Over three nights in a New York church, InfraSound Ensemble NYC explored Sofia Gubaidulina’s music through voice, instruments, and improvisation. What began with sound and its physical body gradually expanded into transformation, memory, death, spirituality, and prayer. By listening deeply, I experienced the “abyss” that opened up within it.

Gubaidulina at the Edge of the Abyss

Three Days of Music in New York

New York contemporary music ensemble InfraSound presents The Edge of the Abyss, a three-day festival exploring the music and legacy of Sofia Gubaidulina. In the resonant space of a Times Square chapel, sound, the physicality of instruments, voice, silence, and prayer come together. Alongside performances, the festival features a panel discussion and a community improvisation. How far can sound carry our consciousness? This is an invitation not simply to hear Gubaidulina’s music, but to journey beyond sound itself.

At TIME:SPANS 2026, I challenged myself to listen—and discovered the pleasure of simply listening. Across twelve concerts of mostly new music, music lost its shape, while the spaces between sounds and their resonances gently stirred the mind. Collapse and renewal. Listening to the inside of sound. We stop thinking and simply listen. The composer gives something to sound, the performer brings it forth through the body, and the listener receives it. Within that cycle, music returns once again to sound.

TIME:SPANS 2026 #12 — Talea Ensemble and conductor James Baker in the U.S. premieres of Rebecca Saunders’s Scar (Triptych II) and Skull (Triptych III). These two works are the second and third parts of Saunders’s Triptych. The first work, Skin, was performed by the same Talea Ensemble two years ago. In other words, this time, Scar and Skull, following Skin, were performed, completing Saunders’s three-part cycle, written between 2016 and 2023, in performances by the same Talea Ensemble. It was a journey into Saunders’s world, exploring scars shaped by sound, and then the skull beneath them.

Haas’s in vain: a precisely broken orchestra unfolds strange sounds for 60 minutes, moving between darkness and light.

TIME:SPANS 2026 #10 — American Modern Opera Company

Sciarrino’s Stupori and Hersch’s Carrion-Miles to Purgatory made me hear disappearance. In Sciarrino, meaning gradually peeled away from language until voice, breath, overtones, resonance, and silence became a single sonic entity. In Hersch, the world expanded from death, Purgatory, and Hell to the body, the earth, God, and finally the city itself, until that world collapsed.

TIME:SPANS 2026 #9 — Pamela Z

August 18, 2026

A program that condensed nearly 40 years of Pamela Z’s work into a single performance, from works dating from 1986 to 2024.

Pamela Z performed a program of short solo voice works with real-time electronic processing, sampled sounds, and wireless gesture controllers.

TIME:SPANS 2026 #8 — International Contemporary Ensemble. They presented a diverse picture of contemporary music today.

In Sonicscape, the patterns of sound I experienced seemed to emerge from Sarah’s deepest inner world, and they ultimately transcended the sonic worlds of Manoury and Mark Andre.

It made me rethink what sound is, what an instrument is, and what performance is. There, my awareness expanded beyond the traditional timbres of instruments toward acoustic phenomena, the body, electronic sound, space, and everything that exists between them.

It also reminded me once again that composers write music because there are instruments they love.

What are you listening to? A new composer tells me.

Mark Andre’s music with this ensemble is to construct an acoustic space through a unique combination: Ning Yu at the piano, two specialists in electronic sound, Michael Acker and Joachim Haas, and the more than half-century-long tradition of electronic music at the SWR Experimentalstudio in Freiburg. Together, they create a sonic environment in which the acoustic piano, live electronics, and Freiburg’s accumulated knowledge of electronic sound become inseparable parts of Andre’s musical world.

What Is Passed from Composer to Composer, from Performer to Composer. The Parker Quartet worked by Kurtág and Farrin.

A Summer Saturday Night with Haas and JACK Quartet Was Like Trying to Catch an Eel.

Timespans 2026 has begun. At the first concert, I heard a piece that kept chasing form.

On August 7 at Alice Tully Hall, Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted a joint orchestra of students from Juilliard and London’s Royal Academy of Music.

I went to hear Stravinsky, Berg, and Bartók

But somewhere during the concert, I stopped thinking about the music as something poetic, intellectual, or visual

I began to hear the physical reality of sound itself.

Salonen did not seem to move the orchestra from the outside. He allowed the musicians to generate sound from within—to breathe, listen, and move together while remaining free.

The students played with extraordinary concentration. Every sound seemed to have a place, a weight, a direction.

And as the music unfolded, I found myself asking a much simpler question

What is sound?

Hanna-Elisabeth Müller’s voice brought the timeless resonance of Mozart to Tanglewood.

I traveled to Tanglewood in the summer to meet HIMARI.

After the World Cup ended, Astorians lingered in the gentle summer twilight, embraced by the river breeze.
At Wylie’s, alcohol, music, and human voices continued to resonate, creating their own small symphony.

Elegance and Vulnerability

A Time When Lost Memories Return.

Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center

Chloé Van Soeterstède, conductor

Simone Lamsma, violin