The Living Array (2026)

The Living Array asks what our technologies are made of, and answers with a sound system built entirely of people. There were no surround speakers in the room. The immersive layer of this music is written for an ensemble of percussionists dispersed through the audience, playing hardwood, small metals, and (near the end) the phones in their hands; at the premiere, Lawson performed the work alone, and the ensemble version, with Belmont University percussionists, is planned for its next performance. The machine, this piece proposes, has always been made of the living world.

The music sings four words all night, and only one of them ever changes:

find my way · find our way
find their way · find the way

One melody carries the entire piece, sung as a kind of chant: unmetered, unadorned, in a single key from first note to last. What changes is what sings it, and for whom.

I. Skin & Timber. Sound begins in bodies and building. Breath, fingertips, and the Grand Lobby's historic postal table become the first instruments, and a synthesizer is played by electrical current passed through human skin and organic matter. The chant appears once, clean: find my way, sung by a lone human voice.

II. Angels & Metamorphosis. Metal that sings: pedal steel, gongs, singing bowls, and the Mellotron, a choir of tape ghosts. The voice returns multiplied into a choir of recordings of itself, singing find our way, though the only "our" a machine can offer is copies of yourself. And for one bright stretch, the music does what this exhibition's dreamers do: it dances.

III. Entanglement. Nothing new enters. Everything heard in the first movement returns transformed: granulated, stretched, resynthesized. The electronic future is built audibly from the organic past. A vocoder, the machine itself, takes up the chant: first find my way, claiming a self; then, slowly, find their way, learning to sing for others. The word posthuman also names the aftermath of our own absence. When the speakers fall silent, listen for what survives.

Coda: Convergence. The dispersed array gathers into one body of people, and the last technology standing is the oldest one: breath. Find the way.

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Instrumentarium: voice · pedal steel · Mellotron · Minimoog Model D · Roland Juno · ROLI Seaboard and Airwave · human-⁠touch circuits · hardwood and small metal percussion · telephones · human voices on a single tone

Solo premiere performed by Lawson White. The Living Array Ensemble, Belmont University percussionists dispersed through the audience, is planned for the work's next performance.

With gratitude to Mark Scala, Cristina Echezarreta, Tom Eisenbraun, and the staff of the Frist Art Museum; and to the Belmont University percussion studio.

The premiere was followed at 6:00 p.m. by the Shimmer Symposium keynote conversation in the auditorium.

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About the artist

Lawson White is an artist and composer based in Tennessee. A percussionist by training and a former member of Sō Percussion, he has performed at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, BAM, the Park Avenue Armory, and the Walker Art Center, and has created work with choreographers including Shen Wei, Merce Cunningham, and Eliot Feld. As a producer and engineer, his credits span GRAMMY-winning and -nominated recordings with artists from Turnstile to Twenty One Pilots. He teaches percussion at Belmont University.

lawsonwhite.com