Join Musarc choir on one of the longest days of the year and watch the choir sing until dusk in one of the city’s most beautiful spaces. Food prepared by singers and drinks available all evening + shop with books, music and artworks by members of the ensemble. 

Choir as Method takes place in one of the UK’s most beautiful modernist churches – Saint Paul’s Bow in London. The setting is informal and convivial. Breaks between performances offer time to talk and eat. There is no fixed stage, and the performance arrangements will change as the evening progresses. The audience is invited to move around, stand or sit on the floor. There will be no artificial lighting in the space. The audience will be given candles to illuminate the auditorium as darkness falls. The concert is expected to finish just after sunset, which on the day is around 9.30pm.

The event will include an album launch (release by SN Variation) with choir works by Heleen van Haegenborgh and live performances.

‘Affordances’ unites four works writ­ten by Belgian com­pos­er Heleen van Haegenborgh for UK exper­i­men­tal choral ensem­ble Musarc between 2019–2025. Scored for voic­es and free melod­ic instru­ments, each piece tunes into a dif­fer­ent dimen­sion of the vibrant and orac­u­lar polypho­ny of the cho­rus, its joy­ful hal­lu­ci­na­tions, its many lan­guages and the many ways it has with the world as a body of bod­ies, sin­gu­lar and plur­al: at times sound­ing restrained and haunt­ing­ly beau­ti­ful, at oth­er times tri­umphant and clear. A new series of minia­tures for vio­lin writ­ten by van Haegenborgh espe­cial­ly for the album seems to look back on the process of mak­ing the music, speak­ing from the mid­dle, like a mnemon­ic cho­rus of one. Recorded over two days in April 2025 at Luca School of Arts, Ghent, Affordances offers a view into Musarc’s qui­et­ly rad­i­cal, and maybe unrecord­able, approach to what a choir can do and the unique space it can cre­ates for artists, musi­cians and singers to devel­op new ideas (J. Kohlmaier)