Photo: Chris Lee
In April 2026, KHORIKOS was invited to perform as part of Carnegie Hall's Well-Being Concert series, in the series' first performance (and the ensemble's) at the Guggenheim Museum.
We designed our set specifically for the space, singing both on the first ramp and higher up in the museum's spiral, for an audience on the floor and the lower ramps. On the ground level, the sound is intimate and immediate; higher up, the sound is still present, but the source is obscured, allowing us to position ourselves so that the audience's listening perspective is continually changing even as they remain in place.
As part of the series, we were prompted to consider what our music does for our own well-being. The most important (in fact, nonnegotiable!) part of our practice is breathing well: every rehearsal starts with a swift breath in and a long exhale. We modeled our set around this shape: a ramp up in intensity and a long denouement, as we prepare to face what's in front of us.
Bookended by some of our favorite music from Shara Nova, Arvo Pärt, our latest commission from Kile Smith, and our original take on Anna Meredith's Heal You, we curated a set to to embrace Frank Lloyd Wright's design for the space as a "temple of spirit." We commissioned our friend Charlotte Greve to write a piece based on Denise Levertov's Continuing:
From desire to desire
plucking
white petals away from their
green centres. It was thus and thus
repeats the head, the fantasist.
No matter:
that wind sweeps forward
again—life itself.
Gather them, flawed, curled
veined like a child’s temple
heaped one on another
irregular
displaced at a breath: secrets . . .
So
one smiled, another turned pages:
steady, heartbeats apart; many
continuing variously—
And the stripped green? Alert, hard
on a thick stalk. So.
Breath provides an opportunity for a shift in perspective, so we programmed music that looks at the same material with multiple lenses. Our "faith cycle," debuted in 2023's CIVITAS, puts the rising-falling-rising motif of John Mundy's staggering, unusual Daleth through its paces in Transition, a piece by Alec Galambos for Charlotte's alto sax, and in Cyrillus Kreek's Kui suur on meie vaesus with Charlotte soaring overhead. Our next cycle of three starts with another world premiere, Alec's "So.", reflecting again on the last word of Levertov's poem, an ode to the present moment and a prelude to Ádes' O Albion, an echo of the past, and Tavener's Song for Athene, a beacon of hope for the future.
Read more about the performance, the series, and Carol Bove's art in the Guggenheim's article on the event.