Olivia Block

Olivia Block

A Collection of Crossings

World Premiere

2026, 45 minutes

Sound artist Olivia Block presents a rare pipe organ performance, exploring the instrument’s vast acoustic and spatial possibilities through subtle textures and sustained tones.

A Collection of Crossings emerges from Block’s interest in knot formations and braiding patterns. Thinking about these universal concepts, she attempts to translate them into a nonlinear, overlapping musical structure. The multiple organ manuals and timbral groups unique to pipe organ architecture naturally express this compositional language. A series of intervallic and melodic strands can cross over and under one another on the different manuals, changing slightly through subtle sound-color differences. This eternal knot-like formation ties itself together over time through crossing clusters and motifs.

 

Angelique Po

Gmeeoorh by Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001)

1974, 20 minutes

Organist, pianist, and continuo player Angelique Po performs Gmeeoorh, the legendary Greek-French composer/architect Iannis Xenakis' only work for organ, which was commissioned by the 1974 International Contemporary Organ Music Festival at the Hartt College of Music in the University of Hartford, Connecticut. 

Xenakis describes Gmeeoorh as "a free anagram of ORGANON", and a piece that "pursues the research of a generalisation of the melodic principle, by using linear arborescenses (clonings) undergoing various transformations such as homothetic, rotations, distortions, expansions, etc..." The resulting music stretches the sonic capabilities of whatever organ it is played on, and is not entirely playable by a single person without assistance. The composer suggests tools such as planks of wood for playing the wide spans of notes required in certain parts of the piece, assistants for "passages that are too difficult", and "ignor(ing) the notes which are off the keyboard." Sonically, Po describes the piece as the deep primal growl of a long-forgotten creature rising from the depths.

 

 

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Olivia Block