Hall of Mirrors, Sarah Davachi – “Tower Thoughts” Carillon New Music Festival

Описание: Hall of Mirrors (2022)
Sarah Davachi (b. 1987)
Chicago premiere
Tiffany Ng, carillon

Hall of Mirrors first began in 2018 when I was approached by Tiffany Ng, who commissions new works for carillon and electronics. She is also the performer of the instrument in the album recording…. Although it is ostensibly a keyboard instrument, the carillon is an incredibly fascinating and unusual mechanism to compose for due to its sheer physicality and presence. I focused primarily on the lower registers of the bells, and have allowed the lowest bell to ring out unadorned on several occasions in this piece. Bells have a unique spectral presence, at once both consonant and dissonant, and in the case of larger and heavier bells, these properties are very easily perceptible as the sound dissipates slowly across a vast listening space. Compositionally, I maintained a very basic structure in this piece according to the (perhaps counterintuitive) principle that it would then create a singular and unified sonic object within which specific underlying dissonant harmonics could more easily become isolated, overlapped, reinforced, and amplified in predictable ways. In order to maintain a common point of departure, I also incorporated a series of sine tones, generated from the diapason fundamental of an electric organ, to accompany the carillon. This piece is best suited for larger carillons, and given its prevalence of both major and minor third intervals would produce very different results on meantone carillons, of which there are numerous extant examples.

—Sarah Davachi

Hall of Mirrors opens Davachi's critically-acclaimed album Two Sisters, selected by A2IM as 2022 Self-Released Record of the Year.

The Tower Thoughts Carillon New Music Festival presented 44 pieces from the 21st century, including 6 new commissions by Rockefeller Chapel and 11 world premieres in total. Three guest artists from around the world, together with University of Chicago carillonists, performed five concerts over the course of a weekend, May 9-11, 2025. Additionally, the tower was given a voice, the live voice of a human, broadcast out the bell chambers via four large speakers. With this voice, between every piece, the tower shared a snippet of its life, a glimpse of what it’s seen, heard, felt, and thought about since 1928, a brief, fleeting tower thought. This festival, devised by Alex Johnson, the 7th University Carillonist of the University of Chicago, is the second Carillon New Music Festival in Chicago History. The first was Ripple Effects, produced in 2018, devised by Joey Brink, the 6th University Carillonist.

Recording by C W Media.