C O N C E R T F O R A S P A C E A N D T I M E ( 2 0 2 6 )
Performed by Ars Nova Copenhagen and Århus Sinfonietta (4, 8)
Conducted by Mathias Skaarup Sørensen
Concert for a Space and Time (2019, rev. 2024), for choir and string quintet.
Composed by Lil Lacy. Text by Lil Lacy and Sonja Ferdinand.
Sung in Danish with English translation
Concert for a Space and Time is a 60 min. site-specific alternative Christmas concert written for choir and 5 string players, exploring the space and atmosphere of a shopping and congress center.
First, the piece focuses on the material functions and concrete aspects of the place; the stairs, the escalators, the floor....
Then it moves into the material; wood, steel, glass...
Then deeper into the consistency of the material warm, cold, hard, soft, and beyond to the time before the material; the time before the glass became glass; into the smaller components such as silica, limestone, and quartz sand... and on to the sound of the waves rolling over the sand...
The voices move throughout the center at the beginning of the piece, and the sound of the strings will at one point come from many different directions.
At another point the sound of the voices makes the air in the center's passage vibrate with beatings, the resonance lifts the awareness from the material around us to the material inside us and levitates the experience into connectedness across time, life, and death. The ending of the piece connects to the sunset, the change of colors in the sky, and the ending of yet another day.
The piece is a tribute to the opening of one’s awareness of the surroundings and people with whom we share the same air, space, and time. Concert for a Space and Time invites a new appreciation of the moment right now, right here.
'You might think of Christmas as a time for coming together with people. You might also think of shopping centres as an integral part of Christmas. But you probably don’t think of shopping centres as places for intimate interpersonal connection. They’re a necessary evil, but too commercial, too LED-lit and hardedged for any truly mindful experience. However, with her ‘alternative Christmas concert’, Concert for a Space and Time, the Danish-American composer Lil Lacy, alongside the librettist and playwright Sonja Ferdinand, has completed that circle.
Composed in 2019, Concert for a Space and Time was conceived for the Scandinavian Center, Aarhus – a modernist convention centre, shopping centre and hotel situated next to Musikhuset Aarhus – where it was first performed by Ensemble Edge and Århus Sinfonietta. Two years earlier, Lacy had given a concert here, one of a series she arranged for public spaces, and had fallen in love with the setting. After her father passed away in April 2018, she had the idea to make a work that brought into this place the values of presence and connectivity by which he had lived. ‘His view of the world was about working with the energy connecting people, opening up your awareness, being present in the moment now,’ Lacy explains. ‘My father was from the United States, and one of the reasons he really loved to come to Denmark was the fact that some societal values and collective awarenesses were very different from where he had grown up and what his culture originally had taught him.’
The weeks before Christmas, Lacy continues, are a time when we, inevitably, become more materialistic and somewhat tunnel-visioned, buying gifts and ticking off tasks. But the idea behind Concert for a Space and Time is ‘not to say it’s necessarily wrong to go and buy a gift for your family. The message is not that shopping centres are bad.’ Instead, the piece is an invitation to increase our awareness and perhaps find a different perspective on what is around us and what is happening here and now.’
- by Tim Rutherford-Johnson
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