Opening Ultima 2025: City Lines

Choreographed concert by Joanna Bailie with the Oslo Cathedral Choir

Thursday 11 September, at 19:00–20:00

130–300 kr

35 % off with ultiMATE

Ultima 2025 opens with a new work that lets the city speak for itself.

City Lines by Joanna Bailie is an acoustic portrait of Oslo, written for Oslo Cathedral Choir and electronics. The piece enters into dialogue with key themes of this year’s festival: belonging, movement, and how we navigate the space between the individual and the collective.

The sounds are drawn directly from the city—tram stops, tunnels, intersections, and outlying areas—and shaped into sonic movements that trace paths from west to east, from high terrain to the city centre, from noise to stillness. Deep drones mirror the city’s rhythms and its crowds; other passages open into musical, contemplative moments: a bell, a ferry crossing, a breath.

The choir’s sound and movement unfold in close interplay with the electronics. The human voice carries and transforms the city’s sounds, lending them presence. In a choreography developed in collaboration with Mette Edvardsen, the singers move in curved lines and irregular formations, echoing the acoustic topography of both the city and the composition.

At the heart of Oslo, open to street sounds and rich with internal resonance, the Cathedral becomes a place where music and architecture allow the city and the composition to meet.

City Lines offers a meditative opening to this year’s festival—where the everyday and the structural, the human and the mechanical, merge into a shared current.

Facts

City Lines by Joanna Bailie opens Ultima 2025. The concert will be introduced by the Minister of Culture and Equality, Lubna Jaffery.
The work is based on 280 field recordings made at metro and tram stops in Oslo, as well as other distinctive urban spaces.
Bailies favorittsted for opptak var det pulserende krysset Skippergata, Nygata og Storgata – som hun kalte «magic corner».
City Lines will be performed by the Oslo Cathedral Choir, an ensemble continually exploring new formats for choral and church music.