Kald i Klang

Kald i Klang is an ambitious electroacoustic sound art work that seeks to unite the church bells of the Haderslev Cathedral Deanery into a single musical instrument and art installation. It was exhibited at Kunsthal 6100 in 2025.

The work consists of recordings of the bells from the deanery’s 29 churches, played back through loudspeakers concealed inside small bells cast by the Danish Bell Museum. The audience experiences the work by positioning themselves beneath the bells.

The piece relates to the church bells both as one unified carillon and as individual sound sources whose overtones are examined in relation to one another—a technique known from the classical compositional discipline of spectral music. This makes the work an electroacoustic musical composition that is physically and acoustically impossible: to hear all the church bells of the Haderslev Cathedral Deanery at once and in relation to each other, and acoustically impossible in the sense that overtones cannot be separated from the fundamental tone without the use of technology.

The audience is invited into a meditative space that allows for reflection on the significance of church bells within the Danish soundscape. The work has a dual dimension: it can be experienced simply for what it is—a spatial composition for church bells, timbre, and overtones—but it can also be experienced as a question of whether church bells still call people to gathering and community in Denmark’s smaller villages. Is the call of the bells still relevant to the modern human sense of community, and if not, what brings people together today?

It is precisely this reflection that the composer wishes to open up for dialogue: what is the sound of community, and what is the audience’s own relationship to the sense of community that the bells represent? Do the bells still call us to community, or are they merely the ringing of sound—a call in sound.

The title Kald i Klang is taken from an inscription on one of the bells in Nustrup Church. Here, the bells once rang—calling farmers in the fields and the town’s inhabitants to gatherings and church services.

This piece was made possible with the generous funding from The Danish Art Council, William Demant Fonden, Jorcks Fond and Dansk Klokkemuseum.

Photos by Thomas Sørensen