A Day of Sound
Between Spirituality and the Imagination

14 June 2025
GASK, Church of St James, Chapel of Corpus Christi 
organiser(s): GASK, Michal Rataj (programme) 

Sound knows no borders – it travels across cultures, it resounds throughout a space, we cannot close our ears to it and it enters our imagination in a way that, in this era of overly visual culture, is truly exceptional.

This exceptionality is individual, determined by the highly personal nature of each listener.

In 2025, A Day of Sound will delve into the relationship between visuality and spirituality. The festival presents music whose diversity transports us across the centuries. We will hear sounds that innovatively transform the visual imagination. We will witness how a traditional liturgical space becomes a sound space, and how the spirituality of a place meets the personal stories of the audience and the imagination of contemporary music.

The festival features artists and composers from the Czech Republic and abroad (Canada and Austria) whose sound art transcends our understanding of contemporary music.

PROGRAMME

[2–8pm] Baroque pharmacy

All day long, the pharmacy will host a sound cinema – a dark space for undisturbed listening to immersive sound compositions. Sound produces images.

[3pm, 5:30pm] GASK exhibitions

During the afternoon, Italian percussionist Elia Moretti will guide visitors through the current exhibitions at GASK. Through the innovative use of a wide range of percussion instruments, Moretti will create a kind of parallel sound world to the visual world he presents in his own exhibitions. His two sound tours of two different exhibitions are accompanied by a word from the curators.

[4–5pm] Chapel of Corpus Christi

The Chapel of Corpus Christi adjacent to GASK and the Church of St Barbara will resound with music from across the centuries, performed by a quartet of top local musicians headed by soprano Barbora Kabátková, Europe's leading performer of Gregorian chant and early medieval music. During the performance, Kabátková will also perform on a medieval harp and psaltery.

The musical trio of Romanovská – Tichý – Hrubý mainly engages in free improvisation. The musicians themselves and the instruments they play have very different musical backgrounds. Anna Romanovská has a background in classical music and is strongly rooted in the contemporary music scene. With her performance on the Japanese stringed instrument known as the koto, she brings an oriental touch to the trio's music. Petr Tichý is most rooted in the contemporary jazz scene, but his multi-genre approach reflects his background in folk culture and music. Michal Hrubý comes from a punk-folk background, expanded by his extraordinary musical knowledge across musical styles and music history. His involvement thus adds a perfect element of the unexpected to the trio as a whole.

[6:30–7:30pm] Baroque refectory

VISIONS COULEURS

In this captivating audiovisual performance, Canadian artist Nicolas Bernier, one of the most exciting audiovisual artists on the contemporary world scene, will present his intense mix of live projection and virtuoso analogue synthesizer. As listeners and viewers in the monastery's baroque refectory, we find ourselves immersed in an intense audiovisual experience.

[8–8:45pm] Church of St James

The final venue for our sonic journey through spirituality and the imagination is the Church of St James. The first audio-visual part of the evening concert features four artists under the direction of composer Jan Trojan, who is best known for his long history of compositional work in religious buildings and liturgical spaces, with which he interacts sonically through sound installations, creating music that connects past and present, the spiritual and the mundane, the acoustic and the electronic. Trojan has presented his work at the Convent of St Agnes, the Church of St Salvator and the Church of St Giles in Prague, as well as at the famous churches near Lipnice Castle, and in many other places.

Performing in the sacral space of St James' Church are top saxophonist Miroslav Tóth and accordionist Roman Zabelov. The performance features a site-specific video projection by Linda Arbanová, who previously collaborated with the two musicians to 'animate' the frescoes in the refectory of the Dominican monastery at St Giles' Church in Prague.

[9–10pm] Church of St James

The festival concludes with a concert by one of today's most interesting Austrian composers, Klaus Lang. In his organ concert, Lang will perform liturgical compositions from the early French Middle Ages along with his own compositions for organ featuring improvisation. For Lang, music is 'time made audible'. As we listen to music in this way in a religious venue, we descend to a deeper place and find ourselves in dialogue with our own inner self.

Tickets to A Day of Sound provide free admission to GASK's exhibitions, including Cape of Horn featuring works by Markéta Othová, Kateřina Vincourová and Veronika Šrek Bromová, the new permanent exhibition Through the Labyrinth and many others.

Admission to the festival is included in a ticket to the entire GASK premises:

CZK 240 – adults
CZK 120 – discounted admission
CZK 540 – family ticket