Undertones

Our ears are the only sensory organ that never shuts off, even in sleep. The background hum of our everyday lives may only register on a subconscious level, but it shapes our experience of place and well-being.

Undertones is a performance project that juxtaposes a chamber version of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony with aleatoric works by John Cage in order to bring the ways our ears shape our experience and relationship with the world around us to the fore. Beyond their love of nature, both composers confronted the potency and absence of sound; Cage in his radical explorations of ambient sound and "silence", and Beethoven through an imaginative muscle shaped by the devastation of his hearing loss. Together they ask a deceptively simple question: What does it mean to really listen to the world we inhabit?

Drawing on acoustic ecology and historical performance practice, Undertones approaches listening as a form of relationship: To listen is to participate in a system larger than oneself. In blurring the lines between past and present, noise and music, the performance invites musicians and listeners alike to ask how the way we listen shapes who we become.

In collaboration with stage director Carmen C. Kruse, Échappée imagines Undertones as an immersive experience, in which visual layers invite a heightened awareness of sonic space. By using lighting to engage with the nuances of sound perception, subtle tensions between hearing, seeing, and imagination emerge. A playful spatial approach invites audiences to explore new ways of listening and to experience the familiar in unfamiliar ways.

Échappée developed and performed an initial pilot of Undertones while Ensemble in Residence at the inaugural Constellation Symposium: Music and the Land (October 2025) with mentoring by John Eliot Gardiner.