“It’s really about having built care and trust for each other — which is really important in this kind of collaboration. It’s this trust that allows me to come to them and say “this is my idea”. I can trust them with that, and they can have faith in my ideas.”
Danya Pilchen
Danya Pilchen is a Ukrainian composer based in The Hague. Danya’s compositional interests lie in the human experience of time and music’s ability to shed light on it, with music for solo, ensemble, orchestra, theatre productions, and immersive sound installations that incorporate instrumental performances. Danya’s music is closely intertwined with his research into collective experiences of time in musical practices. Danya’s work has been commissioned and showcased by organisations such as Orgelpark, Klangraum, Studio LOOS, Bučení 7 Festival, Kirkos, Trixie The Hague, CELLAR DOOR London, and many others; he has a longstanding collaboration with Kali Ensemble, and has released albums on Edition Wandelweiser and Moving Furniture Records. Danya studied at Royal Conservatoire The Hague and Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory with Yannis Kyriakides, Jan van de Putte, and Yuri Kasparov, and was awarded a Research Grant from Makersregeling Arts and Culture Council of the City of The Hague in 2023.
Danya’s latest album Paper Braids, commissioned by Orgelpark and performed by Kali Ensemble, was released on Moving Furniture Records in March 2026. Patrick Ellis spoke with Danya over Zoom about computer-controlled organs, long-term collaborations, Wandelweiser, and developing a listening practice, plus more…
Header photo by Yinquan Chen
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Patrick/PRXLUDES: Recently, you had an album out on Moving Furniture Records, which features a site-specific work that was commissioned by Orgelpark in Amsterdam and was written for Kali Ensemble. Could you please tell me about the commission, as well as some of the ideas that were behind that piece?
Danya Pilchen: There were two currents that came together. On one hand, with my practice with Kali Ensemble, we have a lot of interest in working with room acoustics; developing pieces that are site-specific, and aim to make the acoustics of a space audible. This area of my practice got its current shape during my residency at Studio LOOS in The Hague (which unfortunately doesn’t exist anymore) in 2023. Then, we had a large residency where we really developed our tools for how to analyse the room acoustic — by recording the room at different points, analysing the spectra, and finding ways to create a listening practice that envelops the knowledge of the space.
And then on the other hand, they had a bunch of organs at Orgelpark. Two of the organs in particular are computer-controlled. The older one can be controlled via MIDI, and what that does is it can send on and off signals to start a note, and control the register. This can either be played by a digital keyboard, or you can generate different algorithms where you can send signals continuously.
Meanwhile, the other one (the Utopa Baroque Organ) — which is more cutting-edge — is controlled by OSC signals on a mechanical level with much finer detail. This is controlled by a hyperorgan console: it can control not just the notes and the registration, but also the air pressure. You can create patterns of different pulses, including tremolo patterns, and you can send continuous signals that you always see, which are more advanced than MIDI. If you are writing a piece in the space, then you can combine the two organs together, and you can create athe sonic pattern that no other organ can. There are other hyperorgans around the world, for example in Sweden and Canada, but I think that, especially in a space such as Orgelpark, it is completely unique.
I think that I was lucky [to have this opportunity]. When I was still studying in the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague, we had a project hosted by Orgelpark and the composition department, mentored by Trevor Grahl and Calliope Tsoupaki, as well as Pepe Garcia from percussion ensemble HIIT. And that was my first experience working with the hyperorgan, and so that’s what I think helped me approach Orgelpark with more formed ideas for this project.
When you went back to work at Orgelpark for a second time, did you have a fair awareness of what you were going to do with the space?
Absolutely. It was all planned in a much deeper way. The first experience [working at Orgelpark] was much more of a door opening for me to see that there was a whole ocean of possibilities — you can explore all of the different instruments, the elements of the space. It [Orgelpark] used to be a church; so there is a large central space, but there are also tiny rooms and cavities that you can use to create a spatial experience.
I came up with the idea that I would use the tools that I had explored before: in particular, using acoustic feedback to generate an acoustic “map” of the space. We did this first at Studio Loos [with Kali Ensemble], and then again with a more technical project as part of a sound installation named Ample Space Between. And so during those projects, I had developed a technical toolkit, which I then brought into the second Orgelpark project.
I began the recording with these feedback sweeps: going from a narrow band of a band-pass filter, going through all of the frequency range — from the low to the high — and recording which frequencies have a response. And then, if you have a microphone and a speaker facing each other with some sort of distance between them, you create this internal system with feedback, and it catches the specific wavelengths of how the space is reacting to a particular sound. Afterwards, I would then think of how to use the hyperorgan, as well as the other organs in the space, to trigger these resonances. That was my idea.
What are some of the methods that you brought forward into Paper Braids? And what were some of the tools that you left behind?
What I have learned from these projects is that I don’t need a super high level of precision for spatial analysis. That’s why you would have tools like impulse response1, or a more traditional sine sweep; and then analysing that, they are much more precise than the feedback sweep that we were using. The thing with the feedback sweep is that it gives you [an] immediately audible sonic result, which you can later refine with computer analysis… It is a less precise way to analyse the acoustics, but it works.
At the end of the day, what I am looking for is a listening experience. Going from that project at Orgelpark two years prior, to the sound installation piece… I had learnt that I can record an initial feedback sweep, and use a simple software tool (Praat) to find the peaks; and then I can test whether these results are robust — if I can use them in a composition — and then I am satisfied. What I have learnt is how to cut out the fine details that are not that important, in order to be much faster when working on these kinds of pieces. Being much faster and busier with composing, listening and workshopping with these musicians… I think that’s what I have learnt.
You have developed quite a close-knit practice with Kali Ensemble. How did this collaborative partnership begin?
We have been working closely together since 2021 — which was when Nirantar Yakthumba first invited me to write for them. It was a really wonderful experience; by working with Nirantar, we became close friends. Back then, the project was for a much smaller-scale piece compared to what we would do later on, but I really wanted to test out some ideas with them.
At the time, they were on a Residency with Studio LOOS, and they invited me — as well as a few [other] composers — to write for them. I wanted to write a few ideas; working with the kind of internal time perception that is communicated from one musician to another through certain listening rules that created a listening practice. During our first workshop together, we experimented with a lot of different ideas: listening to how long it takes for a sound to decay, and then using that as a measure for time — or using breathing as a time measure. I found a really great response from them. They were really open to working in a collaborative and practice-based way, which really suited my approach to composing.
How did that working relationship continue?
From then on, we continued to talk about music and tried different things. I started writing a series of shorter pieces for them that all dealt with the same idea: listening to the tails [ed. the ending or the decay] of a sound, and weaving together the very moment that you stop hearing a sound, with the start of another. Then with the Studio Loos residency, I began developing two more central ideas: one using the acoustic feedback — first to prolong these tails, to make them more audible; and [then to] translate the internal practice within the ensemble into something that the listener can hear — into something that can become less esoteric.
A lot of the feedback that I was getting from people at the time was: “I can see that the performers are very attentive and they are listening intently — and what they are playing is very intentional — but as [a] listener, I can’t understand what that intention is and what I am meant to be listening out for”. It’s like looking into a night sky, and trying to see the stars, but you have to wait for around half an hour for your eyes to adjust. It’s similar to the listening practice that I have been building with Kali Ensemble — it takes time to get into it. So I was thinking about how, within the context of a single performance, I can open a door into this practice. So I started to use amplification to highlight the details with the decaying sounds. Where I would tinker with the brightness of the stars… -laughs-
You also developed an idea with Kali Ensemble at Studio LOOS, where you were exploring the spatial sonorities of glass vases…
Yes. It was to use large glass vases as resonating objects where they trap the sound inside of them, and it becomes this “room within a room”. The glass vessel has a more audible and particular acoustic response than that of a larger room. At first, we would just place a few of these glass vessels in a room and amplify them — so you could hear the acoustic response of much smaller spaces, and the feedback in a larger space — and maybe that link would create a higher awareness of how the sound travels through the room.
That idea led further into Ample Space Between. That [project] brings together a sound installation where I work with these glass vessels, with feedback that was generated inside of them. Then there were also two solo pieces that I wrote for clarinet and double bass with electronics inside the installation; and I did another piece with composer and sound engineer, Gregor [Connelly], who helped me build the installation. So it was an installation as a kind of manufactured space, and then the performance had the sounds put inside that space. I’m really grateful and indebted to them; it’s a huge privilege to have a long-term collaboration that can continuously grow as a partnership.
It feels like you’ve developed a strong long-term partnership with Kali Ensemble. Can you tell me what it is about these kinds of collaborations that you value in your practice?
It’s really about having built care and trust for each other — which is really important in this kind of collaboration. It’s this trust that allows me to come to them and say “this is my idea”. I can trust them with that, and they can have faith in my ideas. I’m not going to ask anything if they might be unwilling to do so. It’s really this kind of mutuality that’s important to really allow my work to blossom in this environment.
Sometimes I feel in the new music world, a lot of this trust has been supplemented with decorum, or formalising relationships between composers and performers, in an attempt to save time and be more efficient. Nowadays, you get a commission and then you get two rehearsals, which are both forty minutes long, and then you have a premiere at the end. I’ve written for groups where you are not allowed to talk to a musician personally — and instead you have to talk to a conductor during the break of a rehearsal. There are these formalities of what you are expected to be in this scenario. I think because we are so afraid of our trust being broken in these contexts, they create these formalised environments. With Kali Ensemble, they are doing the complete opposite.
I think that often the best work is created when you are afforded more time to experiment with ideas and are in a more relaxed environment. Would you agree with that?
Absolutely. As composers, we are incentivised to go down a career building path by seeking out as many opportunities as possible — especially if you are trying to make money from composing. I hate to be judgmental about it all, but it ends up generating a lot of monotonous work, because the composers need to play it safe to get their next commission; or they need to be able to explain what they do in a very formulaic way to the people who pay for these commissions (who aren’t always musicians).
But then, to also come to a collective of musicians… [in this system] they have barely any time to actually get to know the composer — so the composer also has to be safer with how they write and what sort of ideas they bring to the table. So I really think that it’s a great idea to build these long lasting relationships.
How was it getting Paper Braids onto a record? Did you know early on that you would put the piece onto a release?
No, it was actually completely coincidental. One of the audience members at the premiere was a mutual friend, and they recommended my piece to Orphax aka Sietse van Erve (who runs Moving Furniture Records), and then he asked me for the recording. I was also very lucky that the demo that I sent over was recorded in fantastic quality. In Orgelpark, they have an amazing engineering team — Clare Gallagher helped us with the live sound, and Bert van Dijk did the recording and the mastering using lots of microphones — which meant that it was perfect for release.
It’s refreshing to hear that everything just fell into place.
Definitely. There was also barely any audience noise during the performance, which I am very fortunate for. The thing about that piece is that it really differs from one performance to the next, because it’s really based on the musicians listening to what is happening in the space.
The score is very open. It’s written as a virtual “map” that is created with the pitches of the frequency response of the space. There are certain rules around that: for example, using “dead ends” where they can wander in and then have to go back to earlier material. So what they did is they listened to the sounds of the space, trying to match the pitch, but then they can’t just play that pitch — they have to find a way around that — which is how you get the melodies.
And then on the other hand, the hyperorgan is controlled algorithmically, and it also takes some input from the microphones to help start and stop the processes. So it really has a lot of moving parts. With that second performance of the piece, I was really happy with the way that it went, and I didn’t want to make a special recording for a release — I just wanted people who liked that specific version.
Paper Braids is the second album that you released. Your first album was released through Edition Wandelweiser, named two songs. anne, germaine, seamus, koen, danya.
That’s right. two songs was written in 2022, and it was released in 2023. It’s strange, because in a way there is a similar process, but if you compare the two pieces [ed. two songs and Paper Braids], they sound very different from each other.
With the Wandelweiser release, I also had a very personal relationship and collaboration with the musicians. There was Anne La Berge, who I knew as a teacher at the Royal Conservatoire. I came to her with the idea for this piece, and then I also approached Seamus Cater, who I did a masters with and had previously performed a shorter piece of mine. From them, we ended up approaching Koen Nutters and Germaine Sijstermans to be musicians for the piece.
It was a really personal experience for me, because when I began writing the piece, it was April 2022 — right after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. I couldn’t think about music for the first month. I wasn’t really in a state to just sit down and write a complete work. So what happened is I would bring sketches to the musicians, and we would try things out.
I think two songs was the first experience for me to create a piece with this level of collaboration. I had previously worked with Kali Ensemble before, but at that time [I was] just bringing a complete piece to them and then working on it. But with this project, it really started from sketches and workshopping. During these sessions, I would play with them on the piano: we weren’t improvising together, but it was me putting myself inside of the ensemble, so it was a bit therapeutic for me. I also received an insane level of support from them during that moment, which was really special and it really informed my later work.
We then premiered the piece in April 2022, and then later during the summer, we decided to meet again and record the piece. The premiere and recording were made at Splendor, Amsterdam, which was made possible by Anne. A good friend of mine, Hidde Kramer, helped record, edit and master the release. Afterwards, I brought it over to Antoine [Beuger] from Wandelweiser, who I have a long-standing connection with, and he was really positive about my release. So in a way, it was my first experience to get deeply into collaborative composition with a group of musicians.
On the thread of collaboration: have there been any other close-knit projects with other groups or musicians?
I think what really informed or inspired this approach for me was an experience I had in the summer of 2021 at the Klangraum Festival in Dusseldorf. Antoine Beuger organises [the festival] every summer; it’s two weeks during the summer, split in two with separate musicians and audience members — but [throughout the festival] the same programme gets repeated five times in a row in a different order.
I proposed the piece to Antoine in 2020 (the year prior to the performance). There were no rules about what you had to bring; but what I wanted to [bring something] as a listener and [a] participant, because what happens at Klangraum Festival is that everybody can join in with an instrument or voice. So when a composer offers an open score, then anybody can join in. Of course, a lot of people come with their own established practices, where they are just performing their own work, and there are performers coming with an hour-long programme and they play it.
But I was really interested in creating a piece for that specific environment — being very open and having the work invite performers, whilst having the pieces being played for five days in a row. It was not just an immersive or a collaborative performance, but I feel having a chance to get the piece performed five days in a row with largely the same people joining in… Of course, there were some different performers each day — but that really helped me to see the whole journey of the piece over the five days.
Admittedly, it wasn’t as close knit as the previous two works that I’ve mentioned, but I think that what happened for me there helped me enter a larger-scale practice that Antoine helped kick off with his festival. In some ways, that piece was really open, but it also really demanded a high level of trust and attention from one person to another, to understand where the boundaries are.
Two years later, I came with a different participatory piece of mine where there was a moment where a person from the audience didn’t quite get where my boundary was with trusting each other, and entering the same kind of space. I wouldn’t say that there was a “conflict”, but there was a misunderstanding. There is a high degree of vulnerability in this kind of relationship. But it is this part of the Wandelweiser ethos that really inspired my later work.
A lot of people associate Wandelweiser with a certain aesthetic, which I think on some level was true at one point. There are a lot of people who like very silent and fragile, careful sounds, that require attentive listening in a meditative state — which I think is great. But for a lot of people outside of it, they just see it as a certain aesthetic of long soft notes with pauses between them… -laughs- There is a social dynamic and a collectivist ethos in it that I find very appealing, and I wish to explore that further in my own work.
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How do you want to push that further? You told me that you have a few more records coming up…
There are plans to make a record for my piece, Ample Space Between, and we are going to release it in the autumn of this year. It’s going to be a recording of the sound installation — based on the glass vessels in an organised space with a feedback loop going inside of them — and then two pieces: the double bass solo piece and the clarinet, which are interlaced with the recordings of the installation. That will come out on Donemus Records.
Will there be more planning on the production side of things for these upcoming releases?
I was thinking about how I can package the experience of a sound installation into an album format. I was very curious about combining the two very different temporal experiences in the same one work: one having some kind of consistent sound field where you can walk around, leave and go again — so your attention to it doesn’t have to be so intense — the idea of how you can experience the space by walking around. Then, on the other hand, you have a performance where the audience comes in; and we have placed rugs, pillows and cushions for them to sit down and be immersed in the experience.
Obviously, I couldn’t create the same sort of experience — in terms of the spatial awareness, or the temporal experience of being in a space with an installation or performance. And so I put in the same level of contrast between two musical environments. So what I did in the album was have shorter tracks [for the] installation itself that have a consistent quality, with some repetitions. Very unemotional, in a way. -laughs- But then you get into the next piece, which is very distinct.
Since it was impossible to create a contrast between two kinds of time experience, I decided to recreate the same contrast by using different kinds of musical textures. Using more serene and repetitive fragments from the installation itself and then the parts where the instruments come in, playing with the installation, there are two different sonic textures that are created — firstly with the double bass and then with the clarinet.
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Tell me about what you have coming up? I understand you’re undertaking a residency in November…
I’m writing a four hand piano piece, which will be performed by Kali Ensemble, featuring Nirantar and Joel [Gester Suárez], that we’re going to develop in a residency at POM Eindhoven coming November. I really want to focus on exploring the sympathetic string resonances on the piano, by pressing a bunch of keys silently, and then playing a note to create the resonance. I use a lot of that in my pieces that involve the piano. Similar to two songs: the piano part that I played had a lot of that resonance in it, which would catch the sounds from other instruments. That was the first way that I explored how to make it possible to prolong the tails of decaying sounds. Before I used amplification and feedback for the sound resonances, I just used the piano.
So it is taking that same idea, building up a level of complexity that can only be done with four hands — really trying to build these complex-like resonance bases with this principle in the piano. Hopefully it will be recorded also.
I’ve also heard that you have another piece happening at Orgelpark soon. Is that another site-specific work?
Yes. It’s going to be a piece for voice, two pianos, organs, and a bunch of electronics. It’s going further into exploring the space of the Orgelpark. I am also going to use some of the spaces that go behind the concert hall — using the other rooms in the building — and explore them too. Another exciting addition will be Kristia Michael, who we invited to sing with us. Still a lot of work to do, but I am very excited.
Where are you in the process of this new Orgelpark piece, and how do you see your listening practice develop further through this work?
It’s still very much a work in progress. I don’t think we are going to start with the rehearsal before September, unless we meet a few times beforehand. With Paper Braids, the main idea was to take the principle of the acoustic feedback loop, and then open it up to include the listening of the musicians. So they listen to what is happening in the space, and then react to it with their sound, and then the algorithm that is controlling the hyperorgan uses the microphone to catch certain sounds and then hear the output. The acoustic feedback [is] in the middle, and then the musicians and the hyperorgan [are] on either side of the space. What it creates is this continuous process-centred piece.
What I would like to try with the new one is creating more of an emotional link between the acoustic feedback process and the listener — maybe by including a voice… Creating stops on the way with moments that have more of a song feel to it. The best way to describe it is: what I want to lean more into is the kind of emotional aspect of my music. Which I think has always been there. I have always had very strong responses to listening, but I think it’s definitely something that I was afraid of exploring.
In the way that I was educated when I was studying in Moscow, the feeling that I got from there when I was younger when I was trying to position myself. I always felt cautious about using any talking or thinking about the emotional aspect of my music, because it always seems that it’s a very 19th-century, old-fashioned thing that everybody avoids. And when you talk about your music, you always have to be very “conceptual” or “research-oriented”. We all try to be very technical — which comes from the mid-20th century — and we also have to avoid emotion as a way to deal with any post-war trauma; we position ourselves as a field of science.
So I am looking forward to leaning more into this emotional aspect. I’m not talking about expressing my emotions through music. But because I’m interested in time perception, and the human domain of time, at the end of the day, going through emotional states is how we experience time — they affect our understanding of time. It’s a very tricky area. I have only recently allowed myself to explore [it] more.
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Stream and download Danya Pilchen’s latest album, Paper Braids, at:
Danya’s latest commission for Orgelpark, with Kali Ensemble, premieres on 26 September at Orgelpark, Amsterdam – learn more and buy tickets:
Learn more about Danya and his practice:
- https://danya.land/
- https://danyapilchen.bandcamp.com/
- https://soundcloud.com/daniil-pilchen
- https://www.instagram.com/danyapilchen/
Footnotes:
- A digital snapshot of how a speaker cabinet, room, or space responds to sound. ↩︎
