This silent music

Co-Creators of This Silent Music, Katy Avery and Liz Lang

This Silent Music Reframes the Impulse to Scream into the Void

Three World Premieres Turn Philadelphia's James Turrell Skyspace into a New Ritual of Collective Listening

August 8, 2026 • Philadelphia

PHILADELPHIA, PA – July 15, 2026 – In a cultural moment defined by outrage, algorithmic overload, and collective exhaustion, This Silent Music proposes something almost radical: listening. Created specifically for Philadelphia’s James Turrell Skyspace, the interdisciplinary performance inaugurates a new ritual, bringing together three world premiere commissions that reimagine silence, light, and sound as the language of collective listening. On August 8, 2026, at 7:30pm, audiences become part of an immersive performance where music, architecture, and community converge in an act of witness.

The premiere will take place inside one of only 100 James Turrell Skyspaces worldwide. As daylight fades into dusk, the changing sky becomes an active element of the performance, transforming Turrell’s architectural environment into a visual counterpart to the music. Reflecting the architecture itself, the works abandon the traditional use of piano in favor of marimba, glassy auxiliary percussion, and oud, creating a sound world conceived specifically for the space and disrupting the expected language of a classical concert.

Co-creators Katy Avery and Liz Lang arrive at This Silent Music having spent years creating interdisciplinary projects that examine identity, embodiment, and the ways contemporary audiences experience sound. Avery’s recent commissioning initiatives – including Bombe Fits and a forthcoming exploration of body image through female-identifying performers – continue her interest in collaborative vocal performance. Lang’s projects Prohibition and Rooted similarly blend classical and genre-bending experimentation, cultural history, and social inquiry.

This Silent Music builds on that shared artistic practice. Supported by the International Foundation for Contemporary Music through Avery’s Cortona Sessions Fellowship, the collaborators are creating an experience that asks how ritual, attention, and community might help us navigate the psychological conditions of contemporary life.

“We’re living through a moment when many people feel simultaneously overwhelmed and disconnected,” said Creative Director Katy Avery. “Every part of this project resists speed – the commissioning process, the venue, the pacing of the music itself. That felt increasingly urgent to us in a culture that rewards reaction over contemplation.”

Anchoring the program are three world premiere commissions: a duet by transmasculine composer LJ White incorporating sonified black hole data from astrophysicist Becka Phillipson; a song cycle by Hawaiian-based Mieke Doezema confronting ecological loss through natural soundscapes shaped by thelegacy of colonialism; and a song cycle by Lebanese composer Alex Wakim and poet George Abud that melds Arabic tonality and instrumentation with Western techniques, using tension and resolve as an act of cultural uncovering.

At a moment when public life rewards noise over nuance, This Silent Music offers an antidote to cultural numbness by treating collective listening not as a passive consumption, but as a radical public act.

Press Contact: Katy Avery
Katy Avery Commissioning Projects
Tel: 316.640.2904 • Email: katyaverysoprano@gmail.com