Staring at the Sun. Album Launch + Musarc Folk Meet on a Midsummer Day Until Dusk VI. St Paul’s Bow Common, 21 June 2025, 6.30–Sunset

Staring at the Sun is Musarc’s sixth annual midsummer concert which sees the choir sing into the sunset on the longest day of the year. The evening features a new durational performance by Joanna Ward and Reuben Esterhuizen + music from Musarc’s new album with Heleen van Haegenborgh which we are launching on the night + early polyphonies + and the choir’s traditional solstice performance of Lin Chiwei’s tape score Quipou Sonore Stereo 1.5 for double choir.

The event takes place in one of the country’s most beautiful modernist spaces. The setting is informal and convivial, with no fixed stage. Performance arrangements change as the evening progresses and visitors are invited to move around, stand or sit on benches and blankets on the floor. Food prepared by the choir is served. There will be no artificial lighting in the space and the audience is 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 evening opens with an ambitious and poetic new work by composers Joanna Ward and Reuben Esterhuizen that draws on the life and death of magician, escape artist, modernist icon and pop medium of the early mass-age, Harry Houdini.

Staring at the Sun explodes the process of composition and performance. The eponymous piece acts like a container in which multiple works are activated by the choir as happenings playing out over space and time. Each deconstructs and materialises the myth of Houdini inside a vacillating field of multiple choral pieces, video and sound screenings that appear like stations in a landscape.

A crowd gathers to see the spectacle, a choir within it rises and falls, suspended, believed. In Staring at the Sun, characters close to Houdini, such as his wife Bess or his press agent Kit Clarke, meet for a strange séance with Kate Bush and Dua Lipa. Scenes overlap and orbit, repeating in different configurations while the audience form individual pathways through the performance which evolves over the timespan of just under an hour.

Staring at the Sun is a container in itself, constructed and choreographed by the composers and animated by the singer. Inside it, two distinct and new works for choir are placed – Rosabel, Believe! by Joanna Ward and The Great End by Reuben Esterhuizen.

Joanna and Reuben, both regular singers with Musarc, have used the opportunity of working with the choir to explore the possibilities of ‘Choir as Method’ – working with the singers to generate material for certain pieces while honing in on the unique affordances of the ensemble to create a work that makes space for individual autonomies and coming into existence thanks to the strength of the collective voice.

We are thrilled to launch a new album in collaboration with SN Variations.

Affordances presents four works written by Belgian composer Heleen van Haegenborgh for UK experimental choral ensemble Musarc between 2019–25. 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.

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. The evening will feature live extracts from Haegenborgh's music.

A special edition of the vinyl – with a sleeve screen-printed by Ghost and an orange vinyl lathe-cut by Bladud Flies! – will be available for £50 on the night. The special edition, alongside standard black vinyl (£24) and digital download (£8) can now be pre-ordered on Bandcamp.

Food prepared by singers and drinks available all evening + shop with books, music and artworks by members of the ensemble. Doors and bar open 6.30pm. Programme starts 7.30pm and ends just after sunset. Advance Tickets starting from £12 available online. Children and young people under fifteen go free.

St Paul’s Bow is one of London’s most beautiful and welcoming public spaces. Designed in 1960 by Maguire and Murray, the building is considered a Brutalist masterpiece. In 2013, it won the National Churches Trust Diamond Jubilee Award for best Modern Church built in the UK since 1953.

Unlike other churches in London, St Paul’s remains a civic space and a continuation of the city, open all day to the community and passers-by for contemplation or as a refuge. It is is a town square, able to process the assembled detritus of the people and things that pass through it. Benches surround the altar, alongside crayons and nursery chairs, two pianos, a coffee machine, a box of home-made instruments, cushions, cleaning paraphernalia, stacks of chairs and trestles, extension leads, Ikea bags overflowing with stuff for the next jumble sale, balloons from a christening, flowers. From the ceiling issue two bell pulls and salt weeps through two cracks in the concrete, forming small stalagmites on the floor that look like patches of snow.

Its dignity lies in its complete disregard for barriers, security and corporate balance sheets. St Paul’s has offered Musarc time and space to rehearse and perform in return for a donation. The choir would like to thank the church and its guardian, Mother Bernadette Hegarty, for its generosity and welcome.