Luka Aron / Moritz von Oswald

Bells have marked the passage of time, signaled communal life, and accompanied sacred rites for centuries. Up in the Bell Tower by Luka Aron responds to this tradition from a phenomenological perspective: a resonant force felt in the body, shaping our perception of time and space. Bells recorded in Venice, Stockholm and Aron’s home village in the Black Forest are juxtaposed with physically-modeled digital counterparts; bells cast in code rather than metal, their density, geometry, and harmonic structure remapped. Some remain close to traditional iron and bronze; others are imagined in impossible alloys. By isolating the internal sonic 185 architecture – interacting partials, slow pulses, emergent melodic cycles – the piece reveals micro temporal phenomena typically obscured by distance and ambience. Departing from his previous work in just intonation, Aron focuses here on the unstable inharmonic spectra of bells. Tuning becomes a form of searching: for order within asymmetry, for poise within sway. Referencing seventeenth-century English change ringing and the indeterminate phasing of free-swinging bells, the piece operates between permutation and unpredictability.

This special live version of Moritz von Oswald’s Silencio with Cappella Marciana unfolds along the continuum of ensemble experimentation shaped by Edgard Varèse, György Ligeti and Iannis Xenakis. Subtle dissonances of tuning, fluctuations in timing, and minute textural shifts become exposed, as the organic micro-instabilities of the human voice encounter the implacable precision of machines. Composed in von Oswald’s Berlin studio on classic synthesisers (EMS VCS3, AKS, Prophet V, Oberheim 4-Voice, Moog Model 15) and transcribed into choral scores by Berlin-based Finnish composer Jarkko Riihimäki, these twin processes converge live. Cappella Marciana’s layered harmonics engage directly with the electronic systems that originally generated the material. Silencio occupies a suspended zone neither fully electronic nor fully vocal. In its continuous reconfiguration, repetition and reduction give rise to a new form of deep listening.