Untitled School and Other Strange Lessons

The subject is listening. The method is uncertain.

Four of contemporary music’s most precise performers gather for an afternoon where discipline keeps opening onto something stranger.

Lesson 1. Ferdinand Schwarz’s new work, the unwanting soul sees what is hidden, draws on Taoist philosophy and deep listening. With moving loudspeakers, the ensemble draws out psychoacoustic phenomena that seem to shift between the instruments, the room and the listener alike. The lesson: Slow down. Pay attention. Something is already happening.

Lesson 2. Øyvind Torvund’s Untitled School arrives in the form of a lecture: Scales, Textures, Chords, Imitations, Jungles. But embroidery patterns, medieval manuscripts, abstract art and wild animal calls keep interrupting the syllabus. The lesson: Categories exist to be destabilised.

Lesson 3. Sarah Davachi’s Feedback Studies turns the room itself into an instrument. With a reduced set of pitches and acoustic feedback loops, the performers navigate a fragile and shifting balance between control and collapse. The lesson: The room is always listening back.

Class dismissed. What you have learned is for you to decide.

Programme

Ferdinand Schwarz the unwanting soul sees what is hidden, world premiere

Øyvind Torvund Untitled School (2014)

NB: For practical reasons, the Mud Jam section of Untitled School will not be performed in this version.

Sarah Davachi Feedback Studies (2022)

Want to know more?

• Deep Listening is associated with Pauline Oliveros, who developed it as a practice of expanded attention. It is not only about hearing sounds, but about listening to space, the body, thoughts, dreams and imagination.
• Acoustic feedback happens when amplified sound is picked up and sent back into the same system. It produces pitches and overtones that depend on the room and the performers’ control.
• Øyvind Torvund on Untitled School: “The piece was inspired by the lecture-performance genre, a hybrid form I find very appealing: you come to learn something, but at any moment you may encounter the absurd and poetic instead. This was also the idea behind the title: a school where you do not quite know what you are learning.”
• Torvund’s music also features in the festival’s opening concert, Magic Fantastic, and in Cikada’s concert And Now the Weather.
• Also at Ultima: The four musicians in this new quartet appear elsewhere in the festival too, including Autumn Caravan, Mot harde flater, Hi sida, PIANO ACTIONS and crypt_.