Synesthesia and Ritual invites audiences into a multisensory and meditative concert experience. The concert presents five world premieres written for Aegira Duo, featuring music by leading composers in Denmark’s and New York’s contemporary music scenes.

What happens when contemporary classical performance is framed as ritual? Can the nature of time, phenomena — and reality itself — be explored and felt through the medium of sound?

Aegira Duo — violinist Anne Sophie Andersen and pianist Andrea Christie — set out to explore these questions creatively through a cycle of new works for violin and piano. The questions are approached from two different angles: synesthesia and ceremony. As a synesthete, sound triggers visual impressions for Anne Sophie. This inspired a concert experience centered around music as image or felt sense as well as a shared interest in contemplative practice and natural phenomena. The program presents works by Nirmali Fenn, Sunny Knable, Sophie Søs Meyer, Santiago Rueda-García, Derek Weagle, and Aegira Duo themselves.

New music across the Atlantic

Forging a meaningful cultural exchange between Aarhus/Copenhagen and New York, the project connects these seven composers from across the Atlantic. Each presents their unique compositional approach to the unifying themes, shaped by diverse backgrounds, artistic interests, and personal relationships to ceremony.

Derek Weagle, whose practice moves between composition and sound healing, co-creates the concert’s formal structure with the duo. They have composed the ritual container that holds the six works in a single continuous arc: a soundscape of singing bowls, gongs, chimes, electronics, and voice drawing on traditions where sound is not only heard but inhabited.

Contemporary concert meets guided sound ritual

The concert opens with a guided meditation, inviting the audience into a shared felt sense of openness before the music begins. From there, the works flow seamlessly into one another without pause — woven together through improvisations within the unifying soundscape and sparse poetic text, written by Derek in collaboration with the project’s composers and spoken in the recorded voices of the composers themselves between works. The result places the audience at the intersection of concert and ceremony, rooted in traditions of ritual and sound healing.

Across the program, ritual is approached from radically different angles: ancient dance forms, cyclical time, tree rings as a metaphor for trauma healing, the Chinese Wǔxíng system of the five elements, the subtle movements of the zodiac animals wood snake and fire horse, the wave-particle duality of quantum physics, and a unique treatment of the resonance of the piano, transforming it into a living sound sculpture oscillating between identities of image and sound.

Synesthesia and Ritual premieres in August 2026 on a three-city tour of Denmark, with performances in Aarhus, Odense, and Copenhagen.