''When the violin plays, we hear a sound that does not belong to either the musician or the violin. This is a third “sound,” a resonance that reveals to us what silence and emptiness are.' — Lee Ufan, in conversation with Sonja Abadžieva, The Large Glass Interview with Lee Ufan.

Over the course of an afternoon, the musicians of the contemporary music ensemble ars ad hoc will make brief appearances at Casa de Serralves, performing a series of works that establish different lines of dialogue with Lee Ufan’s exhibition. Ranging from tributes and more direct references to the artist’s work to explorations of the relationships between pitches and timbres, investigations into natural tuning systems, and phenomenological and materialist approaches to sound and listening, the programme also plays with the intervals between pitches and the silences between sounds. Each intervention proposes a particular way of inhabiting and listening to space.

Starting from a conception of sound as a field of vibrations and resonances that extends beyond its source, enveloping space and transforming the perception of those who inhabit it, the programme draws inspiration from Lee Ufan’s thinking on the inter- and intra-relations between space, place and time, and on how these emerge through encounters between bodies, objects, environments and actions. Each sound thus asserts itself as both a presence and the possibility of disappearance: it arises from the material and acoustic properties of a place, reveals its resonances and, as it fades away, makes perceptible duration, silence and what remains latent. In this context, composition and performance become practices of attentiveness to what unfolds between sound and resonance, between what manifests itself and what fades away. Space ceases to be a static setting and reveals itself instead as a constantly transforming, vibrational and relational reality.

Programme:

14:00

Catherine Lamb

stones, shades (for mark so) (2009)

For some stones

Clarence Barlow

...Until... Version 8 (1981), ~10’

For Piccolo and sine tone

15:30

Marc Sabat

Claudius Ptolemy (2008/17), 4’

For violin and cello

Daryl Jamieson

From line (after Lee Ufan) (2018), 5’-20’

17:00

Tōru Takemitsu

Air (1995), ~7’

For solo flute

Ben Johnston

Ponder Nothing (1989), ~10’

For clarinet solo

Ricardo Carvalho > flute

Horácio Ferreira > clarinet

Diogo Coelho > violin

Gonçalo Lélis > cello

Diana Ferreira >direction

Arte no Tempo >production

Arte no Tempo is an organisation funded by the Portuguese Republic – Culture / Directorate-General for the Arts.

ars ad hoc is a project supported by Banco BPI and the “la Caixa” Foundation.

From 2026, it also receives support from the Ernst von Siemens Foundation for its mini-concert season at the Serralves Foundation.