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Can music evoke silence?
Musicians and co-creators Liz Lang and Katy Avery are hoping to prove so with a new concert heading to the James Turrell Skyspace in Chestnut Hill this weekend.
“I do a lot of hiking, and I love my time in nature,” Avery explained. “I have found especially since COVID that that has become a really crucial part of keeping me sane… We hear more in the silence very often, and that was the space we wanted to create for ourselves.”
The show, “This Silent Music,” will be classical, modern and experimental all in one. The performance will be on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. with three different commissions.
“I’ve spoken to so many people in my community in Philadelphia who have no idea,” Avery said of the Chestnut Hill Friends Meeting Skyspace. “They’ve never heard of James Turrell, or if they have, they had no idea that we had one of his Skyspaces here in the city.”
For those not in the know, Turrell designs simple rooms with shifting, colorful light installations that interact with the natural angle of the sun. The one in Chestnut Hill is one of 100 Skyspaces the artist has created worldwide.
Guests are encouraged to sit in one of the window seats around the room or even lie on the floor to experience the light show that begins at golden hour.
While the show is not Quaker, in many ways a meeting space is an apt fit for a concert, which calls its audience to put down their phones and embrace stillness. Parts of the show incorporate sounds from the natural world, including sonified black hole data. One piece deals with themes of ecological loss. There will also be a pre-concert talk.
“Our astrophysics consultant will be there to talk about her research and the program that she’s developed with these audible light curve sound files that she’s made — that our composer used in the piece,” Avery said.
Lang and Avery have been taking an out-of-the-box approach for the show. Unlike many classical works, there is no piano.
“We have a marimba. We have auxiliary percussion,” Lang said. “There’s oud in one of the pieces, in the piece I commissioned, and so it’s a very unexpected sound world.”
The oud, by the way, is a type of Arabic guitar and an ode to Lang’s Lebanese roots.
“We are excited to get to hear everyone together for the first time in a few days,” Lang said. “The sound world is coming together and being built often in real time in front of an audience.”
Lang and Avery are close friends. Together they have been pushing themselves vocally for the concert, and testing out new techniques. One of which, Avery demonstrated — a primal scream-like sound, which she noted has ties with the heavy-metal genre.
“What we’re trying to ask the audience to do is to find an alternative to screaming into the void,” Lang explained. “We’re in a moment where noise is awarded over nuance, you know? I feel the impulse to scream on a daily basis.”
As the concert goes on and the sun descends, the room will continue to shift in color from cool blues to bright oranges. This is the first time the group will be performing these pieces in the space and as an ensemble. Lang and Avery are eager to see how the music unfolds.
“The music industry, while really vast, also really loves to put people in boxes,” Lang said. The goal of the show is to do the opposite and create something brand new and fluid.
“This is the first time you’re going to hear this. Every piece here receives its first breath.”
