commissions |
Stef actively collaborates with composers in the creation of new works for harp, both acoustic and electroacoustic. His practice is rooted in close dialogue, long-term artistic exchange, and a shared curiosity about expanding the instrument’s expressive and technical possibilities.
Recent collaborations include works by Dai Fujikura, Leilehua Lanzilotti, Christopher Cerrone, Alexander Schubert and others — each exploring distinct sonic territories, from fragile textural writing to amplified, high-energy performance formats. Upcoming collaborations include new projects with Elena Rykova, Ken Thomson and Bekah Simms. Stef is particularly interested in projects that challenge inherited narratives around the harp and situate it within contemporary musical languages — whether through extended techniques, electronics, interdisciplinary formats, or unexpected stylistic crossings. He welcomes inquiries for solo works, chamber music, ensemble contexts, and collaborative research-based projects. For commission proposals or collaboration inquiries, please get in touch. |
swift interval
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for harp and electronics
The title comes from Jorie Graham's poem "Home": "the swift interval before evaporation, & the stillness of brimming." A live harp plays against four electronic copies of itself, each tuned slightly flat—one by roughly a sixth of a semitone, another by a quarter tone. These near-unisons create a persistent tension—swift because the distance is so small, brimming because the sound never quite settles. I looked for other writers circling similar states of irresolution—three poems that, like the movements they inspire, bleed into one another.
I. Cactus Land draws from T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men. The movement is dominated by a "xylophonic" technique—striking the string while dampening it—a brittle, prickly sound, like touching a cactus needle. II. A Blanker Whiteness borrows from Robert Frost's "Desert Places." The music settles into a single diatonic field, white on white, where the subtle tuning differences between the live harp and its electronic shadows create something like depth perception—distance emerging from sameness. III. No Detail Too Small takes its name from Elizabeth Bishop's "Sandpiper." The finale exploits the harp's ability to play identical pitches on different strings, then multiplies this across all five harps, turning the smallest details into a kaleidoscopic blur. Swift Interval was commissioned by and dedicated to Stef Van Vynckt, who premiered the work on March 21, 2026 in Brussels. - Christopher Cerrone |
vessels (160935 km)
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for amplified harp, smartphone and video
Vessels (160935 km) various kinds of continuous flows of different speeds, densities, and textures, are perplexed. The work was inspired by a fusion of two ideas of continuous flows that define us: imagining blood cells running through vessels in a body, as well as a vehicle driving on the highway. Hence, the title relates to both concepts, it resembles a geographical road sign, but also specifies average length of blood vessels in an adult human body. - Maja Bosnic
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floating fireflies
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for harp
The music material I came up with was something that appeared to float, hovering without a particular direction. Or maybe there IS an overall direction. Perhaps it is something between the two states.
- Dai Fujikura |
h.a.r.p. hermeneutic acquisition and reconstruction procedure
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an audio protocol transcript with harp
Imagine This Piece Of Audio,
As A Transcript, Of A Sequence Of Events, Unfolding In Outer Space. Imagine An Algorithm, Trying To Access, A Secured Data Location. A Cultural Server Containing Heritage And Archives Of Human Practice A Hyper-Digital Off-Earth Storage Location Under Attack, Under Extrusion, Under Penetration A Vulnerable Memory Floating In A Vacuum Surrounded By Austenitic Steel. A Multi-Encrypted Access Gateway. An Array Breaks, A Hex Code Unlocks, An Ascii Tear Blinks, And…. Finally The Intrusion Occurs And The Code Is In A Stream Of Data A Set Of Candles Burning, Like Chip Diodes In A Floating Server Room An Ancient Instrument Plays The Transcribed Cultural Data Fragments Stored In A Secure Server Room The Server Walls Like Ancient Persian Rugs The Disk Mounted On Ivory Pillars In A Vacuum-Sealed Space That Is Ultimate Contain Artifact #23-Tv-762 In The End Of Summer A Storm Surge Is Rolling In. See The Diver Enters The Water As Everyone Is Leaving. To Return With A Coral-Colored Shell. Passed On To Lover, To Grandson. Artifact Captured Memory Dissolved. A Cultural Placeholder Evaporated In Dark Space A Coral-Colored Shimmer Lingering On As Afterglow - Alexander Schubert |
time becomes again
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for harp and tape
The title "Time Becomes Again"—I still find it easy to misspeak—is a fragment plucked from the eighth couplet of Wallace Stevens’s famously di@icult poem “Description Without Place.” Although removed from their context, these words, like much of Stevens, rang a sympathetic bell deep within me. I sometimes find inventions of language that are compact but allusive enough to use as titles for pieces. "Time becomes again" serves marvelously well: three simple words that give a little fillip to the mind, suggesting a counterintuitive operation of language, if not reality. How indeed does time “become” at all, let alone "again"?
[...] Time Becomes Again started life as a bit of electronic music generated by a software program I made. Being devoid of taste and inhibitions, computers can model the irrational potentialities of a musical present—not unlike the existential flicker of quantum particles—in wonderful ways. But this piece is more concerned with the experience of musical time than its technological origins. Its manner of speaking is gentle, perhaps the better to escape the guesswork of an analytical ear. I have never liked the idea that listeners could know in advance, however briefly, what a piece was about to do. It seems a misuse of the composer's omniscience—not to say omnipotence—in the universe of the composition. Omniscience is ultimately boring, however. The computer is the tool I use to surprise myself. As a result, this piece proceeds not through motivic fixation but by the cultivation of a mysterious sense of propulsion. The engine producing this propulsion is powered by little explosions of computational serendipity. Considering whether these flashes restart the clock of perception or only seem to brings us back to Stevens and the central preoccupation of his poem: "It is possible that to seem—it is to be, / As the sun is something seeming and it is."µ I am grateful to harpist Stef van Vynckt, who commissioned Time Becomes Again, and to whom it is warmly dedicated. - John Supko |
translating myself and others
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for harp, cello and alto flute
translating myself and others is based on the book of the same name by Jhumpa Lahiri. In asking questions such as, "who possesses a language, and why?" Lahiri's book is in many ways about belonging and unbelonging. She writes, ". . . to translate is to alter one's linguistic coordinates, to grab on to what has slipped away, to cope with exile."
Throughout the book, Lahiri poses both different ways of looking at translation: "a series of doors," (p. 13), "a forest, a bridge, a child, a lover, a sweater, a building, a triangle" (p. 11), and different ways of what it means to be a translator / engage with the act of translation, "to develop another pair of eyes, to experiment with weakness," (p. 18), "to cope with exile," (p. 75, as above). Each movement in this musical work takes one of those perspectives and investigates it sonically: opening and closing doors, experimenting with weakness, looking for ways of relating or connecting. Musical transcription and arrangement are forms of translation—finding the essence of a recording and hoping to translate that onto another instrument not just in a literal reproduction, but looking to capture the nuance of one sound and its meaning with the unique abilities of another instrument's sound. The last movement is a translation of one of my own works that itself is a translation of a recording I made finding the resonance of a bronze bell. - Leilehua Lanzilotti This piece was made possible by a grant from the Fromm Music Foundation. Creation and development of the work was supported in part by residencies at Casa Wabi (Oaxaca, Mexico) and the Merwin Conservancy (Haʻikū, Maui). |
between the sphinx and the bank vault, there is a taut thread
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for harp, cello and bass flute
The title of this work is taken from two lines of Federico Garcia Lorca’s poem “Dance of Death,” inspired by a visit to New York City’s Wall Street, just after a massive stock market crash in 1929. Lorca was undoubtedly shaken by the misery he witnessed at the center of America’s financial failure, and was perhaps haunted by the rise of authoritarian power in his native Spain. The dark history of the street — so called due to a wall erected by the Dutch to protect their wealth from Native Americans and the British — encapsulates the historic inequity and voracious greed of those “who drink a dead girl’s tears at the bank/or eat pyramids of dawn on tiny street corners.”
- Jason Eckardt |
fluo for harp
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for harp and fixed media
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san clemente syndrome
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for harp, cello, electronics, and DMX lights
The title references the Basilica di San Clemente, a 14th century church that has beautifully excavated layers below the surface from the 4th century and the 1st century CE. The basilica is located on the same street as, and just two minutes walking from, two of the most prominent gay bars in Rome. Thinking broadly about its queer affect, the church appears in Andre Aciman’s queer-classic Call my by your name, wherein the palimsestic history of the church represents Elio’s understanding of desire. On the same night that they visit the basilica, Elio and Oliver make love for the first time. Elio later remarks how every new relationship in his life is in some way built on this foundational memory with Oliver, just like “the church is built on the ruins of subsequent restorations … just layers and secret passageways and interlocking chambers.”
My work for cello, harp, electronics, and DMX lights is inspired by about a half dozen visits I made to the church and its neighborhood over several months, sometimes in the company of architects, lighting designers, and musicians. I was struck first by the shadowy grates in the lower two layers where one can see all the way through to the top level. Furthermore, the lighting curation highlights the distinct building materials and affects of each layer. Inspired by these reflections, I programmed a lighting element that sculpts the shadows of the cellist and harpist as they play, developing another contrapuntal and theatrical layer to the piece. In addition to at times emphasizing the play of contrasting musical materials, the visual language creates a sense of musical time that I believe accords with Elio and many queer people’s experience—time as a mixed and imperfect present, one that is informed by trauma but also shards of hope in our past, and looks towards the future that is not yet here. - Baldwin Giang |
a world in us
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for harp and violin
My personal bonds and friendships with collaborators deeply inform my musical process. I regularly create with people I cherish dearly but have rarely made anything exploring this experience. “A World in Us” is a phrase taken from a quote by writer and diarist, Anias Nin, stating “Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.” It is inspired by the early email threads between violinist, Roan Ma, harpist, Stef Van Vynckt, and myself, where we each reminisced about the incredible relationships blossoming out of our time attending Bang on a Can in 2024. In this conversation Roan described a fleeting moment in the 2004 Chinese film, The World of friendship between the main character and secondary character experience this brief but altering bond. Making music with friends allows me to celebrate the fleeting yet transformative bonds that shape both life and art. - Jessica Ackerley
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le seuil du dehors
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for harp
My inspiration springs from a dream that has always lingered. A dream I cherish deeply, one that has accompanied me for twenty years now.
A substantial dream, born in an intimate space-time, yet living in the space-time of the outside world. For me, the dream is the threshold between the spiritual and material worlds, where these two spheres confront one another. At times, I dream of what my eyes perceive; at other times, of what I wish to see. My inner world expresses itself through these reveries. Look — a dark forest takes shape, the sun caresses the scene, trees rise upward, the sea stretches into infinity. Numbered doors line up, a green expanse unfolds, a prison stands tall, and a guard keeps watch with his jailer. A voice guides my steps to door 38. I open it. Amazed by the lightness of my steps, I find myself in a rolling landscape. - Alireza Farhang |
seeking, as it were
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for harp and pre-recorded harp-like instruments
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a map of all the places we could be, yet are not
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for harp, cello and electronics
A map of all the places you could be, yet are not wonders how we might engage deeply and meaningfully with place through our creative praxes without shying away from the painful histories lived and living beneath our feet. Can moments of intentional sound and movement serve as a land acknowledgement when framed properly? What do we gain and lose through such work? Of what importance is language in this communication? I don’t know, and I am grateful for the opportunity to ask these questions alongside such wonderful collaborators. A map of all the places you could be, yet are not was written for my dear friends, Extended Music Collective and Marie Levêque, and premiered at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity on the side of Sacred Buffalo Guardian Mountain in August of 2023. Both composition and choreography were collaborative efforts between Marie and myself, and it is especially worth acknowledging Marie’s beautiful, original text which, read by her, echoes through the piece’s first third.
- Ben Portzen |
this ain't fake
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for harp
The problem with the harp may very well be the instrument’s popularity — a popularity that has perhaps overemphasized its clichés.
Say “harp,” and you immediately hear angels plucking, butterflies fluttering… you can almost smell the flowers blooming. As if the harp had nothing else up its sleeve. But it does: you can really tug at the strings. You can make it thunder properly in the low register. On the other hand, it is essentially a diatonic instrument. As a composer, you really have to make an extra effort to squeeze a roaring dissonance out of it. But didn’t The Ramones turn music upside down in the 1970s? With simple triads, yet with a drive and boldness that demystified certain aspects of music-making. Personally, I think the time is ripe to “punkify” harp music — to bring the harp, with all its pedals, back down to earth. So may this new piece clash head-on with the traditional repertoire. Pun intended. - Frank Nuyts |
stories we told
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for harp
Over the past year, I’ve often reflected on how people are carried by stories — how we process (sometimes irrational) reality step by step through narrative. And also how the contrast between an absurd reality and the story in our heads can sometimes feel unsettling. With this piece, I wanted to highlight that tension.
The harp plays fragile and delicate themes, full of color. Every few measures, new colors are added; again and again, the story grows larger. Until, gradually, cracks begin to appear in the whole. That one note that doesn’t fit. That one modulation too many. Small things that can suddenly cause the bubble to burst. After which we begin rebuilding our story — again and again. - Mirek Coutigny |