Nightsongs, Daysongs: Ellen Arkbro in Paris

Nightclouds            Ellen Arkbro
Daysong      Ellen Arkbro and Judith Hamann
Chordalities      Ellen Arkbro and Dafne Vicente-Sandoval

Nightsongs, Daysongs is a multipart concert series conceived as a sonic portrait of composer and musician Ellen Arkbro, who will present both new work and recent commissions. For one night only in Paris, Arkbro performs excerpts from recent album Nightclouds and premieres compositions for cellist Judith Hamann and for bassoonist Dafne Vicente-Sandoval, commissioned by Blank Forms and the Bourse de Commerce–Pinault Collection.

Ellen Arkbro (b. 1990) is a composer, musician, and sound artist working with precision-tuned intervallic harmony. Arkbro composes for acoustic instruments, synthetic sounds, and combinations of the two. Through her concise musical vocabulary and formal architecture evoke a sense of emotional ambivalence, simultaneously uplifting and mournful, guiding the listener through a spectrum of feeling with a cool and distant beauty. Despite her works’ scale and precision, the result is rarely a dry exercise in process; Arkbro draws from a vivid array of musical vocabularies—namely, her studies with La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Jung Hee Choi, and Marc Sabat; jazz and blues scales and pop modalities; electroacoustic music and sound synthesis; and her time in Catherine Christer Hennix’s Kamigaku Ensemble. In all aspects of her practice, Arkbro focuses on the qualities of harmonic sound that reveal listening as an active process of creative participation, inviting the listener to gradually transform into the sound itself. Her recent solo release for Blank Forms Editions, Nightclouds, stands as a profound statement in Arkbro’s evolving body of work, at once introspective and expansive. The album reaffirms her singular ability to transform harmonic simplicity into deeply affecting sonic landscapes, inviting listeners into a space of contemplation and emotional depth.

Judith Hamann is a cellist, composer, and performer who, in their process-driven and embodied practice, considers the ways sound operates as a subject, object, and actant. Trained in contemporary classical performance, they frequently challenge the boundaries of their instruments, whether the cello, voice, or body, considering how sonic thresholds offer generative sites of instability and movement. Their practice frequently crosses disciplines, incorporating improvisation, field recording, electro-acoustics, performance, and site-specific response, and is often collaborative in nature. In their recent research, Hamann examines the acts of shaking and humming as formal and intimate encounters; interrogates “collapse” as a generative imaginary surface; and considers the “de-mastering” of bodies, both human and non-human, in settler-colonial heritage instrumental practice and pedagogy.

Dafne Vicente-Sandoval, a native Parisian, explores sound through contemporary music performance, improvisation, and sound installations. After training at the Paris Conservatory, Vicente-Sandoval studied under the bassoonist Sergio Azzolini, who motivated her inquiries into tuning systems, timbral shades, and instrumental instability. Over the last decade, Vicente-Sandoval has dedicated herself to an in-depth instrumental practice, emerging from an intuitive experimentation into the complexities of the bassoon’s acoustical properties. Vicente-Sandoval also presents solo performances of microphone feedback generated through the resonant spaces of the bassoon itself. She and Arkbro share a compositional interest in seeking how the intonation of instruments coincides with the timbre of the room in which they are played.