The Room as Instrument
B Chakoian Jones on The Great Space
When composer B Chakoian Jones first conceived The Great Space, it was not as a recording, nor even as a fixed musical object, but as a response—to architecture, to reverberation, and to the act of listening itself. Written in 2019 for the Parthenon’s Naos room, the string quartet emerged from a highly specific acoustic reality: five seconds of decay, a monumental interior, and the invitation to allow silence to function as material rather than absence. What began as a site-specific commission has since expanded into a broader inquiry—one that asks not only how music inhabits space, but how audiences might recover attentiveness within it.
Now released as Jones’s first studio recording and accompanied by a series of performances across Tennessee in 2026—including a return to the Parthenon this February—The Great Space continues to evolve. In this conversation with Music City Review, Jones reflects on translating a room into sound, the shifting meanings of “spatial presence,” the string quartet’s historical gravity, and the collaborative openness that defines his work. Throughout, his answers resist prescription, favoring instead an ethics of listening: an invitation to notice where we are, how we arrive there, and what it might mean to be fully present—if only for a moment.
On the Piece/Recording:
Music City Review [MCR]: The Great Space began as a commission for the Parthenon’s Naos room in 2019. How did writing for that particular architecture shape the piece from the outset? How does one write for a 5 second decay?
B Chakoian Jones [BCJ]: Writing for the Parthenon’s Naos room was a joyful exercise in restraint. With 5 seconds of delay, silence in the writing was an opportunity to let the room speak. I wrote in lots of rests and extended minimalist passages in which the room becomes the fifth instrument. With that said, I also wanted to experiment with thicker textures. I snuck in some moving rhythmic passages just to see if the room could handle the ensemble and vice versa. I think they executed it well back in 2019. The room is really beautiful.
[MCR]: You’ve described the work as a “simple thesis of spatial exploration.” What questions about space felt most urgent to you when you began composing—and have those questions shifted over time?
[BCJ]: When I first wrote The Great Space the thesis of exploration was simple and limited to the Naos room. I don’t know if I explicitly asked myself this, but the question really was, ‘How can I make this performance as multi-dimensional as possible. We’re dealing with art that is being presented linearly and from a focal point. But with that space, the audience could really experience the music all around them.
And yes, the question of spatial exploration has grown for sure. Really, I ought to call it ‘spatial presence’. We live in a very distracted world such that most of us are not absorbing the space around us as we exist. Additionally most of us no longer have the attention for instrumental music. I’d love for the audience of The Great Space to listen with a state of mind that engages not only with the music, but with the space they’re in; the physical space, the sonic space, the atmosphere, etc. It’s a big ask honestly in 2025, and I don’t demand it. I just hope people can get there.
[MCR]: This is your first studio release, yet the piece was conceived in a live, site-specific context. What was gained—and what was lost—in translating The Great Space from physical room to recorded medium? (Did you attempt to reproduce the Naos Room in the studio?)
[BCJ]: Thank you for this insightful question. What was lost, as is often the case in Classical recordings, is the sound of the air passing through the instruments. The breathing of the instruments. At least that’s kind of how I think about it. And of course the beauty of being able to see human beings perform.
What is gained however is much greater. Being able to bring this music into any space is amazing. We obviously could never perform the quartet in a car and would probably not perform it in the woods etc. So for someone to be able to take this music and experience it in any kind of space is great.
We recorded the piece at Eastside Manor in East Nashville. The room is very live, and while I didn’t have any illusion of imitating the Naos room I did want a reverberatory sound. However when we went to mix the piece I was brought back to this idea of letting the space speak. And to me that meant the space that the listener would be in more than the space the recording had occurred in. So we leaned towards a drier sound that would let any room (or headphones) be the fifth instrument.
[MCR]:You ask listeners to notice both “the little things” and “the grandeur” of the spaces they inhabit. How do you attempt to sonify that tension between intimacy and scale?
[BCJ]: I guess I don’t want to be too specific with that. I really just want folks to be present. But I think dynamics and textures; solo instruments and silence can make people feel a certain way perhaps. Maybe dial into something specific in the room or open to the entire experience?
String quartets carry a long historical weight. How conscious were you of that lineage when writing this work, and where did you feel free to resist or reframe expectations?
There wasn’t too much active thought in the historical weight of the string quartet, but I am definitely inspired by composers of different eras. While my voice is definitely American, having spent a lot of time with Glass’s and Barber’s string quartets, I also love Bartok’s and Dvorak’s quartets. The beauty of the string quartet is that it can function as one instrument almost like a piano, spanning a large tonal range simultaneously. But then it can also be four independent instruments all at once with infinite textures to draw from.
As far as resisting or reframing expectations in relation to the writing for string quartet, I think there was a push and pull between styles. There is a bit of minimalism and a bit of modernism. But then even within the idea of minimalism I really wanted to go beyond the Philip Glass minimalism and think more along the lines of John Cage minimalism. How absolutely little can I write at certain moments. That’s really hard for me, but it was really fun.
On the Performance
[MCR]: Contemporary dancer Becca Hoback joins the performances in 2026. How does the presence of the moving body alter the way audiences perceive musical space?
[BCJ]: I have absolutely no idea! I’m so excited to experience it with her.
[MCR]: What roles do the photography and videography play in the piece?
[BCJ]: The roles of photography and videography are auxiliary but important. The goal is obvious to be present in the moment, but I think that these mediums are the ways that we are reflective of our space in time. It is a good thing to document this beautiful world we’re in. Let’s just spend time with that documentation beyond hoping for ‘likes’ on social media.
[MCR]: How much, if at all, did you direct the multiple disciplines involved in the performance?
[BCJ]: I gave Becca total freedom in her performance. Truly the only thing we discussed was highlighting the performance space beyond a traditional stage.
[MCR]: Having worked extensively with ensembles like Chatterbird and Intersection, how did your experiences in collaborative, experimental settings inform this more singular statement?
[BCJ]: This broad genre of music is community driven. It is not a genre that will ever be financially driven and that is beautiful. So playing with those ensembles required the attitude that we were going to go make music together, an audience was going to hopefully find some sort of meaning or truth or joy, and that performance would never happen again. It’s heavy but it’s also a relief. It’s largely egoless. So I wrote this piece, I grew this idea from it, and then I just handed it to friends to run with. Becca is taking it. My friend Melissa Fuller who did the photo shoot for the cover ran with it. It’s good stuff.
[MCR]:The Parthenon reappears as a performance site for the February 8 concert. Does returning to the Naos feel like a homecoming, a re-interrogation of the original idea, a revision? something else?
[BCJ]: It does feel like a bit of a homecoming. This is definitely the premier space for this piece to be performed in. It will be a reexamining though because we’ll have Becca bringing her element to the performance.
[MCR]: Several of the 2026 performances occur in markedly different venues—from churches to theaters to Nashville’s famous Arcade. Do you expect the piece, and its reception, to differ in each space?
[BCJ]: There will definitely be differences. The Parthenon is its own beast of course. The Laurel Theater (Knoxville, TN) is a more traditional community venue in which the audience will be completely unfamiliar with myself, Becca, or the piece. I’m really leaning on the promoters to bring in folks, and their excitement about the performance is encouraging. St. Paul’s (Athens, TN) is an episcopal church, and while functionally similar to Laurel Theater, will obviously have a certain reverence attached to the performance. It’s obviously a secular piece, but I believe there is always a unique quality to making art and receiving art in religious spaces. I’m most excited about The Arcade. This is going to be sort of a guerilla performance in association with the art crawl. With the help and blessing of Arcade Arts Nashville, we’ll be performing on the walkway across the alley during the crawl. This performance will obviously be public, which always adds a fun chaos.
[MCR]: Your work often blurs the lines between concert music and lived experience. How important is accessibility—emotional or physical—to your compositional thinking?
[BCJ]: Accessibility is vitally important. Quality, depth, etc should never be compromised for aesthetic, but art is best shared. Really to me that’s entirely the point.
[MCR]: As founder of the Nashville Chamber Music Series, you’ve spent years curating spaces for listening. How has that curatorial perspective shaped the way you think about audience attention?
[BCJ]: Nashville Chamber Music Series has hosted forty-two concerts and carol sings since 2015. Because this is a house concert series the audience size is always small. But we’ve had concerts where backyards were packed, and it was a raucous time. And we’ve had concerts where very few people came and they were mostly family and friends. This can be very discouraging at face value, but then I talk to folks afterwards and it’s always clear that it was worth it. Bringing music to people is beautiful. In some ways the environment can be more distracting because we have kids running around and art on the walls and doors closing and opening. But that really is an intentional element of the experience. The lines between performer and audience don’t entirely disappear but they definitely blur. Where the stage starts and stops is unclear. It’s messy. And I think that’s why everyone has such a great time.
Across its many iterations—live, recorded, choreographed, documented—The Great Space resists closure. Jones speaks less as an architect of experience than as a facilitator, repeatedly returning to the idea that music gains meaning through shared presence rather than control. Whether performed beneath the Parthenon’s coffered ceiling, inside a church, or in the open chaos of the Arcade, the piece remains intentionally porous, shaped as much by its environment and audience as by the notes on the page.
In an era marked by distraction and compression, Jones’s work offers a quiet but insistent proposition: that attention itself can be an artistic act. The Great Space does not demand reverence, nor does it insist on transcendence. Instead, it asks listeners to occupy their surroundings more fully—to hear not only the quartet, but the air, the architecture, the bodies in motion, and the moment as it unfolds. In doing so, the piece becomes less a statement than an invitation—one that continues to open, expand, and reverberate long after the final sound has faded. To be present, tickets to the February 8th Concert are available here, and you can pre-order The Great Space (due to be released on February 6th) here.
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