Can you feel it? Immersive music festival inspires passion for sound
The second edition of the Surround! festival in Bruges boasts a programme of sound installations, hybrid performances and non-traditional musical interactions that lets audiences really feel what they’re listening to
Sound all around
The second edition of Concertgebouw’s Surround! festival continues the tradition by putting us punters right in the middle of the action. Concertgebouw’s artistic director, Jeroen Vanacker, explains why an immersive experience is better than a front-row seat.
“This is a totally different way of experiencing music,” he says. “The audience doesn’t just hear and see the performance. They feel it. It’s all around them.”
Each of Surround!’s four days highlights a different strategy used by contemporary artists to reach out and touch their audience. There are sound installations that are experienced individually. There are acoustic performances in which otherwise traditional musicians interact with spectators in non-traditional ways.
There are electronic performances in which the audience is surrounded by loudspeakers and showered in entirely computer-generated sounds. And finally there are hybrid performances that fuse organic and electronic elements.
This out-of-the-box approach isn’t new to the Concertgebouw. Vanacker and co inaugurated Surround! two years ago and had even earlier hosted a Cage-inspired happening that was all about pushing the artistic envelope. The venue even has a permanent collection of sound installations dubbed the Sound Factory.
Curiosity reprogrammed
Vanacker notes that children are far more receptive than adults to these installations. This he attributes to youth’s naive curiosity, a curiosity too often repressed by cultural programming that divides the sonic world into music (good) and noise (bad).
“It’s difficult to get adults to suspend their expectations,” he says, “to listen to pure sound, without composition or meaning.”
Vanacker recalls his own youthful fascination with noise. “I would listen to everything,” he says. “My favourite part of the summer holiday was hearing the coast tram cruise down the street. Its rumbling came from a distance and reached a crescendo as it passed. It was like magic.”
Fortunately for the wide-eyed child within, Vanacker pursued an arts education that allowed him to indulge his passion. His discovery of American experimental composer Cage gave him the perfect alibi. Cage effectively advocated that everyone listen like children.
As today’s generation of experimental composers stands on the shoulders of giants like Cage, Vanacker conceived Surround! as half contemporary exploration and half history lesson. He even borrowed one of the earliest artefacts of electro-acoustic music for the occasion.
The Acousmonium, built in the 1970s by French composer François Bayle, is an electronic orchestra comprised of dozens of loudspeakers of varying sizes and tonal qualities. The system will warm up with well-known archival works on 19 November before channelling new material by contemporary Dutch composer Esther Venrooy the following day.
A nod to the masters
In another nod to the old masters, Surround!’s closing night concert on 21 November sees (and hears) the Brussels Philharmonic Orchestra perform works by one of Bayle’s peers, another giant of the European avant-garde, Iannis Xenakis. The composer fled civil war in his native Greece in the late 1940s and established himself in Paris, where he championed the application of mathematical principles to music theory.
It’s difficult to get adults to suspend their expectations, to listen to pure sound, without composition
“Xenakis is dear to our hearts,” Vanacker says. “He was an architect as well as a composer, so sound and space are always linked in his works. He even wrote scores on graph paper to indicate the spatial dimension.”
After paying homage to the greats, Surround! brings us up to date with some of the latest experimentations in sound and space. The state-of-the-art Wave Field Synthesis system (pictured above) is presented alongside its precursor, the Acousmonium. Where the latter cultivates tone by selecting cabinets of differing sizes and specifications and arranging them in organic configurations, the former is all about precise geometry. Its 192 identical speakers are arranged in a perfect square around the audience and controlled by meticulous algorithms, creating a hyper-stereo effect.
The festival also boasts the world premiere of a site-specific composition by Lithuania-born, Leuven-based composer Vykintas Baltakas, created for the Concertgebouw’s Angel Room.
“The Angel Room is a special place,” says Vanacker. “In 2012, Luc Tuymans painted a mural in a side corridor, which we soon realised had very particular light and acoustic properties. It has since become its own dedicated performance space.”
There’s also the Belgian premiere of Danish composer Simon Steen-Andersen’s multimedia performance Black Box Music. Musicians surround the audience and receive direction from a conductor whose hands are hidden in a black box, the contents of which are broadcast via infrared camera.
Finally, frequent Concertgebouw collaborator Venrooy presents and defends her doctoral thesis in the context of Surround! An artist, researcher and instructor at Luca School of Arts, Venrooy has spent her entire professional life exploring the relationship between sound and space.
18-21 November, Concertgebouw, ’t Zand 34, Bruges
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