Three rooms and a lobby

Three Rooms and a Lobby explores the relationship between music and architecture. Set to the composer’s own text, the music is aimed at evoking a journey through a strange and fantastical building. As the piece progresses and we return to previously-explored rooms in this musical building, we see them from new perspectives: with more or less illumination, for more or less time, or with more or less activity occurring in each space. In this way, the piece suggests an architecture lacking the visual dimension, but with a new and unusual temporal dimension.The work explores the relationship between our perception of both musical time and physical space. Each room has its own sense of time, giving it a unique character that may change during the piece. Are there certain architectural characteristics in the world around us that affect our perception of time? How can music allow us to experience physical space in new ways?Three Rooms and a Lobby was written for VivaVoce of Montréal,directed by Peter Schubert, in the context of the choir’s composer mentorship project, under the mentorship of Tim Brady.