Nightsongs, Daysongs: New York, night two

Nightsongs, Daysongs is a sonic portrait of composer and musician Ellen Arkbro, who will perform selections from her recent albums and present the US premieres of new compositions commissioned for her collaborators. 

Night two features selections from Arkbro’s 2025 albums Nightclouds (for solo organ) and How do I know if my cat likes me? (with Hanne Lippard and Hampus Lindwall), as well as Arkbro’s composition Nightsong (for three bass viols), performed by Hydrus Consort (Adam Grauman, Nicole Hogstrand, and Samuel Runsteen).

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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, Arkbro evokes a sense of emotional ambivalence, 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 and La Becque 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.