For Organ, feedback, spatialized loudspeaker array, and variable ensemble

In collaboration with Ragnhild May

Celebrating the consecration of the Florence Cathedral, Guillaume Dufay composed the motet Nuper Rosarum Flores in 1436. Using spatial proportions derived from the dimensions of the Temple in Jerusalem as described in I Kings, every parameter of the work — pitch, duration, form — was composed to initiate an alternative spatial order: one present but unseen. As Dufay’s composition resounded throughout the Dome, the mystical space of the Biblical Temple was summoned within the strictly euclidean space of the church.

Some 400 years later a young Yves Klein, while wandering the streets of Paris, imagined awesome invisible buildings suspended above the city — so marvelous that they even rivaled the splendor of the city’s palaces that line the Seine. Soon thereafter, he would begins his investigations into “Air Architecture” — a project in Klein’s output of great variety. From blueprints of future homes that consisted entirely of pressurized air, to the abstract geometries formed by hundreds of Yves-Klein-blue Balloons released into the sky, Klein became fixated by rhe idea of imagining and materializing figures in air.

Throughout her multifaceted practice, Maryanne Amacher used sound to create and explore ephemeral spatialities. Through “tuning” buildings with large loudspeaker arrays and creating invisible shapes in air with extreme electronics, sound became the means by which various spaces — acoustic, psychoacoustic, imaginary — were articulated and instantiated.

Drawing on this lineage Ragnhild May and Stefan Maier prioritize space as the primary parameter of their collaborative compositional work. Here, the temporal constitution of Euclidean, conceptual, and perceptual spaces becomes central, as traditionally foregrounded musical parameters take a secondary role.

Bellows uses cathedrals as a site for this work. May and Maier distribute loudspeakers and large subwoofers variably throughout multiple rooms looking for nodes and resonances from disparate acoustic spaces. Rooms become the sounding chambers for Maier’s electronic drones and May’s selfmade instruments. Here, the building is instrumentalized: it is literally performed upon — sub frequencies travel through walls, shaking loose fixtures and door handles; high frequencies pass through multiple rooms, taking on unique resonant characteristics before reaching listeners.