The Living Array (2026)
Lawson White
Created for the opening of Shimmer: Dreaming the Posthuman
Frist Art Museum, Grand Lobby · September 25, 2026 · World premiere
The Living Array asks what our technologies are made of, and answers with a sound system built entirely of people. There are no surround speakers in the room tonight. The immersive layer of this music is performed by an ensemble of percussionists dispersed among you, playing hardwood, small metals, and — near the end — the phones in their hands. 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 — 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 — 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 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.
---
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
The Living Array Ensemble — percussionists and faculty of Belmont University.
With gratitude to Mark Scala, Cristina Echezarreta, Tom Eisenbraun, and the staff of the Frist Art Museum; and to the Belmont University percussion studio.
Tonight's program continues at 6:00 p.m. in the auditorium with the Shimmer Symposium keynote conversation.
---
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.