Tyshawn Sorey’s Sound of Silence

At the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tyshawn Sorey traded the usual frenzy for hushed intensity with his piece Monochromatic Light (Afterlife), drawing on the Rothko Chapel’s dark, subtly shifting canvases and Morton Feldman’s 1971 memorial score. Performed in near darkness, the work invites listeners to lean into tiny shifts of tone and light, stretching time and reshaping space in real time.

A true genre-bender—drummer, trombonist, pianist and composer—Sorey blurs the line between improvisation and notation, creating soundscapes defined as much by silence as by notes. As bass-baritone Davóne Tines puts it, those intentional pauses become zones of reflection and rest, offering a welcome escape from our always-on world.

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