Phaedra Ensemble: Lines Made by Walking
Lineup
About the Event
Phaedra Ensemble follows music into the landscape, tracing movement, environment and cultural memory through works by Gabriella Smith, John Luther Adams, Alvin Lucier, Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen and Raven Chacon, inviting us to listen to place anew.
As part of Origins Unwrapped, Phaedra Ensemble presents a programme inspired by landscape, movement and the ways people understand and inhabit the world around them. Bringing together composers from across North America and Europe, the concert explores how music can deepen our awareness of place, environment and belonging.
Gabriella Smith’s Keep Going draws on her close engagement with the natural world, creating music of restless energy, vivid colour and surging momentum. John Luther Adams’ Lines Made By Walking takes its title from the tracks we leave through exploration, transforming the act of walking through a landscape into a spacious musical journey of slowly shifting textures and broad sonic vistas. By contrast, Alvin Lucier’s Navigations for Strings invites audiences into an intensely focused listening experience, revealing hidden harmonies, resonances and acoustic details that often pass unnoticed.
Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen’s Last Ground combines austerity and wit, finding tension, humour and unexpected drama in the repetition and transformation of simple musical ideas, while Raven Chacon’s Journey of the Horizontal People reflects on Indigenous relationships to land, movement and history through a distinctive sound world that evokes vast spaces, memory and travel across the landscape.
Together, these works offer different perspectives on how we encounter our surroundings, inviting us to listen more closely to the landscapes we move through, inherit and call home.
This event will last for approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes with an interval.
About Phaedra Ensemble
Phaedra Ensemble is a London-based contemporary chamber ensemble whose work spans curation, performance, and creation – part of a ‘new breed of ensembles tearing up the rules of classical music’ (M Magazine). Beginning as a string quartet, Phaedra has now expanded into a larger, flexible ensemble. Collaborators include Caroline Shaw, Masayoshi Fujita, Laura Jurd, and singer-songwriter The Magic Lantern. They have performed across the UK, including at the Barbican Centre, the Southbank Centre, Café OTO, and Cheltenham Festival, alongside international performances at La Seine Musicale and NYU Arts Center Abu Dhabi. Broadcasts include BBC Radio 3 and France Musique.