CTM 2026: Sarah Davachi & Ellen Arkbro

This evening unfolds as a deep listening encounter with resonance. Moving between organ traditions, extended tuning systems and durational attention, sound is treated less as event than as environment, revealing the fragile balance between control and instability, structure and vibration. Meticulous harmonic structures meet the physical realities of breath and space, allowing tones to slowly reconfigure. Sarah Davachi opens with the A/V solo organ performance »Double Reeds,« extending her ongoing investigations into resonance and duration and pairing layered organ tones with a film by Los Angeles filmmaker Dicky Bahto, amplifying the sense of architectural immersion. The work treats the organ as a portal, unfolding dense harmonic fields where overtones slowly reveal themselves.

Premiering the results of her CTM × Somerset House × Goethe-Institut commission, Ellen Arkbro performs alongside The London Crumhorn Consort in a new work for reed organ and crumhorns. Developed during her early 2025 residency in London, the piece continues Arkbro’s inquiry into finely tuned harmonic architectures. The performers lean into the trembling nature of fully in-tune sound, listening and sounding as a single body. Working with seven-limit just intonation, they hold tones attempting to create stable compositional blocks almost like a synthesizer, juxtaposed with the crumhorn’s inherently unruly breath-bound nature — a buzzy timbre and rich resonance which resists perfect steadiness. The music’s core is found in that tension between the unreachable ideal of a pure tone and the effort required to approach it.