Join us in the Founder's Room, next to BP Hall for:

• Curated field recordings played back on a Mobius Acoustics quadrophonic sound system throughout the festival

• Conversations featuring composers, acoustic ecologists, field recordists, and climate scientists. Dr. Yewande Pearse and Sarah Cahill will be moderating discussions at 2PM, 4PM, and 6PM.

Presented by LA Phil Insight
Insight is generously supported by Linda and David Shaheen.

The Cloud Orchestra invites audiences to immerse themselves in a transformative 12-hour audio installation that explores the intersection of music and nature. Blurring the lines between the natural world and human-made sound, the installation evolves in real time through a unique blend of field recordings and musical compositions.

Central to the experience is a collection of 10 vinyl records, featuring three hours of meticulously captured soundscapes from diverse environments, including tropical rainforests, Polish forests, Portuguese meadows, the Caucasus Mountains, and the distinctive landscapes of southern and northern California. These recordings offer a rich auditory journey, from the calls of hummingbirds and elks to the subtle flow of creeks, all curated for participants to explore and shape.

Complementing these natural atmospheres are 60 cassettes of generative bird songs, crafted by Alexey Seliverstov through a custom algorithm. Each bird combines real bird calls with synthesized sounds, piano, and human voices, offering a dynamic layer to the soundscape. Visitors can interact with these elements, choosing and playing both vinyl and cassettes to create their own sound collage.

Reel-to-reel recorders will play additional layers of the soundscape, adding depth to the immersive experience. As attendees arrange dictaphones on the table, their sound choices are captured, mixed, and played back through large speakers, allowing each individual to contribute to the evolving soundscape and feel like an artist within the installation. The result is a constantly shifting auditory experience that fuses generative music with the sounds of the natural world.

Threshold Music is an environmental ambient composition for the WDCH Garden created through sculptural wind chimes. Designed to catch the breeze, the chimes draw the listener through space and recontextualize the sounds of the city that drift into the hanging gardens at the Philharmonic. Tonally, the work is comprised of a harmony found in local birdsong, passing people, and pitches found in the boundless ecosystem that encompasses Los Angeles.

Threshold Music is informed by Erik Satie’s concept of musique d'ameublement and Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Kankyō Ongaku, which imagine the composer as a designer of musical atmosphere and aura in both domestic and natural spaces. Through the work’s connection with the environment, we hope that the piece creates a live field recording in the ear of the visitor and sparks hand-holding, careful listening, and a feeling of solidarity with our shared landscape.

Mobile Microphone is a video series started in 2022 that explores dynamic methods of capturing ambient sounds out in the world. Using the microphone as an instrument itself (a sound shaper as well as an amplifier), the capturer of sound is as dynamic as the captured. This project explores environments through a variety of mobile microphones- shotgun, dynamic, hydrophones as well as electromagnetic sensing.

Ka Baird will be leading a series of Mobile Microphone tours throughout Walt Disney Concert Hall during Noon to Midnight. These tours will allow attendees to participate in focused real-time listening to the sounds unfolding all around as captured by Ka’s active microphone. Consider this a field recording of field recordings.

Mobile Microphone Tour Schedule:

Tours start in Lobby West. Limited space per tour

3:00-3:20 PM
4:00-4:20 PM
5:00-5:20 PM
7:00-7:20 PM

Tidal Resonance (2023) by Lachlan Turczan is a kinetic sculpture that explores the intersection of sound, water, and light. The work features a small pool of water held within a parabolic mirror, which shapes the water into a liquid lens. Through the application of cymatic frequencies within the vessel, sound vibrations sculpt the water’s surface into waveforms known as cymatics. These wave patterns manipulate the reflection of light within the water, producing constantly shifting, mesmerizing visuals. The piece highlights the fluid relationship between sound and light, encouraging viewers to experience the dynamic interplay between these elements as both a sensory and sculptural phenomenon.

Dew Point IV is part of a series that explores water’s archetypal spherical form. As the longest piece in the series, it highlights how each droplet moves across the elongated, narrow surface, gradually pulled toward the center by gravity. In this nearly frictionless, superhydrophobic environment, water seems to materialize from nowhere, gliding from both sides before colliding and bouncing along the shallow depression. The droplets then disappear into a central slit, only to return and repeat the cycle, mimicking the perpetual, spiraling motion of water in nature. This continuous flow reflects water’s essential rhythms, capturing its ceaseless movement through the world. Theodor Schwenk’s observation in Sensitive Chaos resonates here: “Wherever water occurs it tends to take on a spherical form... Water will always attempt to form an organic whole by joining what is divided and uniting it in circulation.” Dew Point IV brings this insight to life, as the droplets continually seek reunion, embodying water’s inherent drive toward unity within natural cycles.

A video installation by Mercedes Dorame, a multi-disciplinary artist who calls on her Tongva ancestry to engage the problematics of (in)visibility and ideas of cultural construction and ancestral connection to land and sky. Born in Los Angeles, California, she received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and her undergraduate degree from UCLA.

Sonic landscapes capturing specific Los Angeles sites and neighborhoods surround an abstract film exploring our evolving relationship with technology in this performance by artistic collaborators and married couple Michael Pisaro-Liu and Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu.

A long-time member of the Wandelweiser collective, Pisaro-Liu explored the nature of silence in many of his early compositions. This focus gradually expanded to include an investigation of the performance environment—the sounds, aspects, and constraints of concert halls and theaters—which led him to recording those environments and eventually incorporating those field recordings into his practice. Transparent City is a series of 24 10-minute pieces created from 2004 to 2007. Each piece in the series includes a recording of a specific location (this performance includes No. 11 Dockweiler Beach, No. 7 Union Station Lobby, No. 12 Marina del Rey, and No. 17 Musch Meadow, Topanga) accompanied by a quartet of sine waves that oscillate, flutter, or drone in a subtle duet with the documented audio of the everyday. The presence of the pitched sine waves underscores the musicality of the world—“They are something like a visitation by a harmonically attuned ear,” Pisaro-Liu explains. He adds: “The live performance is a spontaneously constructed layer that mediates between the places of recording and the space of performance.”

Between Pisaro-Liu's stops at Union Station Lobby and Marina del Rey is Hsing-Hsin Liu’s 20-minute film I Carry the Universe With Me. An artist, filmmaker, and writer who embraces the conceptual and metaphysical in her work, she explores nothing less than our future reality in this new film. “Today, we still long for a new way of seeing and understanding the world: using smartphones, computers, newly invented cameras, and virtual reality. In a future dominated by technological images, how will human culture be rewritten? Will history be reset?” Hsing-Hsin Liu asks. —Amanda Angel

Michael Pisaro-Liu, electric guitar and objects
Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu, film

LA Phil principal timpanist and USC Professor Joseph Pereira leads the USC Percussion Group in this program featuring focuses on wood, water, and light.

Masakazu Natsuda’s Wooden Music for nine percussionists imagines how early humans came together to make music out of found bones and rocks. Natsuda notes that “The hitting sounds that came from pieces of wood in one’s hands (perhaps rocks or bones...) would have been some of the first sounds that mankind produced besides their spoken words.” Its echoing bursts, poignant pauses, and non-tempered tuning allow a gentle transition into a rooted experience of time. The work was recorded on Natsuda’s 2014 album, Les chants prehistoriques.

George Lewis’ Le témoignage des lumières (The Century of Lights) “situates itself within the classic American trope of depiction” by immediately transporting listeners aboard a négrier, where the sonic environment of the ships used to carry enslaved people is rendered. The piece portrays “the appalling violence and objectification of human beings that financially supported the Age of Enlightenment–in French, Le siècle des Lumières.”

Ted Hearne’s Thaw for percussion quartet opens with the bright sound of three glockenspiels and a large drum in an imagined block of ice, “still and cold with only the faintest beat of the outside world.” This cube gently melts and the once “solid rhythms” of the ice block transform into sparkling self-contained gestures that flow rambunctiously into the formerly empty space and “in time, evaporate completely.”

Six bowed timpani slip and wail in the opening of Ondřej Adámek’s Fishbones for six percussionists. The “cynical idea of the life cycle of the fish” occurred to Adámek during the composition of this work—a life cycle that “begins with hatching freely in the ocean and ends in the pressure of cans.” —Anna Heflin

Joseph Pereira, director, curator
Ensemble: Tyler Brown, Kana Funayama, Sabrina Lai, David Lee, Brandon Lim, Chanhui Lim, Marcos Rivera, Marcos Salgado, Preston Spisak, Jonathan Yuen, Xavier Zwick

What happens when you take a string section outside? What if you let the breeze run across the f-holes of a cello? If a bee landed on a violin string mid-buzz? What does a cello's body feel like when it's warmed in the sun? These four composers treat the string ensembles for which they've written the way a homeowner treats a set of windchimes: They set everything up, and they let greater forces take control.

Andrew Norman's The Companion Guide to Rome plops us down at nine different spots in the Italian city and asks us to take in what we see. The piece, which was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize, offers musical interpretations of Norman's favorite churches in Rome. Still, this is no tourist's sketch. Norman brings a curious spirit, eye for detail, and, more than anything, a full heart to these portraits, presenting us not only with the feeling of being out on holiday taking in architecture in the warmth, Aperol spritz at the ready. Over and over, The Companion Guide to Rome reminds us of the strange (and eventually overwhelming) joy that comes with encountering wonder—over, and over, and over.

Andrew Yee's Trees of Greenwood for strings and voice is a haunting, almost haunted, slow-motion portrait of a forest. The specter of loss clings to the violins, only to be ushered into the future by a strong line from the cello. The vocalist follows suit, singing their way through a list of tree names like it's an incantation. The tight weave of vocal melody and cresting strings feels both urgent and timeless, full of motion but grounded, roots gripping deep into the earth while the branches reach to the sky.

Philip Glass' Violin Concerto No. 2, “The American Four Seasons,” was originally conceived as Glass’ response to Vivaldi, though he admits he himself isn't quite sure how the works relate. No matter. It’s a showcase for a powerhouse soloist, producing a flurry of notes that flap and rush like raked leaves caught in a windstorm. At others, the violin sings a song of mourning that brings to mind a spare, isolated winter. Etienne Gara will duck between them, moving from frigid to roasting at a moment's notice—a bit like Los Angeles in November.

Gabriella Smith's Desert Ecology premiered in 2023 as an elegy to the Joshua tree. Smith has a unique talent for both finding the musical in the natural world—the brush of tumbleweed against dirt, the ping of a plucked cactus needle—and for recreating that music through an ensemble. Across its five movements, which recall both works by John Adams and Vivaldi's Four Seasons, microtones hum, strings mimic the flapping of flocks of birds, and, from tapes Smith herself made at Joshua Tree National Park, actual birds sing. Like the desert itself, Desert Ecology is acrid, austere, and brimming with life. —Sadie Sartini Garner

Laurel Irene, soprano, The Trees of Green-Wood

Etienne Gara, violin and artistic direction
Leonard Fu, violin
Evan Hjort, violin
Sheng-Ching Hsu, violin
YuEun Kim, violin
Mann-Wen Lo, violin
Misha Vayman, violin
Yezu Woo, violin
YuTing Hsu, viola
Nao Kubota, viola
Chieh-Fan Yiu, viola
Stella Cho, cello
Javier Iglesias Martin, cello
Joo Lee, cello
Ryan Baird, bass
Nathan Ben-Yehuda, synthesizer & electronics

Gabriella Smith's Desert Ecology was commissioned by The Soraya at CSUN as part of a larger work called, “Treelogy” for Delirium Musicum. Projected photos for Gabriella Smith's Desert Ecology courtesy of Casey Kiernan, Tom Saint, and Ryan Hallock.

Violin Concerto No. 2 "The American Four Seasons" Mvt IV by Philip Glass is presented under license from G. Schirmer Inc. and Associated Music Publishers, copyright owners.

The Dr. Dawn Norfleet Trio performs an improvisatory set in the Walt Disney Concert Hall garden built on real-time reaction to the environment. Each member of the ensemble offered a few words expressing their musical points of view and intention for this performance:

Dr. Dawn Norfleet (Flute & Voice) — As a composing musician, I’m primarily inspired by aesthetics and approaches influenced by Black American and Afro-Diasporic cultures. I’m also influenced by European and global musical languages and the natural and humanly made sounds of my urban surroundings, from the haunting call of mourning doves to the uneven rhythm of MTA bus windshield wipers. As an improvisor, my approach is shaped by certain childhood experiences as a member of a large African American church community. When considering a title for this performance, I immediately thought of a phrase that has long resonated with me: to be “instant in season and out of season.” Although biblically sourced, I think of the passage as a life skill advising me to be prepared for the unknowns of life: successfully navigating unruly winds and serendipitous joys of “life-ing” can create and exercise skills that make one stronger, wiser, and more empathetic. Since our trio will be collaborating with the creative Present as a fourth ensemble member in this outdoor Autumn event, I thought the title was fitting. I’m thrilled and grateful to premiere this musical journey with JoVia and Fabricio in this beautiful space.

Dr. JoVia Armstrong (Percussion) — I have been an improviser-composer since 2001. I view improvisation as composition, which represents my identity. Collective improvisation is a conversation between musicians. Time, space, and life around them influence their opinions, suggestions, questions, and answers.

Fabricio Watannay (Voice, Clay Music Instruments, Electronics) — As an artist, I take inspiration from the ancestral roots of the American continent, especially in their musical technologies, which tell us so much about their creators, revealing emotion and thought that define Identitarian concepts. As an academic, I reflect on how modern music technologies define the “melting pot” we are now and how I can integrate them with ancestral/indigenous music technologies to honor the ancestors of this continent and inspire those with whom we share this blessed land. This performance is based on cumbia music, which represents to me the beauty and joy of the synthesis of the Indigenous, African, and European roots in the American continent.

Dr. Dawn Norfleet, flute and voice
Dr. JoVia Armstrong, percussion
Fabricio Watanay, voice, clay music instruments, electronics

2-2:45PM
Moderator: Yewande Pearse
Speakers: Laraaji, Derrick Skye, and Rajna Swaminathan

Join us in the Founder's Room, next to BP Hall for:

• Curated field recordings played back on a Mobius Acoustics quadrophonic sound system throughout the festival

• Conversations featuring composers, acoustic ecologists, field recordists, and climate scientists. Dr. Yewande Pearse and Sarah Cahill will be moderating discussions at 2PM, 4PM, and 6PM.

Presented by LA Phil Insight
Insight is generously supported by Linda and David Shaheen.

Los Angeles-based new-music ensemble Wild Up, led by Christopher Rountree, curates a concert of pieces that bridge, blend, and transcend genre, showing how field recordings can be a space of meditation, experimentation, and, ultimately, connection. Through their processes, procedures, and deployment of field recordings, the three composers on the program—Andrew McIntosh, M.A. Tiesenga, and Patrick Shiroishi—offer a means of delving deeper into our world through the act of listening. 

McIntosh’s Learning (2021) opens the concert, while a new work of his for solo percussion and field recordings follows. The Grammy-nominated composer, violinist, and violist’s practice spans early music, microtonality, improvisation, and the 20th century avant-garde. He often combines field recordings of nature with composed music, underscoring the recordings’ power to transport and enhance our experience of our surroundings. Learning jumps off of this theme, weaving field recordings of the composer’s time spent climbing around the Rosenita Saddle in the Angeles National Forest with sparse melodies to explore the act of change—emerging, becoming, and remembering—by listening to the subtle sounds of nature and percussion as they unfold.

Similarly, Tiesenga looks to the natural world to inspire their compositions. A Los Angeles-based composer, Tiesenga makes music that stems from a combined interest in nature, visual scores, and the possibility of music to provide connection to each other and our environment. For Wild Up, they compose a world premiere for ensemble informed by their interdisciplinary practice.

The concert closes with a world premiere by Shiroishi, multi-instrumentalist and composer whose solo and collaborative music can be found across the spectrum of genres, like jazz, contemporary classical, ambient, and hardcore. Shiroishi’s wide-ranging catalog as a soloist and collaborator takes on themes of heritage, familial memory, place, and more, using his pensive music as a space for fostering understanding—of relationships, of history, and of the world. —Vanessa Ague

Andrew McIntosh, solo percussion and field recordings, Learning
Andrew Tholl, conductor, On paths
Molly Turner, conductor, Khristina

Wild Up Rosters
MCINTOSH
Sidney Hopson, percussion

TIESENGA
Rachel Beetz, flute
Brian Walsh, bass clarinet
Archie Carey, bassoon
Aija Mattson, horn
Mattie Barbier, trombone
Andrew Tholl, violin and conductor
Rachel Iba, violin
Linnea Powell, viola
Mia Barcia Colombo, cello
Marlon Martinez, bass
Sidney Hopson, percussion
Vicki Ray, piano
Shelley Burgon, harp
Marta Tiesenga, electronics

SHIROISHI
Andrew Tholl, violin
Rachel Iba, violin
Linnea Powell, viola
Marta Honer, viola
Mia Barcia Colombo, cello
Hillary Smith, cell

Khristina is an LA Phil commission

What memories does the land hold? In some mysterious way, can places retain stories we humans have lost? Can our environment reveal obscured truths? With “Site/Line,” the Isaura String Quartet confronts these questions, opening the door to a sonic exploration of the places people come from and how those spaces shape and mold them. This five-part program finds the Isuara Quartet joined by Kanaka Maoli composer Leilehua Lanzilotti, Serbian composer Aleksandra Vrebalov, Chicago jazz maverick Tomeka Reid, electronic composer John Eagle, and the Beijing-born, and Toronto/LA multi-instrumentalist Minjia Chen. Reflecting on the program’s aim, the Quartet states, “In dialogue about the ways in which we connect and remember, each work offers a unique perspective on our environments— both natural and built—and how these environments shape who we are, what we perceive, and the ways in which we move through the world.” 

The result is a program that travels vast distances, evoking expanses from the islands of Hawaii to the California seaside, taking listeners from the South Side of Chicago to a rural church in Nebraska, to more imaginal spaces like “the underground” and “the moon.” The performance includes two world premieres, both Isaura Quartet commissions. One is John Eagle’s “inside-outside,” which draws from his practice of field recording and examines the way, to quote Eagle, “human memory also records and shapes perception, creating a memory loop. The other is Migjia Chen’s “the speed at which change,” which examines the generations-long journey of Chinese immigrants. Explaining the intention driving these collaborations, the Isuara Quartet states: “Site/Line is a love letter: a space for collective celebration, grieving, liberation, learning, and seeing each other with joy and compassion.”

The pieces inside-outside and the speed at which change are Isaura String Quartet commissions

“Hockets,” writes composer and multi-instrumentalist Meara O’Reilly, “are perceptually slippery.” 

A musical technique in which a single melody line is split into shorter phrases and divided among multiple parts—one voice or instrument sounds while the others remain at rest in an unbroken flow—hocketing is a practice that alters listener’s perception of the music, confounding traditional rules of counterpoint and clouding everything from how many people are performing to who is responsible for producing which sound to where the sound is originating. While commonly associated with medieval vocal music, hockets are found in indigenous folk practices as well as in the natural world—some species of birds are known to hocket even when alone in order to fool predators into believing they are present in greater numbers.

O’Reilly, who came to classical composition from a background in experimentalism and noise, became interested in hockets as an avenue for exploring the principles of auditory perception; in 2019 she released Hockets for Two Voices, a 7-track EP on which she is the sole performer, on contemporary classical organization Bang on a Can’s Cantaloupe Music label. O’Reilly notes that hockets do not only challenge the listener—performing music this precise requires that the vocalists “receive and internalize each other’s part almost as much as their own; a practice in careful listening.”

O’Reilly’s performance consists of Hockets for Two Voices transcribed for flutes and Hockets for Two Flutes, a new work created to be partially in conversation with Lily Clark’s Dewpoint. In Clark’s fountain sculpture, droplets of water seem to magically appear around the edges of a ceramic box before dripping down and disappearing into a central slit. The continuously flowing movements of O’Reilly’s hockets are composed to mimic the size, gravity, and sound of Clark’s droplets as they well and fall in a continuous cycle, a meditation on the nature of reality and illusion in our fallible perception of the natural world’s perfect design. —Mariana Timony

Rachel Beetz, flute, Hockets for Two Flutes
Michael Matsuno, flute, Hockets for Two Flutes

If you scroll to the bottom of Ravon Chacon’s curriculum vitae, you’ll eventually reach his earliest work: Field Recordings. The three recordings capture three locations in the U.S. Southwest, chosen for their quiet. “I don’t know what I was expecting to hear,” Chacon would say in a taped conversation two decades later. He found himself listening more and more closely and increasing the volume. “I finally just cranked it to 11 to try to magnify what was there.... and they had all these different colors to them, and I realized that maybe this is what I want to listen to.”

The sense and memory of place imbues much of the work of Chacon, a Diné composer, musician, and artist. In Three Songs, a series of three videos captures American Indian women singing about “the history of a landscape” within that same landscape that saw “a conflict, displacement or massacre of their tribe” take place. Sage Bond, a member of the Diné; Jehnean Washington, a Yuchi; and Mary Ann Emarthle, a Seminole, vocalize the stories of the Navajo Long Walk, the Trail of Tears, and the removal of the Seminole people.

Written two years earlier, Horse Notations was inspired by an 1874 Popular Science Journal article analyzing the gaits of horses. Chacon synthesized these charts of canters, gallops, trots, and others into his score for flute, string quartet, and two hand drums. The imprecision of nature and the sense of movement across land is embedded into the music.

In contrast to Chacon’s literal references, the interdisciplinary vocalist, sound meditation practitioner, and composer Odeya Nini creates a metaphorical landscape in her new work Come Close and Sea. Incorporating four field recordings—the sound of human palms against a wooden floor, two recordings of anti-war protests, and Pacific Ocean waves —with live instrumentation and voice, she creates a resonance that bridges distance. “The forces of polarity pull us apart and obscure the interrelatedness inherent in our experience. Eventually, we are bound to recognize just how close we all are. How close can we allow ourselves to be?” —Amanda Angel

Odeya Nini, voice, Come Close and Sea
Joanne Pearce Martin, piano, Dark Waves
Vicki Ray, piano, Dark Waves
Johannes Bosgra, video, Dark Waves

Come Close and Sea is an LA Phil commission with generous support from the Hillenburg Family

Tribute to Sarah Gibson

Sarah Gibson was a Los Angeles-based composer and pianist whose works drew on her breadth of experience as a collaborative performer. Her compositions reflected her deep interest in the creative process across various artistic mediums—especially from the female perspective. Gibson died on July 14, 2024, at the age of 38.

Gibson’s gifts as a composer, performer, and collaborator are captured in this video of a live 2022 performance of her composition the line of your trajectory, featuring the piano duo HOCKET (Gibson and Thomas Kotcheff) along with members of the Seattle Symphony. Gibson provided the following notes about the piece:

In 2021, I was thinking a lot about journeys. This certainly had to do with how much our collective journeys had all been taking unexpected halts, turns, and detours during 2020-2022.

Geometry teaches us that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but the reality of life is never so simple. Our journeys rarely adhere to the straightforward directions we may expect. This piece, beginning lamentfully and wandering with sliding lines, morphs into more kinetic and zigzagging lines as it gains energy and direction. The unexpected and contrasting music reflects on the unpredictability of life as we navigated our way into 2022.

HOCKET (Sarah Gibson and Thomas Kotcheff ), piano
Walter Gray, cello
Michael A. Werner, percussion

the line of your trajectory 2022 video is courtesy Seattle Symphony

4-4:45PM
Moderator: Sarah Cahill
Speakers: Colloboh, Annea Lockwood, and Ellen Reid

Join us in the Founder's Room, next to BP Hall for:

• Curated field recordings played back on a Mobius Acoustics quadrophonic sound system throughout the festival

• Conversations featuring composers, acoustic ecologists, field recordists, and climate scientists. Dr. Yewande Pearse and Sarah Cahill will be moderating discussions at 2PM, 4PM, and 6PM.

Presented by LA Phil Insight
Insight is generously supported by Linda and David Shaheen.

Through the four works on this program, the Calder Quartet transverses real and metaphorical desert landscapes, culminating in Steve Reich’s seminal Different Trains, which marries live and recorded sound.

Missy Mazzoli’s Death Valley Junction is a “sonic depiction” of the eponymous desert town—one of Mazzoli’s favorite places. It is dedicated to dancer Martha Beckett, who resurrected the local opera house, adorned its walls with eccentric murals, and took up a decades-long one-woman residency. Mazzoli “attempts to depict some of Beckett’s exuberant energy and unstoppable optimism” in this composition.

A former LA Phil Composer Fellow, 17-year-old Marvel Jem Roth received the 2024 G. Schirmer Prize for Luna Composition Lab with lens, a semi-autobiographical piece for string quartet and electronic found sounds “This work in a way is a ‘lens’ into my life, driving from the Santa Monica Mountains to Walt Disney Concert Hall, and the ways in which I have seen my life, my home, be distorted through media.” Roth said.

Distilled from a concert-length work for four choirs, John Luther Adams’ Canticles of the Sky for acoustic string quartet creates rich and thick sonorities with each musician playing multiple notes simultaneously. The first two movements aurally paint the illusion of seeing multiple suns or multiple moons in the Arctic Sky. The final two movements “evoke the extraordinary depth and clarity of Sonoran Desert skies.” 

As the son of divorced parents, Steve Reich, along with his governess, often took the four-day train trip back and forth from his mother’s home Los Angeles to his father’s in New York in the late 1930s and early ’40s. Decades later, Reich reflected that at that same time he was traveling across the US, millions of fellow Jews in Europe were forced to take “very different trains” to Nazi concentration camps. This three-movement work for string quartet and pre-recorded performance tape is a profound and innovative meditation on the weight of history, using “clearly pitched” speech samples from Reich’s governess, a retired Pullman operator, and collected recordings of Holocaust survivors. —Anna Heflin

Breath / Heartbeat / Surrender invites the audience into a deeply reflective and immersive experience, where music and nature intertwine to evoke the profound connections between the physical and the spiritual. This set is a journey through elemental forces—wind, water, and the light of the setting sun—each piece drawing inspiration from these natural phenomena to explore themes of breath, heartbeat, and the act of surrender.

The breath symbolizes life’s essence, a force that animates and connects all living beings. It’s the spirit that moves through the world, carried by the wind and felt in moments of quiet reflection. The heartbeat represents the steady presence of life, resonating in the subtle vibrations of the earth and the low hums of distant celestial bodies. These elements come together to suggest a narrative of surrender—an invitation to let go of distractions, find stillness in nature and appreciate the beauty of the moment.

Breath / Heartbeat / Surrender is more than just a musical set; it is an exploration of the connections that bind us to each other and to the world around us. The music serves as a guide, gently leading the listener through a landscape of sound that mirrors the ebb and flow of life itself. This set encourages a deep connection with the self and the environment, urging a surrender to the simplicity and purity of the present moment, where breath and heartbeat become one with the spirit of the earth.

ר֣וּחַ

The sound file for Ruach was recorded in the San Gabriel mountains. I lived for a few years on Mt. Baldy, and I loved going for long morning walks, meditating and thinking about life and music. The sound of the wind always framed and gently infiltrated my thoughts. I could feel my face widen to take in the space. Often I would walk to the waterfall and sit for a while, loving how its sound gradually emerged from the wind as I got closer, until its roar was all there was.

The text is first from Genesis, “and the spirit of God is hovering.” Then, Psalm 118 “out of my narrow constraint I called to God. God answered me with wide open spaces.”

In Hebrew, ruach means both wind and spirit. It is the breath of God. It is the wind in the mountains. It is the spirit we bring to everything we do. —Mark Lowenstein

Azul, Naranja, Salado

Azul Naranja Salado begins 30 minutes before sunset and is timed specifically to the moment the sun disappears from the horizon, drawings on new musical elements as the landscape unfurls. Slowly evolving textures, shifting patterns, and changes in scale and dimension play with the unfolding gradations of light and color on the surrounding land, water, and sky.

The music is inspired partly by the low frequency sounds emanating from our sun as captured by a group of scientists from NASA and the ESA (The European Space Agency), who have been able to map the vibrations that form the “low, pulsing hum of our star’s heartbeat.”

Azul Naranja Salado is an invitation to embrace stillness—the pure joy and deep meaning one finds when resisting the urge to overthink, multi-task, or seek validation of “time well-spent” and to seek out and surrender to these moments wholly and completely. —Angélica Negrón

Marc Lowenstein, conductor, ר֣וּחַ (Ruach)
Laurel Irene, soprano, ר֣וּחַ (Ruach)
Derrick Skye, conductor, Azul, Naranja, Salado

This set is a thematic journey through various scales of sound and evocative soundscapes, spanning from the buzzing microcosms of nature to interpretations of cosmic phenomena.

Wadada Leo Smith's The Earth: A Blue Sanctuary… (full title: The Earth: A Blue Sanctuary, Light, Gardens of Organic Flowers, Underground Rivers, Lakes and Pomegranate Lagoons) is an expression of diverse landscapes, from serene gardens to hidden aquatic realms, capturing the essence of our planet’s beauty and mystery. “I’ve heard the sounds of the crickets, the birds, the whirling about and clinging of the wind, the floating waves ‘ and clashing of water against rocks, the love of thunder and beauty that prevails during and after the lightening–the–toiling of souls throughout the world in suffering – the moments of realization, of oneness, of realness in all of these make and contribute to the wholeness of my music – the sound- rhythm beyond – beyond” –Wadada Leo Smith.

From this broad exploration of our planet, Hum zooms to the miniscule community of honeybees, where a field recording captures the buzz of the pollinators inside their hive, combined with intermittent mechanical droning seeping from the human world.

From pollinator to pollinated, the flowers challenge us that "to be one thing is to be next to nothing" in Eve Beglarian’s From the Same Melancholy Fate, where the performer is in community with past versions of themselves via layers of improvised tracks from previous performances.

Finally, “only cosmic creations are universal, as a mountain or valley or rivers and planets” (Wadada Leo Smith) with the conclusion of the program featuring a world premiere built from the cosmos by Anne LeBaron. My Beloved Spectra honors groundbreaking astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin and features electronically-altered field recordings of NASA’s space sounds, integrated with recordings made in the extraterrestrial-inspired Integratron.

Shalini Vijayan, violin, My Beloved Spectra
Andrew McIntosh, viola, My Beloved Spectra
Alison Bjorkedal, harp, My Beloved Spectra

Annea Lockwood is always attentive to how sounds can be fully embodied. Throughout her career, the New Zealand-born composer has constructed tremendous sound maps of various locales and composed expansive pieces that highlight the shifting nature of space, humans, music, and the entangled relationships therein. The bulk of the program will be composed of Jitterbug, a work that was initially created for the esteemed dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham. Importantly, Jitterbug was not initially crafted with a specific dance in mind—both artists created their respective works separately. However, Lockwood is well aware of their inevitable interactions. “It’s very hard for the dancers not to become entrained by these rhythms,” she explains of the piece. “And then all of a sudden, music and the dancers illustrate one another.” Though there will not be any dancers at this performance, the audience will be invited to feel the ways in which these sounds create a full-body experience. 

Jitterbug will be performed by Vicki Ray, a pianist who Lockwood says “instinctively dives into the inside of the piano with tremendous imagination,” as well as percussionist Wes Sumpter, who she calls “an excellent improviser full of ideas about sound, density, and timbre.” Lockwood will join them to provide field recording playback. Given that each rendition of this piece has been different, one can expect a thoughtful performance that takes the concert hall into consideration. She succinctly captures the importance of such variability: “These performers are so incredibly ingenious, why not give them free rein.” Also in the program will be Buoyant, a brief field recording inspired by the summers that she spent with her late partner Ruth Anderson. Lockwood would daydream about the sounds of this lake as well as those at a Hoboken, NJ, ferry boat terminal; the piece is the result of her delight in these spaces. — Joshua Minsoo Kim

Annea Lockwood, field recording playback, Jitterbug
Annea Lockwood, field recording playback, Jitterbug 
Vicki Ray, pianos, Jitterbug 
Wesley Sumpter, percussion, Jitterbug

In this program pre-recorded tracks and live instruments interweave to show water in various states, evolutionary qualities in the environment and sound, and the dichotomy between natural and human-made phenomena.

Ingram Marshall’s Fog Tropes begins with an electronic track capturing distant maritime horns that transport listeners to San Francisco Bay. Commissioned by composer and conductor John Adams for a “New and Unusual Sounds” series organized by the San Francisco Symphony in 1981, Marshall layered taped instruments on top of the local field recordings. Churning horns seamlessly emerge in a gentle blurring between the field recordings and live instruments. “Many people are reminded of the San Francisco Bay when they hear this music,” Marshall acknowledges, “but for me it is a piece about memory and the feeling of being lost.” 

Derrick Skye’s Alluvion takes its title from "the natural process whereby different ecological elements accumulate and gradually form new landscapes,” as the LA-based composer explains. After opening with what seems like whale song bellowing from the electronic soundscape, Alluvion’s samples quicken over the course of the work—and amid a tapestry of musical language from Persian, Eastern European, and Black American traditions—to reveal their original source: bird song. As a seashore accumulates sediment to evolve over time, “different cultures and musical practices can also coalesce and blend into a new layered soundscape,” writes Skye.

The last piece of the program, Dennehy’s Tessellatum for viola, strings, and electric animation, explores the idea of human vs. nature. It is paired with Steven Mertens’ film, which juxtaposes the “man-made geometric perfection and the natural oddness of the deep ocean” as the music swivels between man-made tuning systems and ones that occur in nature. The kaleidoscopic soundscape supporting violist Nadia Sirota, featuring a new arrangement for strings, shines so bright, it shimmers. —Anna Heflin

Molly Turner, conductor
Nadia Sirota, viola, Tessellatum  
Steven Mertens, animation, Tessellatum

Alluvion is an LA Phil commission with generous support from the Hillenburg Family

6-6:45PM
Moderator: Sarah Cahill
Speakers: Ka Baird, Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu, Michael Pisaro-Liu, and Patrick Shiroishi

Join us in the Founder's Room, next to BP Hall for:

• Curated field recordings played back on a Mobius Acoustics quadrophonic sound system throughout the festival

• Conversations featuring composers, acoustic ecologists, field recordists, and climate scientists. Dr. Yewande Pearse and Sarah Cahill will be moderating discussions at 2PM, 4PM, and 6PM.

Presented by LA Phil Insight
Insight is generously supported by Linda and David Shaheen.

Composer and performer Celia Hollander uses acoustic and digital elements to create shimmering soundscapes that at once feel timeless and yet fixed to a specific place. The perception and experience of time are central to her work, most obviously in her 2021 album Timekeeper, in which each track is stamped with a specific moment of the day, such as 6:33 AM or 5:59 PM. For 2023’s 2nd Draft Hollander recorded herself improvising for an hour each day, later stretching, condensing, and overlapping the tracks.

She provides the following description about LA Interval:

LA Interval is a performance integrating music with a binaural, in-ear field recording of myself walking across Los Angeles from Highland Park to Venice Beach.

This type of recording, in motion and embodied, fully embraces the subjectivity of audio. Traditionally, “field recording” has strived for objectivity, through documenting the sounds of a “natural,” humanless world; a practice that relies on stillness and human silence. This recording, 9 hours in full of audio as I walk, eat, and take breaks across a car-filled city, revels in the transparency and intimacy of “imperfect” audio.

The sense of hearing cannot be closed off at will. There are no earlids” (R. Murray Schafer). Instead, we go in and out of listening through focusing our attention, whether at will or by necessity. To record continuously and without prejudice is an externalization of this experience. Even when a microphone isn’t powered, the diaphragm continues to vibrate; only the conversion of this signal into an electrical current can be turned off. As in our own image, we’ve surrounded ourselves with microphones within devices, continuously reacting to sound even when they aren’t recording.

Incorporating these field recordings live with original music and processing furthers subjectivity into full impressionism. Listening, especially in a layered reality of physical and virtual worlds, is a particle collider of forces at play: the physical environment, attention to the outside world, attention to the inner imaginative world, personal anatomy, a decoding or interpretation of sounds into information, emotion, impression and wonder.

An ambient music pioneer with 50 albums under his belt, Laraaji has never shied away from the new age tag, combining experimentalism with mysticism in sprawling compositions informed by his own meditation practice. His works are rich, immersive sonic tapestries, and he’s unafraid of using snippets of dissonance, distortion, and effects-drenched percussion in a way that sets him apart from many of his peers.

Emerging from the vibrant counterculture of the 1970s, Laraaji, who was born Edward Larry Gordon, began his musical career as a pianist. He studied composition and piano at Howard University in Washington D.C. before moving to New York City, where he experienced an intensive sound meditation and became deeply absorbed in Eastern philosophy and spirituality. Soon after, he discovered a chord zither in a pawn shop. He modified it to better allow open and modal tunings, then added an electric pickup. This harp-like instrument, which he plays with chopsticks, mallets, and brushes, became central to his work. 

Laraaji released his first album, Celestial Vibration (1978), under his birth name. After fellow ambient figurehead Brian Eno came across Laraaji busking in a New York City park, the pair released Laraaji’s Ambient 3: Day of Radiance, which put him in front of a global audience. In the decades since, Laraaji has continued to explore and develop his sound, combining his zither with electronic processing and other instruments to create expansive, ethereal soundscapes. 

In Bliss, Beauty, Beyond—A Celestial Sound Trance-mission, he adds kalimba (a traditional African instrument performed by plucking and raking) as well as looped field recordings, voice, laughter, and piano improvisations on the theme developed on his 2020 album Moon Piano. This transportive live experience, showcasing Laraaji’s ongoing devotion to “celestial field communion through sound and silence,” reveals an artist whose belief in the altering power of music is stronger than ever. —Jess Cornelius

Laraaji, solo electric prepared zither/autoharp, electric kalimba, voice, piano

Oscillations: 100 Years and Forever, written to commemorate the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s centennial, explores the evolution of Los Angeles over the past 100 years, our place on the planet and in the universe, and the nature of time itself. On a human scale, a century is a huge span—a lifetime, an era. Geologically, it’s a slice of an epoch. Cosmically, 100 years is a blip, a heartbeat, the blink of an eye. These different scales of time coexist in Oscillations as the work cycles infinitely.

Choir and percussion conjure primordial Earth and outer space. The libretto, by Sarah LaBrie, poetically interprets an ancient definition of time, and the video design, by Hana S. Kim and Keith Skretch, orients us, using historical maps and images of Los Angeles’s Bunker Hill, now home to the LA Phil's Walt Disney Concert Hall, interwoven with celestial and earthly imagery. 

Oscillations: 100 Years and Forever is a reflection on our moment in time and space and an invitation to contemplate the larger picture. —Ellen Reid

USC Thornton Chamber Singers
Tram Sparks, conductor
Hana Kim and Keith Skretch, projections
Sarah LaBrie, lyrics
Sayd Randle, lead research

Vocal Soloists:
Phoebe J. Rosquist, soprano
Ali Sandweiss Hodges, alto
Andrew Powell, tenor
Jason Yang, baritone

Oscillations: One Hundred Years and Forever is an LA Phil commission

The term “mangal” describes a cluster of mangroves in which the branches and roots of the trees intertwine in their tightly packed salt-water environments. This idea of individuals lifeforms combining to create complex ecosystems provides a fitting metaphor for Rajna Swaminathan’s Mangal project. The artist and composer has adopted the term for a part of her practice that brings together an array of musicians for collaborative and serendipitous performances. She explains, “Mangal is an open-ended process that emerges from engaging our sense of place, improvisational/interdisciplinary modalities, and embodied ways of knowing.”

One of a handful of women who play the South Asian drum called the mrudangam, Swaminathan initially developed her Mangal project during her doctoral studies at Harvard University as a means of breaking down the “exclusionary forces that informed my musical practice.” It evolved further through discussions at the Ocean Memory Project, a conference that brings together thinkers across the arts and sciences to contemplate the ocean’s past and protect its future, and the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music’s Composing Earth Fellowship.

For Noon to Midnight, Swaminathan presents the latest iteration of the project, Mangal x. Ocean Memory Project. She is joined by five musicians from a broad swath of disciplines and cultures: virtuoso Hindustani singer Samarth Nagarkar; composer, sound artist, and dancer Anya Yermakova; accomplished violinist Shalini Vijayan; experimental musician and multi-instrumentalist Eyvind Kang on the viola d’amore; and composer and multi-instrumentalist Patrick Shiroishi on saxophones. Weaving together their respective practices they create a space that is both experimental and transformational. In this meditation “on questions such as trust, memory, resilience, and the fluidity of being, the ensemble seeks new ways to inhabit this space with our presence and resonance.” —Amanda Angel

Rajna Swaminathan, mrudangam
Samarth Nagarkar, voice
Anya Yermakova, field recordings
Shalini Vijayan, violin
Eyvind Kang, viola d’amore
Patrick Shiroishi, saxophones

Mangal is commissioned by the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy’s Composing Earth Series

This is a ticketed event. Go to concert page

Lightscape is an innovative multimedia artwork created by the artist Doug Aitken in collaboration with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Master Chorale. At the core of the work is a feature-length film, a multi-screen fine art installation, and a series of live musical performances. Lightscape creates a modern mythology asking the questions, “where are we now?” and “where are we going?”

Lightscape is a captivating, hallucinatory portrait of the contemporary world, addressing a future hovering on the horizon. Accelerating through the diverse landscapes of the American West Coast like a sinuous, lucid dream the narrative seamlessly flows from character to character almost entirely without language or conventional dramatic structure. Instead, we move through an unpredictable series of interconnected encounters always driven by sound and music. The characters of Lightscape are in constant motion, navigating a wild, beautiful and at times, haunting modern world.

Music is Lightscape’s key driver. The film's soundtrack weaves together original compositions created by Doug Aitken with the Los Angeles Master Chorale and orchestral pieces recorded by the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the baton of Gustavo Dudamel. The vocal music uses reductive language, words and phrases that repeat and overlap into abstraction. Like a musical kaleidoscope, the film sonically shifts gears between these original vocal pieces to works by iconic minimalists such as Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Meredith Monk. The core soundtrack is augmented with ambient soundscapes composed for the film by Doug Aitken, Beck, and others.

Doug Aitken is an artist whose work explores every medium, from sculpture, film, and installations to architectural interventions. His films often explore the modern condition, and his installations create immersive cinematic experiences. He has collaborated with numerous artists and musicians, and his artwork has been exhibited in hundreds of museums and galleries around the world. The Sleepwalkers exhibition at MoMA in 2007 covered the museum’s exterior walls with moving-image projections. In 2012 SONG 1 wrapped the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC with 360-degree panoramic video projections. Mirage, a site-specific sculpture that takes the form of a home completely covered in mirrors and set in the heart of the Californian desert was installed in 2017. It has also been installed in Detroit, MI (2018) and in Gstaad, Switzerland (2019-2021). In July 2019, he launched the project New Horizon, a multifaceted art event challenging the notion of art in the 21st century. The project was composed of a series of live events across the state of Massachusetts, centered around a stunning reflective hot air balloon and gondola. In 2022, a large-scale survey of his artwork was featured in a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney.

A Portrait of the West

Lightscape portrays the landscape of the American West in all of its diversity. From the desolate reaches of Death Valley to futuristic automated robotics factories to Richard Neutra’s tranquil mid-century architecture, Lightscape restlessly navigates these different ecologies and vivid landscapes.

The cast of Lightscape encompasses a wide cross-section of culture. It features diverse talent including members of LA Dance Project, Krumpers from LA’s street-dance subculture, and actors like Natasha Lyonne. Musicians such as Beck, the folk-soul trio La Lom, and 84-year-old funk legend James Gadson make cameos. In the fragmented narrative of Lightscape, there is a sense of connectivity where one character’s perspective seamlessly merges with the next, creating a prismatic view of the modern experience. Lightscape challenges us to reconsider our perceptions of progress as we hurtle into an unknown technological future.

Grant Gershon, conductor
Los Angeles Master Chorale
LA Phil New Music Group

Modular synth whizz Jeremiah Chiu and violist Marta Sofia Honer have spent years collaborating and refining their masterful interplay of acoustic and electronic sounds. Both former members of Chicago’s improvisational and experimental music scene, the pair have developed a singular aesthetic, melding the distinctive tonal colors of viola and analogue synth into a cohesive and unexpected whole. 

Their new work Different Rooms expands on this established process to create a sonic conversation between themselves, the audience, and the performance space. Different Rooms is as much an improvised performance as it is a conceptual score, where the performance space becomes an integral instrument in the work. The pair’s use of live sampling constitutes a “recorded field” (to use their term) rather than traditional field recordings; no two performances are alike.

Different Rooms references two seminal sound works: Steve Reich's Different Trains (1988)—a three-movement piece for string quartet and tape—which is reflected in Honer and Chiu’s combination of pre-recorded, live-recorded, and live-performed sound manipulation; and Alvin Lucier's I am Sitting in a Room (1981), which repeatedly re-amplifies the sound of a spoken phrase into a room.

In Honer and Chiu’s work, the re-recording and re-amplification of their live performance produces an audio-illusory effect; over time the original melodic and harmonic patterns become intentionally blurred, allowing listeners to experience the resonant frequencies of the room itself. The performance space is then in dialogue with the performers, creating a work that evolves and circles back on itself in constant conversation.

For Honer and Chiu, this approach allows for chance occurrences, deepening the experience of witnessing Different Rooms. “This in-the-moment sound creation feels more collective and alive,” she says. “There’s more at stake, somehow, in us hearing it all together for the first time.” —Jess Cornelius

Jeremiah Chiu, modular synthesizer, live sampling
Marta Sofia Honer, viola, electronics

The Nigerian-born and Baltimore-raised producer Colloboh (short for Collins Oboh) has made a new home for himself in Los Angeles’ experimental scene. Colloboh built a dedicated following on Instagram, documenting his DIY process with synthesizers. His 2021 debut EP, Entity Relation, focused on glitchy and kinetic club beats, and his follow-up 2023 album, Saana Sahel, explored a more introspective, moodier sound world that showed both his interests and his personal growth as a musician. The album’s name refers to “a land of Colloboh’s pure imagining—an untouched utopia spanning lush coastlines and sweeping deserts.” These sonic landscapes took the forms of ecstatic free jazz freakouts, samba shuffles, angelic vocals, reimagined versions of works by Claude Debussy and Gabriel Fauré, and an “Acid Sunrise” that evokes the comedown from a Philip Glass rave.

For Noon to Midnight, Colloboh again pushes his own musical boundaries and conjures far-away places in an immersive and collaborative performance titled Through-Zero with visual artist Clayton McCracken. Through-Zero takes the audience over 4,000 miles away to the Snæfellsnes Peninsula of western Iceland, where Colloboh spent three weeks of winter in solitude. Forged by volcanoes and capped with glacial ice, Snæfellsnes is home to dramatic and contrasting landscapes. Using his modular synthesizer and with the help of 3D recreations of the world he inhabited, Colloboh seeks to “revisit sonic visions and conversations I observed between sentient forces of nature.” —Ricky O’Bannon

Colloboh, synthesizer
Clayton McCracken, projections

Where are the intersections of sampling, field recording, and the manipulation of live looping? —Josh Johnson

Los Angeles-based saxophonist, composer, and producer Josh Johnson has become an in-demand collaborator working in the margins of traditional and alternative jazz with an often-avant-garde bent. Johnson won a Grammy Award in 2023 for his production on Meshell Ndegeocello’s Omnichord Real Book, served as musical director for Leon Bridges, performs with The Chicago Underground Quartet, and has appeared on recordings by Harry Styles, Broken Bells, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

In 2023, though, he pulled back from steady collaborative gigs to refocus and hone his own compositional voice. What emerged from this introspective journey was Unusual Object, which Johnson said, “is a development and documentation of a more personal world of sound.” Both in the album and in live improvisatory performance, Johnson manipulates his saxophone, using it to control synthesizers and samplers that layer upon his live playing to reveal complex but intimate soundscapes.

For Johnson, these effects allow him to reframe the saxophone, which is usually focused on melody and solo sections in jazz. “The saxophone is a funny instrument. I love it. It’s beautiful. It’s fickle. One of the things that guided me in adding electronics is how limiting the saxophone can be.” In Unusual Object, his saxophone holds a more structural role, utilizing playing that's not flashy but is decidedly skillful to establish harmonic outlines and groove to his pieces, focusing the listener on Johnson’s ideas as a composer first. Still, he’s most interested in what happens when composition and improvisation meet. What's found in the margins in real time during each performance is the distinctive and personal sound world Johnson set out to define. —Ricky O’Bannon

Josh Johnson, saxophone, electronics

An intergenerational powerhouse of exploratory jazz, the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra (PAPA, or simply “the Ark”) has been evolving and regenerating since 1961. Founded by the pianist, composer, and community activist Horace Tapscott in South Central Los Angeles, the Ark was established as an incubator of Black talent, a preserver of African American composition, and an instrument for socio-political change. In its early days the ensemble performed in parks, prisons, churches, and coffee shops—even on the back of flat-bed trucks—to reach its community. And for the past six decades, more than 300 musicians, from famed jazz virtuosos to young first-timers, have participated in its spiritually uplifting vibrations. 

Today, under the direction of third-generation Ark member Mekala Session, the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra continues in its ethos of community building and empowerment, with a renewed focus on musical evolution. Propelled by a free-thinking approach to jazz and an instinct for expansion, the Ark transcends classification, traversing decades of Black history through sound. Free jazz, bebop, big band, hard bop, and joyful experimentation collide in a high-level platform for personal expression through collective transmission. The result is celebratory and defiant, brimming with cerebral intensity and technical prowess. 

PAPA: a Sonic Compendium chronicles the Ark's past, present, and future, distilling the essence of its continuous operation into a single program. Narrated by legendary performance poet Kamau Daáood, the work incorporates personal tape archives, videos, and other field recordings from throughout the Ark’s history. With an inimitable energy and a fierce dedication to the potential of people, the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra aims to bring the audience at Walt Disney Concert Hall into their fold—peeling back the layers on a musical group still brimming with purpose and power. —Jess Cornelius

Mekala Session, bandleader
Brian Hargrove, string arrangements
Kamau Daáood, poetry
Chris Williams, field recordings
Kabasa Drum and Dance Ensemble, dancers

In the final hour of Noon to Midnight, Visionary States presents an immersive and transformative experience through a deep evening raga. This performance is designed to empower listeners to absorb the music of the day while igniting their imaginations to think even more expansively. The raga, an ancient musical form in Indian classical music, is renowned for its ability to evoke specific emotions and create a profound connection between the musician, the audience, and cosmology. This evening raga, in particular, is carefully chosen for its ability to enhance introspection and foster a sense of serenity as the day comes to a close.

The performance features Robin Sukhadia on tabla, Rajib Karmakar on sitar, Aakash Pujara on bansuri, and Kailash Sukhadia contributing recorded sounds on Ableton Push. Each of these instruments plays a vital role in creating the unique sonic landscape of the raga. The tabla, a pair of hand drums, provides rhythmic complexity and depth, grounding the music while allowing for intricate patterns that mirror the heartbeat of the performance. The sitar, with its resonant strings and rich tonal qualities, weaves intricate melodies that guide the emotional journey of the raga. The bansuri, a bamboo flute, adds an ethereal quality, its breathy tones evoking the natural world and the flow of life itself. The recorded sounds, triggered via MIDI, create an ambient backdrop that enhances the meditative atmosphere, blending seamlessly with the live instruments to transport listeners into a visionary state.

Together, these elements create a dialogue between the musicians and the audience, where the power of raga facilitates a shared experience of reflection, expansion, and connection, making Visionary States a fitting conclusion to the day’s musical journey.

Robin Sukhadia, curator, tabla
Rajib Karmakar, sitar
Aakash Pujara, bansuri
Kailash Sukhadia, recorded sounds, ableton push