Magda Mayas - Chant (Unsounds, 2026) Sculpting Silence 4

By Stef Gijssels

On "Chant", another sculptor of silence shows her art. The magician is Magda Mayas, whose explorations of the outside and inside of her piano keeps astonishing us, including her inventiveness to create unheard sounds. Mayas is not only a musician, but also an academic researcher with several publications to her name, getting her PhD on the subject of "Orchestrating Timbre – Unfolding Processes of Timbre and Memory in Improvisational Piano Performance" (2019/20), which examines improvisation through timbre, space, movement, objects, and listening.

I'm adding a few videos here to show her art. 

The first is an exercise that Magda Mayas developed for the Hochschule Luzern called "Thinking Silent Matter". The excercise focuses on improvisation in a large ensemble context, bringing attention to silence and reduced sound material with slowly changing parameters, starting with the relevant quote : "... silence not only as absence of sound, but also silence as part of the sound". In the video she guides her students through the concept of the exercise. 

  

Indeed, silence matters. It is even essential to anything we hear, whether we are aware of it or not, so why not actively use it in music? 

On the tree pieces of the album, she shows this in very different formats. The first and last piece were recorded in Australia, with two years apart, the middle track was recorded in Berlin in Tony Buck's Brief Sand Studio. 

The opening track, “Embodied,” recorded live at the SoundOut Festival in Canberra in February 2025, establishes its language through restraint. The piano notes arrive slowly, and the silences between them are as significant as the sounds themselves. Rather than functioning as a conventional prelude, however, this spaciousness becomes the central compositional device. Against the sparse piano framework, elusive sounds emerge from objects and tools used to activate the strings, producing a shifting field of resonance whose sources remain deliberately indistinct. The music is notably sparse, but never static; its intensity lies in the sustained concentration with which each sound occupies the space.

“Halcyon” extends this approach while pushing the sonic material into considerably harsher territory. Carefully paced piano chords are subjected to feedback from a guitar amplifier, alongside a guitar pickup and various other objects. The amplification and feedback transform the piano’s familiar timbre, extending each chord into a dense, sustained resonance. Despite the expanded textural palette, the harmonic language remains remarkably focused: pitches occupy a restricted register and coalesce around a clear tonal centre. This tension between harmonic simplicity and increasingly abrasive resonance gives the piece its mesmerising quality.

Developed in 2023 during the Harringtons Lane artist residency in New South Wales, “Chant” approaches the piano from yet another angle. The piece’s playback was recorded on sixteen different pianos, foregrounding variations in tuning and the subtle differences between instruments. Its structure is deceptively simple, built around the quiet repetition of two chords whose minute variations in tuning and timbre continually alter their perceptual weight. The effect is both soothing and strangely intense. Through repetition, small shifts become magnified, turning what might initially appear static into something constantly in flux.

Across these three works, there is a consistent interest in reducing musical materials to their essentials while expanding the possibilities of resonance, texture and perception. The music derives much of its power from this paradox: the means are often minimal, yet the listening experience is anything but. What emerges is an aesthetic that feels simultaneously rigorous and intuitive—fresh, inventive and deeply attentive to the physical properties of sound.

The title piece was also performed by Mayas at Roulette, streamed live on 30 Apr 2024. The video gives a great insight in her music but also on the added ingredients in the interior of her piano, things you can assume when you see a concert, but can usually at best only guess at. 

Enjoy!

Listen and download from Bandcamp.