LAB I: Musical Prompts
PROGRAMME NOTES
written by PAULINE DRIESEN
Raven Chacon Inscription (2024)
Tyshawn Sorey Adagio (For Wadada Leo Smith) (2022)
Annea Lockwood Saouah! (1987)
George Lewis Weathering (2023)
-----
16.10.2026 DESINGEL ANTWERP
17.10.2026 FLAGEY BRUSSELS
MUSICAL PROMPTS
Prompts instead of notes? That’s what happens when you dare to let go of control: a graphic spark that disrupts, liberates, or completely reinvents the classical orchestral sound.
Forget the ticking of your watch — here, music doesn’t rush forward; it bites into the now. Ilan Volkov and four visionary composers ask us to listen differently: what remains when the noise falls away?
Inscription
Raven Chacon
For Raven Chacon, the place where someone grows up is inseparable from their artistic practice. The composer himself was born in 1977 within the Navajo Nation (Diné) in Arizona, the largest Indigenous reservation in the United States. Although he is wary of labels such as ‘Indigenous composer’, history, community and place remain important points of reference in his work.
This is evident in Voiceless Mass, the work for which he received the Pulitzer Prize in 2022. Here, Chacon explores the imposing spatial qualities of a cathedral while drawing attention to the many voices that such institutions have suppressed and marginalised. Other projects also often begin with social questions, less as explicit political statements than as expressions of a composer who consciously engages with the history and structures within which he works. At the same time, Chacon is above all a tireless explorer of sound. His work moves between music, performance and visual art, driven by a continual search for new ways of listening. He speaks of the importance of ‘bending one’s ears’: opening our ears to unfamiliar sounds and, with them, to new perspectives.
When he was commissioned to compose an orchestral work, Chacon saw a unique opportunity to pursue this exploration further. For Inscription, he took centuries-old rock carvings near Albuquerque, New Mexico, as his starting point. He has visited these sites since childhood, fascinated by the mysterious signs his ancestors left in the rock. As a composer, he increasingly began to see these signs as potential musical gestures.
Yet Inscription is not a graphic score. Chacon’s extensive experience with graphic notation does, however, clearly resonate throughout the work. The petroglyphs do not function as symbols with a fixed meaning, but as starting points for movements, playing gestures and processes of sound. The composition begins not with individual notes or motifs, but with musical gestures: movements that spread through the orchestra and gradually generate new worlds of sound.
Working from this logic of gesture, Chacon developed different fields of sound: shimmering microtonal textures, slowly dissolving clouds of sound and dense layers that gradually sink into the depths. One striking feature is that individual musicians are often given their own unique part. The orchestral sound thus emerges from the coming together of many distinct voices rather than from uniformity. Ultimately, Inscription becomes an exercise in attentive listening. Each new sound to which we open our ears also makes room for a new perspective.
Adagio (for Wadada Leo Smith)
Tyshawn Sorey
The idea that fixed categories sometimes conceal more than they reveal also underpins Tyshawn Sorey’s artistic practice. The American composer, percussionist and multi-instrumentalist moves effortlessly between a wide range of musical traditions. In this context, he likes to speak of ‘mobility’: the freedom to move continually between different musical practices without being constrained by existing labels. This approach helps explain the breadth of his work. It includes pieces that draw on improvisation, experimental music, contemporary composition and many other traditions. The result is an artistic practice that continually eludes any form of categorisation. Adagio (for Wadada Leo Smith) is equally difficult to place. In formal terms, it is a concerto for alto saxophone and orchestra. Yet the work challenges many of the expectations traditionally associated with the genre. While concertos often centre on virtuosity, contrast and spectacular development, Sorey opts for intense concentration, stillness and a stretching of time.
The work is dedicated to the visionary trumpeter and composer Wadada Leo Smith, an important mentor to Sorey. Smith’s ability to let long melodic lines ‘breathe’ was a particular source of inspiration. In his music, each note is given the space to develop its own weight, colour and meaning. In Adagio, this principle is taken to its extreme. At a tempo of exactly 36 crotchets per minute, the music unfolds in a way that makes time seem almost to stand still. As the orchestra traces a slowly shifting soundscape, the alto saxophone provides a warm, expressive anchor.
This radical slowing of time also holds a form of resistance. By insisting on attention, duration and concentration, Sorey refuses to follow a culture that prioritises speed, productivity and constant classification. Here, resistance takes the form not of confrontation, but of remaining attentively present.
Saouah!
Annea Lockwood
The New Zealand-born American composer Annea Lockwood is one of the pioneers of a musical practice closely connected to the environment in which it takes shape. As early as the 1960s, Lockwood began shifting her attention from traditional instrumental and electronic sounds towards the sounds of nature, human voices and the often unexpected richness of everyday listening experiences.
A deep trust in the power of listening lies at the heart of her work. Lockwood gathers her material through recordings, but rarely manipulates them. Her compositions emerge from the careful selection and arrangement of recorded sounds. This reflects her conviction that learning to listen attentively also changes the way we relate to our surroundings. Her well-known composition A Sound Map of the Hudson River (1982), for example, was conceived not as a protest against the river’s pollution, but as an invitation to experience its rich and complex world of sound. For listeners who usually experience the Hudson only through sight, the work offers another way of feeling close to it.
Saouah! also stems from Lockwood’s fascination with water and the way sound travels across it. She originally imagined a performance with four choral groups in separate small boats, allowing the sounds to move across the water in constantly changing patterns. This staging element was eventually dropped, but the fascination with movement, resonance and space remained central to the work.
Lockwood describes Saouah! as a kind of ‘nightscape’: a nocturnal soundscape in which sounds take on a fleeting, almost ethereal quality. Voices, breaths and the resonance of tam-tams emerge from the mass of sound, blend with one another and then disappear back into the surrounding space. The title refers to a Samoan onomatopoeia for a vehicle rushing past, while the text combines existing words with invented syllables. Sound, rather than meaning, is the guiding principle. The result is a composition in which voices and instruments continually form new connections. As is often the case with Lockwood, the emphasis is not on constructing perfect harmonies, but on listening attentively to the rich resonances already present in the world itself.
Weathering
George Lewis
The programme closes with George Lewis, a composer who has spent decades exploring how music can respond to social structures and historical experiences. Lewis grew up in a Chicago marked by racism and discrimination. As a young musician, he found an artistic home in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), an organisation that played a crucial role in the development of experimental Black musical practices in the United States.
Much of Lewis’s work begins with questions about history, representation and the place of marginalised voices in culture and society. Weathering, from 2023, follows this line of enquiry. The title refers to a concept developed by researcher Arline Geronimus. She uses weathering to describe how prolonged exposure to racism and social inequality can have profound effects on the body and mind. Lewis does not translate this idea directly into music, but explores what such an experience might sound like.
At the centre of the composition is a weighty, recognisable chord that returns again and again. Lewis himself calls it the ‘Not this again!’ chord. Its repetition evokes an experience the composer compares to the story of Sisyphus: a continual confrontation with the same obstacles, with no prospect of a definitive victory. It is a familiar experience for many Black Americans, who are nevertheless always expected to behave ‘stoically’ when faced yet again with racism or discrimination. Yet Weathering does not seek to represent stress or despair in music. Quite the opposite: Lewis has emphasised that, above all, he hopes to evoke empathy. As he observes, art does not need to reproduce social experiences exactly to make them felt. Sound itself can create space for recognition, understanding and solidarity. This is precisely the conviction Lewis shares with Chacon, Sorey and Lockwood: that resistance does not necessarily have to be loud and confrontational, but can also emerge through attention, imagination and an openness to new perspectives.
