Simon Løffler I Heida Mobeck

Friday 11 September, at 18:00–18:55

290–450 kr

Please note that venues vary in capacity. A festival pass grants access to the programme, but entry to individual events cannot be guaranteed if a venue reaches full capacity. We therefore recommend arriving early. Admission is on a first-come, first-served basis.

Three new works take the cello apart, with electronics, breath and handmade moths.

Skin against steel, hair against wood, wing against bow. Tanja Orning's long-time exploration of the cello as object and conceptual possibility continues here with world premieres by Heida Mobeck, Simon Løffler and Orning herself.

Heida Mobeck's Relativt virkelig emerges from an eclectic meeting between musique concrète, free jazz, and hip hop. Electronics shadow and extend the cello's body. We hear friction, resistance and breath.

Simon Løffler’s Winged Cello Music is uncanny and delicate. Over two years, he and Orning have given the cello lungs, turned it into a habitat for white moths, and let it vibrate like a cicada. The moths land on bows and fingers, demanding playing techniques that did not exist before they arrived.

Orning’s own Metaxis is rawer. Here, attention turns to sound, bodies and movement. The cello is investigated as concrete matter, in music that can be absurd and dreamlike, unpredictable and precise.

The concert is part of Ultima Thule: The Closest Possible Sound. See the full programme here.

Programme

Simon Løffler Winged Cello Music, world premiere
Tanja Orning Metaxis, world premiere
Heida Mobeck and Tanja Orning Relativt virkelig, world premiere

Want to know more?

French composer, sound engineer, theorist and radio producer Pierre Schaeffer laid the foundations for musique concrète in the late 1940s, when he began recording everyday sounds and using these recordings as compositional material.
In Winged Cello Music, Simon Løffler continues a practice developed in the cycle Becoming Animal, premiered at Ultima in 2022, in which non-human co-performers help shape how the music comes into being.
“We have tried to give the bow, the instrument and the body agency,” says Tanja Orning about working with choreographer Kristin Ryg Helgebostad in Metaxis, a collaboration that asks how the cellist’s embodied knowledge can extend the materiality of the work through its resonance in the dancer’s body.
Orning also performs in Blodveien by Knut Olaf Sunde.
During Ultima Thule: The closest possible sound at Sentralen, the exploration of the experimental cello continues with Violeta García’s noise set Close to the Ground.