A Quaker meetinghouse in Chestnut Hill is turning its ceiling opening into a concert stage this weekend, when a new musical work called This Silent Music makes its world premiere inside the James Turrell-designed Skyspace at Chestnut Hill Friends Meeting. The one-night performance, set for Saturday, blends classical music, heavy metal and poetry into a single sonic experience built specifically for the room's unusual light and acoustics.
The concert starts at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, with a pre-concert discussion featuring the composers beginning at 6:30 p.m., according to Axios. Tickets for This Silent Music start at $25. Co-creator Liz Lang told the outlet that the setting transforms the performance, saying, “it becomes this meditative experience in this space.”
The program features three commissioned pieces built around the Skyspace's themes of light and reflection, according to BroadwayWorld. LJ White's “At the End of It All” incorporates sonified black hole data, Alex Wakim contributes a song cycle blending Arabic tonality, and Mieke Doezema's “Eucalyptus” confronts ecological loss. To match the venue's open ceiling and distinctive acoustics, Avery and Lang built the piece without a traditional piano, instead scoring it for marimba, glassy auxiliary percussion, and the oud. The premiere was made possible through financial support from the International Foundation for Contemporary Music, funneled through soprano Katy Avery's Cortona Sessions Fellowship.
A Skyspace With a Turbulent Backstory
The Skyspace itself is a permanent art installation designed by light artist James Turrell, one of roughly 85 such installations worldwide. Turrell titled the piece “Greet the Light,” a nod to his Quaker upbringing and his grandmother's advice to “go inside to greet the light,” according to the Friends Journal. The Chestnut Hill Friends Meetinghouse, completed in 2013 at 20 East Mermaid Lane, was the first new Quaker meetinghouse built in the Philadelphia region in 80 years, and it remains only the second active Quaker meetinghouse in the world to house a permanent Turrell Skyspace in its main worship room, following Houston's Live Oak Friends Meetinghouse in 2000.
Getting there wasn't easy. Construction in 2012 and 2013 was delayed after an arson firebombing caused an estimated $500,000 in damage, a case that later led to federal charges against trade union members over the use of non-union labor, according to the Chestnut Hill Local. Workers also had to hammer through 13 feet of unexcavated solid rock on the former quarry site before the building could rise. Architect Jim Bradberry engineered the ceiling aperture with a knife's-edge steel roof structure so no frame thickness would be visible from below, creating the illusion of a paper-thin opening to the sky, per Art & Theology. The meetinghouse was built on the site of a 19th-century schist stone quarry, incorporating local schist stonework, pine forest views and green building design aligned with LEED standards.
Beyond Saturday's Premiere
Once organizers expected roughly 1,000 visitors in the Skyspace's first year of operation; it drew more than 4,000 within its first 12 months, per the Chestnut Hill Local's report. Outside of Saturday's concert, the Skyspace typically runs in silence during sunrise or sunset viewings. Sunset shows are generally limited to Sundays, with occasional First Friday showtimes, while sunrise shows happen only a handful of times a year — the next one is scheduled for October 24, with tickets starting at $11.20, per Axios.
For Philadelphia audiences accustomed to seeing Turrell's work treated as a quiet architectural curiosity, This Silent Music offers something different: a live, one-night collision of sound, silence and sky inside a room built explicitly for reflection.
