“We often think of ritual as something that happens only in sacred places, but for me, ritual is a process of mental transformation… For me, the political and the ritual are deeply connected. Both deal with how the mind is shaped and reshaped through repetition, structure, and control.”
Thanakarn Schofield
Thanakarn Schofield is a Thai composer based in New York. His work explores the fusion of sonic ritual and drama, seeking an amalgamation of multicultural influences, with particular emphasis on geographical sonic elements, historical connotations, and political contexts. Thanakarn’s compositions have been performed in more than 20 countries across Asia, Europe, and America, by ensembles and orchestras including Hong Kong New Music Ensemble, Klangforum Wien, Kluster5, Ensemble Linea, Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble, Orkest de Ereprijs, Tacet(i) Ensemble, TAK Ensemble, Residentie Orkest, Avanti! Chamber Orchestra, and Athens State Orchestra. Thanakarn was awarded the “Frank van der Wal-Fonds” Prize from Orkest de Ereprijs (2020), and was a Fromm Foundation Composer Fellow at the Composers Conference (2024); he is currently completing a DMA at the CUNY Graduate Center, having previously studied at the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague and Royal Academy of Music.
Ahead of performances with OSSIA New Music Week, Thailand Philharmonic Orchestra, Westside Chamber Players, and PinkNoise Ensemble throughout the 2025-26 season, Sofia Jen Ouyang spoke with Thanakarn about composition as transformation, layers of time, chess, censorship, “sonic ritual”, and more…
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Sofia/PRXLUDES: Hi Thanakarn! Can you talk about the sounds or ideas that you’re repeatedly drawn to when you’re composing — and how you’ve gone about exploring them?
Thanakarn Schofield: Hi Sofia! I think what I’m most drawn to in my work comes down to three aspects. First, sonic ritual. Second, politics, because where I come from is a very political country. And third, the metaphysical dimension of sound — how sound expresses itself on its own terms, and how we perceive it from our own perspective.
I currently have multiple ideas and directions I want to pursue, so I’m thinking of my work as a long-term writing process. I don’t think one idea should end with a single piece — it should be a long, continuous process. In that sense, I’m currently bringing back some old ideas or sounds from previous pieces, finding ways to develop them further, to reuse and rework them in a new way. I always discover a new hidden spectrum inside all these sounds. For example, there’s this sound I love to use: you bow on the wound strings behind the bridge, which produces this very cool noise. I notice if you play it in different positions (even a tiny bit) with different pressure, it changes this sound into different pitches, different spectrums, and different combinations of enharmonic series.
Can you say more about the kinds of sounds that fascinate you most?
The sounds that fascinate me the most are the ones that can morph — the ones that can change and transform over time, the ones that aren’t fixed. A simple example would be a harmonic on a string, or a multiphonic. But I’m usually looking for something even more specific, perhaps a sound that activates through a very particular mechanism on the instrument. In one of my pieces, ‘Transc(end) II’, I explored a technique on the electric guitar inspired by Jimi Hendrix: you pluck the string, add a vibrato, then keep hitting the body of the electric guitar with your palm to keep the vibration going through the instrument. It becomes a long, sustained tone with constant motion. You can also use a volume pedal or other effect pedals to transform the sound into something entirely different. I’m drawn to this kind of sound — ones that may seem limited at first, yet reveal infinite possibilities for transformation.
Since you mentioned ‘Transc(end) II’ and this idea of transforming sound — what kind of transformation do you tend to explore? Are you bringing out the potential of the original sound through transformation, or are you moving toward something completely new?
For me, when I work with material, it’s about observation. When we observe something, we need to give it time and space for that sonic object to exist and reveal itself. Some sounds only need ten seconds to be understood, while others that are more abstract or complex might take a minute or two. It’s about giving the sound enough time to unfold before transforming it.
For instance, imagine listening to a tape that plays continuously for two minutes. Within that same sound, maybe at one minute and thirty-two seconds, there’s a tiny crack — something subtle that appears just for a moment. I take that fragment, maybe only a few seconds long, and extend it. Then I do it again, and again — stretching, cutting, repeating — until it becomes something new, yet still born from the same material.
To me, it’s like a fractal. When you look closely, it seems different, but it’s still part of the same original pattern. That’s quite Ligeti-like in a way, but it’s also how I understand transformation. When I lived in The Hague, I often visited the Museum Escher in The Palace. Each time I discovered something new. That’s what transformation means to me — it doesn’t have to remain identical to the original, but it always carries the same DNA. In that sense, transformation isn’t about changing what something is; it’s about deepening how it can be perceived.
What is the role of the composer in this act of transformation? Are you an observer, or an actor?
This is a really, really tough question. If I have to answer it honestly, I would say there’s no role. But if you really want me to put a role, it depends on what each of us wants to do. If we look at it philosophically, we need to think about the functionality of a composer: what do we actually do as composers? Technically, we write music — we work with sound as a medium. But maybe sound is not even a medium. Maybe sound just exists on its own plane.
As we know, everything in this universe vibrates — even an atom. Even though we cannot hear sound in the space, we know vibration exists. On Earth, we hear it only because there’s air. So sound exists only in a non-vacuum; but even in a vacuum, there’s still vibration — still movement. That, to me, is fascinating. So then we need to find a container, a medium for sound. It can be something subjective — notation, duration, or other invisible structures — or something physical, like instruments or installations. Many sound artists use installations as their container for sound.
So what is the role of a composer? Are we observers? By nature, I think we should be. We observe what kind of medium we want to place our sound in. But at the same time, are we creators? I would say yes — we are co-creators. Sound already exists; all these chaotic narratives already exist in the universe. Our job is to find a pattern, a rhetoric, a form that speaks to us, and then develop that into our own creation.
And if you want to go further, a composer can be many things. You can use sound as a way to express your idiom, your belief. You can even be a protest composer. For me, my work deals a lot with censorship. One day, I hope I can talk about it more openly, but right now I can’t — not in my own country, and not even where I live now. My work speaks about the idea of censorship in many ways. My music has to be censored, and that censorship becomes the work itself. So that’s my role — I guess I’m a kind of semi-activist, in a sense. That’s my extended role as a composer.
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You’ve spoken to me about a taxonomy of time — that there are different levels of sense of time in musical works. There’s real time, imaginary time, and rhetorical time. Can you talk more about that?
Let’s say we have three senses of time: real time, imaginary time, and rhetorical time. Real time is the physical time that exists — time that moves through space. It’s what we think we can perceive, but actually it’s much more complicated. Even atoms or particles move differently in different planes, so there’s already distortion in that sense. That’s what I call real time — the physical, scientific kind of time that’s always present.
Imaginary time is more about perception, how we feel time passing. For example, when you watch a movie or spend time with people you love, time seems to move faster. But when you’re in a situation you dislike, it moves slower. I think music operates mostly in this kind of time — it’s how the mind stretches or compresses duration depending on focus and emotion. Sometimes, when you listen to very slow music — let’s say Feldman — for hours, you start to fall into a kind of trance with the sound, and those four hours pass by surprisingly fast. When your brain locks onto a single, very slow sound, it’s as if time inside your mind starts moving faster. But if I listen to Ferneyhough, ten minutes can feel like an hour. It’s so dense that your brain works harder to follow every detail. So imaginary time is not about the actual length, but how your mind experiences that length.
Then there’s rhetorical time, which I find really fascinating. It’s not about perception but about construction — how a being that’s aware of itself manipulates and organises time. It’s something that only exists in a fictional, or narrative, sense. Imaginary time can work for other animals, but not this one [rhetorical time], because rhetorical time needs an awareness of situation and structure.
Tell me more about what you mean by rhetorical time — can you give examples of how that works?
It’s a kind of time that depends on indication. For example, when you read a novel, all the descriptions, the explanations, and the storyline itself change your perception of time. A single sentence like “three years later” can suddenly move the whole narrative forward — even though that time doesn’t actually exist, it’s implied. In music, this kind of time only exists in contexts that involve a narrative, like opera, where the storyline gives structure to time itself. So rhetorical time is time as representation — time that’s shaped, organised, and reimagined through structure and narrative.
There is another sense of time that’s fascinating— a combination of rhetorical time and imaginary time. The imaginary time is what’s actually happening in real life, how you feel it unfolding; but at the same time, there’s this rhetorical sense of time. Let me give an example: in this famous Japanese manga One Piece, there is a scene in the Wano arc. It’s a very long arc — over 100 chapters. In this arc, there’s a fight scene called the Onigashima Raid. What the author, Eiichiro Oda, did is very interesting: the entire fight takes place over a single night in the story, but he spends over a year of weekly chapters describing it in detail.
Imagine reading it as it’s released: you’re following the battle week by week, for a whole year, even though in the story it all happens in a single night. So the rhetorical time — the time it takes to tell the story — is stretched across a hundred chapters, while the imaginary time within the story is just one night. This creates a kind of uncanny feeling: you realise that, within the narrative, everything happens in one night, yet it takes a whole year of reading to experience it. The density of detail stretches and twists our sense of time.
How do these processes of time — particularly intersections of these different layers of time — inform your compositional process?
These concepts of time really inspired me when I was writing music. In music, we can’t quite manipulate time in the same way — unless I’m working with something like a sound installation, where a physical object and space create their own narrative duration. Only then can rhetorical time become something real.
One piece where I was thinking seriously about that idea is ‘F.A.C.E.S.’, commissioned by the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble. It was a collaboration with my colleague, Esther Wu, and it took us about two and a half years to complete. Around that time, The Queen’s Gambit came out; it’s about a woman who becomes a world champion chess player. What struck me even more was how fiction became reality — about twenty years later, the real-life chess prodigy Judit Polgár appeared. She wasn’t the world champion, but she competed in open tournaments against the strongest male grandmasters and defeated many of them.
That story really inspired me, because I started noticing how chess players, when they’re playing, create both a rhetorical and an imaginary sense of time. Why is that? Because each opening already has a name — it already carries a kind of narrative. For example, when you play the Queen’s Gambit and your opponent responds with the King’s Indian Defense, it immediately becomes the “Indian Game”. That shift itself creates a new timeline, a new variation, a new sense of unfolding. I found that fascinating — how chess has this clear structure of openings and variations, and also a chaotic, unpredictable endgame.
So my collaborator and I decided to base the piece on a famous chess match called The Game of the Century, played by Bobby Fischer — one of the most legendary chess players in history. He was only thirteen at the time, competing in the World Chess Tournament against Donald Byrne, an older and highly respected player. For Donald, playing against a thirteen-year-old must have felt like facing a kid, so he assumed he would easily win — and that dynamic, that mentality, became an underlying idea for the piece. The piece focuses on sound, but it also carries a psychological intensity, showing what happens inside the players’ minds.
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In the performance, we had two actors representing the chess players, and their moves were projected live on a screen behind them. Every move followed the real game — Bobby Fischer versus Donald Byrne — so they had to memorise the entire sequence. Our percussionist, Karen Yu, memorised every move by heart, which was incredible. She has almost photographic memory. After the opening sequence, the performance starts moving beyond the literal game. The screen begins to shift from showing real moves to showing the players’ inner worlds — how they imagine possible moves and outcomes.
That’s where we explored three levels of time. The first is real time, when the players perform the actual opening on stage. Then comes a brief pause, the moment they stop to think. From there, the piece enters imaginary time, the mental space of calculation and possibility. But because we project that mental process on the screen, the imaginary time also becomes rhetorical time — time that’s represented and visually constructed. When inner time turns outward like that, it creates an uncanny tension, as if time is folding in on itself.
It shows how chess players think through countless variations — what we call the “million possibilities”. They’re constantly searching for the best reality within the game, and that process itself becomes the source of stress and tension. I tried to capture that in the music: the way that time stretches and tightens as thought becomes sound.
So when you say the music is the imaginary time, do you mean that the listeners are hearing the projection of the two players’ states of mind — how they experience time?
But at the same time, how they experience time is also being projected on the screen — so it’s both seen and heard by the audience. We have two layers of time happening together: the rhetorical time on the screen, and the imaginary time through the music. For me, music itself always belongs to imaginary time.
And when people are experiencing both at the same time — seeing and hearing — what do you want that to do for the audience?
I want them to feel a very unique sense of time — maybe we can call it “fantasy time”. -laughs- That’s what I want: for the audience to enter that in-between space, where the two times overlap. What I find most interesting is the counterpoint of time — how different timelines can exist together. In the piece, that reaches a point where the white player suddenly destroys the board, and everything resets. It’s like all the imagination — imaginary time collapses back into reality. After that, there’s just silence — a return to real time.
Your work ‘Recantation’, for large ensemble, explores sonic gestures and materials transforming from initially a more “vital” state into a decline, eventually unable to sustain their original form. Do you intend this process of decline to be something metaphorical beyond an exploration of sound — political, historical, spiritual?
‘Recantation’ is quite a personal piece. At the time, I was thinking a lot about the role of a composer in the context of history — about our awareness within this long continuum of spacetime, and what our function is within it. I wanted to create a piece full of quotations — to the point where no one could tell where anything came from. So I quoted from my own earlier works and from many other composers: Berio’s Sequenzas and Folk Songs, Ligeti (I won’t say which one), Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Stravinsky, a famous Danish composer based in Switzerland, Mozart, and Lutosławski, and also a trace of Shostakovich. What interested me was not their musical materials: it was how they thought about form, their ways of conceiving sound, and the historical use of gesture and structure. I tried to place these references in a kind of linear chronological flow, where one evolves into the next, forming a single thread through time.
The piece begins as a kind of mass — a dense chaos structure that gradually dissolves through different materials. The distortion doesn’t happen randomly; it moves slowly toward a state of decline and dissolution. As it unravels, I begin to rearrange the spectrum, which gradually reforms into variations of the original material. That process passes through deconstruction, deterioration, distortion — almost like a postmodern disassembly — until it arrives at the point when somehow, Beethoven emerges.
The piece itself is built on just E and A, shifting between those two tones throughout. Near the end, a faint echo of Beethoven’s Ninth comes through — not as homage, but almost as mockery. To me, that moment represents the root of time — something once monumental that has now declined and is being reformed before it dissolves again. The E and A are already telling: they are the fundamentals of two overlapping harmonic series. Eventually, those fundamentals also fade, collapsing into something smaller and smaller until the piece ends with the tiniest sound by itself.
How do these layers of quotation and structural transformation shape the emotional arc of ‘Recantation’?
For me, the piece works in two ways. Structurally, it has to end like that — it starts from chaos and slowly narrows down to something very small, but very intense. But emotionally, the tension is still there. It’s not in the sound anymore, it’s more like an energy that stays — the music keeps dissolving, again and again, but it never really disappears.
Beyond its structure, the piece is also about censorship — in both political and historical senses. What I’m trying to say is that all these quotations, all these materials, no matter what you do, in the end [are] all engulfed by time. You can’t escape that. You can’t escape the fact that your existence, your work, everything you create, will eventually be absorbed and dissolved — it becomes part of time itself, part of something larger. And that, to me, is inevitable.
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Your interest in the historical perspective often comes through as a holistic understanding of human activity and how that translates into music. Can you talk about your piece ‘Hear My Prayers’ — what is it about, and how did you go about writing it?
First of all, I have to say — by nature, I’m a pacifist. I hate war more than anything.
This may sound childish, but I often feel that the period we’re born into is an unfortunate one: we were born too late to explore the world, and we were born too early to explore the universe. Maybe because of that, I always feel that we should use our time and resources for peace — to invest in medicine, education, and technology, to improve life everywhere. But instead, we keep spending money on tanks, bombs, and weapons. When you look at military budgets, they’re enormous, but what about spending money on medicine? Education? Infrastructure? Or music and art?
‘Hear My Prayers’ began as a response to the destruction in Palestine, but it’s not only about that conflict. To me, it’s about why all this pointless stuff [repetition of war] keeps happening — sometimes because of one individual, but more often as a kind of collective act. Why do we keep letting this happen? I just wasn’t feeling happy, and for once, I decided I had to write that piece. I wrote it in 2023, during a time when I also couldn’t speak openly about political issues in my own country, so there’s a layer of self-censorship in the piece. The “prayers” are not just mine; they belong to all those suffering — especially children who have lost their families and futures to war.
‘Hear My Prayers’ was premiered by TAK Ensemble — what was the role of both the ensemble and the electronics in the piece?
The electronics use texts from survivors of different wars. One is from a Holocaust survivor; another is from a young girl who dreamed of becoming a doctor but said she couldn’t because bombs kept falling every day. There’s also a passage written by a woman who was executed for speaking about women’s rights during wartime. Her words appeared in a moment when the electronic part gradually becomes a bit clearer compared to the rest of the piece. I told the TAK Ensemble players, “You are the bad guys” — because [in the performance] they were representing the political forces, the ones in power.
I’d love to hear more about the different kinds of voices that exist in this piece. In the electronics, there are field recordings and fragments from victims of political tragedies — you also include a live soprano part. What kinds of voices or languages did you use, and how do they interact?
I used Pig Latin, because to me it’s the most nonsensical, meaningless language. The flute and bass clarinet play a lot of fast notes. For the bass clarinet, I asked the player to remove the mouthpiece and scream, or do a kind of vocal fry directly into the instrument — it’s like murmuring nonsense, as if complaining.
For the soprano, the text is based on speeches by famous politicians. I can’t say their names; we all know them. I call them actors, or gamers, because they’re performing — they play games. They say things like, “this is the best thing,” but that one sentence can kill a million people. I found that so absurd, so I transcribed their words into Pig Latin — a kind of censorship. So that’s what Charlotte Mundy, the soprano, is singing: nonsense. Her voice is doubled by the flute and bass clarinet, amplifying the emptiness of those political speeches — the absurdity of their language. Meanwhile, the violinist and percussionist represent something different. The percussionist controls the electronics, and the violinist plays bells. For me, the bells are like the wishes of the victims — they’re praying for something in life: maybe to see their parents again, or for the war to end.
We all have our own prayers, but sometimes none of them come true. It’s like when you shake a fortune box — if everything comes out at once, you get no fortune. You can’t have everything. So, to me, that means their prayers never come true. That’s the idea behind the piece — between the voices, the electronics, and everything.
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What is the relationship between these different groups of voices? Do you intend for them to blend together so that the listener feels overwhelmed, or is it more of a struggle between them?
It’s a struggle between the two. The prayers from below and the murmuring from people high above — they’re never aligned, right? Because once people become drunk with power, they only follow their own narrative. They ignore the larger, better narratives because they don’t serve their interests.
To me, that’s what we’re seeing in real life: a constant struggle between two kinds of individuals — those with power and voice, and those without, who suffer because of them. That struggle becomes a kind of murmuring, a sound that belongs to the people whose prayers are never heard.
You also mentioned in the programme note that ‘Hear My Prayers’ is a semi-ritual. What does that mean, and what would you see as ritualistic in the piece?
When we humans pray, we do it in many different ways. We often think of ritual as something that happens only in sacred places, but for me, ritual is a process of mental transformation. Take religion as an example — if you’re Christian, you go to church every Sunday and repeat the same gestures and words. That repetition is not just symbolic; it’s about transforming inner awareness over time. Spirituality, to me, is the subconscious of a person — the way consciousness shifts through repetition and reflection. So in that sense, ritual is not about belief, but about transformation.
For me, the political and the ritual are deeply connected. Both deal with how the mind is shaped and reshaped through repetition, structure, and control. In ‘Hear My Prayers’, that’s exactly what happens: the voices, the instruments, and the electronics constantly repeat, distort, and dissolve — a cycle that mirrors how ideology, power, and hope are internalised. It’s also about transforming how we experience time itself — because there’s no such thing as “forever.” Every sound, every repetition, is impermanent. The listener is drawn into that impermanence — that slow shifting of awareness.
You can also see this connection in ‘F.A.C.E.S.’, another piece where I explored how perception changes through structure and time. Interestingly, that piece became semi-political almost by accident: we had a female and a male actor reenacting a historical chess match, and it brought out questions of gender and hierarchy I hadn’t initially planned. That experience showed me how easily ritual and politics can overlap, because they are both systems that shape awareness through repetition and transformation.
So if ritual is about mental transformation, and your music often focuses on transforming sound itself — would you say that composing is also a kind of mental transformation for the listener?
I would say I don’t like the idea of manipulation, but I do like the idea that I can offer a new listening experience. Everything I’ve been talking about — what I’m working toward — I call sonic ritual. It’s a concept I’m still developing, and I can’t say I have a strong conclusion yet. It will probably take years. For me, sonic ritual includes many layers: individual awareness, sonic awareness, historical awareness, and also political awareness — all these processes that we accumulate over time. My hope is that one day I can create a piece where everything combines, where it all connects.
Right now, I’m exploring this idea through different pieces in various perspectives. Some pieces are only about sound, some are more political, and others deal with history or visual elements. I think my obstacle right now, as a composer, is that I’m still mostly fixed within sound. But when you think about artists — composers, architects, painters, sculptors — in the end, we’re all talking about form. The problem is that we often stay trapped inside our own medium. If we move beyond that — beyond just sound or visuals — and become more interdisciplinary, maybe we can reach a new kind of perspective. That’s what I’m trying to do. Maybe that’s where the answer lies. I hope it comes someday.
Are there any upcoming projects for collaborations you are especially excited about?
I have multiple! Right now, I’m writing a new piece for Thailand Philharmonic Orchestra. The piece is scheduled to premiere on 8th February 2026, and I’m really looking forward to it. I have a new piece for OSSIA New Music Week, written only for low instruments — something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. Imagine the sound of only contrabassoon, bass clarinet, double bass, bass trombone, tuba, and a harp using only its lowest strings. I’ve always wanted to explore that kind of texture and depth.
My piece ‘Recantation’ will also be performed by the Westside Chamber Players on 10th February next year in New York City. And I’m starting a new piece for PinkNoise Ensemble. I’m really excited to work with them — they’re such unique and talented musicians. I’m thinking about bringing some political ideas and visual elements into that piece as well.
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Learn more about Thanakarn’s upcoming premieres with the Thailand Philharmonic Orchestra and Westside Chamber Players:
- 8 February 2026 – Thailand Philharmonic Orchestra, Prince Mahidol Hall, Thailand
- 10 February 2026 – Westside Chamber Players, St. Paul’s Chapel, New York City
Learn more about Thanakarn Schofield and his practice:
References/Links:
- One Piece (1997-present), au. Eiichiro Oda
- The Queen’s Gambit (2020), dir. Scott Frank
- orejano, ‘The Game of the Century’ (2008), Chess.com
- Dan Heisman, ‘A Talk to Remember Coach Donald Byrne’ (2022), Chess.com
- Berio – Sequenzas (1958-2002), recorded by Ensemble Intercontemporain
- Berio – Folk Songs (1964)
- Beethoven – Symphony No. 9 (1824)
