NEW MUSIC FESTIVAL AT UofC FEATURES INNOVATIVE COMPOSITIONS

Categorized | Events

NEW MUSIC FESTIVAL AT UofC FEATURES INNOVATIVE COMPOSITIONS

Posted on 26 January 2010 by Calgary Beacon.

Chenoa Anderson rehearsing “Aftertouch”
By Markham Hislop

I attended my first “festival of new music and media” last night. As a self-confessed musical ignoramus, I thought it would broaden my musical horizons. And it didn’t hurt that an old school chum’s composition was being performed. After two hours in a the Eckharte-Gramatte Concert Hall on the University of Calgary campus, I confess to being confused. That was music?

It was, after a fashion. I recognized many of the instruments – pianos, violins, flutes, clarinets, and so on. But the sounds emanating from those instruments, and often a computer integrated into the performance, were completely unfamiliar. There were clicks and whirrs, deliberate feedback from the speakers, and all sorts of keyboard sounds that wouldn’t have been out of place in a video arcade game.

Top 40 pop it was not. And since my musical tastes run to 70s blues rock and John Prine-type singer songwriters, my inclination was to dismiss it as just noise.

My friend convinced me to do otherwise.

Lorne Altman and I go way back, to 1971, in a little northern Manitoba town where his father was a teacher and mine worked for Hydro. We both hated the place in a fish-out-of-water kind of way and naturally became best friends.

Lorne’s family is musical, while I am not. His mother tried to teach me piano for a time, but we both recognized it as a hopeless endeavor and I quit, sparing both parties more needless aggravation. I also tried the trumpet for a while, hoping to join Lorne in the school band. Another bust.

Lorne and his family moved away for Grade 10 and I mercifully gave up on acquiring any musical skills. Like most musical ignoramuses, I know what I like, even it my wife can’t bear to have it on the radio while we’re in the car, and I’m fine with that. Lorne, on the other hand, acquired several music degrees and became a professional composer, among other related occupations.

On Monday well-know flautist Chenoa Anderson performed Lorne’s composition, Aftertouch, at Happening 2010, which is a five-day festival of the aural weird and wonderful organized by the University of Calgary. Yesterday was decidated to Instruments +, which generally means a traditional instrument paired with rather non-traditional technology (a student performance featured a young man painting on a television screen, which was videotaped and projected on a large screen).

The festival runs all this week and features performances of sound and image, possible orchestras, new adventures in sound art, and a network music concert (the latter features performers in cities around the world playing together in almost real-time thanks the marvels of high speed internet access).

I had the good fortune to listen to a rehearsal of Aftertouch and the concert performance. I have no idea how to describe it. According to Lorne, a computer receives the sounds created by Ms. Anderson on her flute and the strength or intensity of the sound activates a software “gate” that, in turn, generates a sound from speakers located on the stage. The idea is that the performer interacts with the computer in a “dynamic loop,” with the music ever changing and evolving. There is no musical score and the Ms. Anderson was free to improvise in whatever manner suited her.

The performance suffered from a few technical glitches, but the audience got the gist of it. But what exactly did they experience? And that is the question Lorne challenged me to think about.

As an academic in the field, he understands the history of musical innovation. He points out that while we may enjoy Mozart of Beethoven, much of the contemporary work of their day has been forgotten. The innovators of that time are considered failures because their work hasn’t stood up to popular and critical scrutiny. But their relentless pursuit of something different, something creative, a departure from the music of previous generations, is the link that bridges the generations of composers.

The six compositions we heard last night may fade into obscurity, but it is the process of innovation that is important. Failure is good, he argues, because as long as musicians are creating new “musical languages” the art form will contine to evolve and grow.

This is an interesting way to look at new music and media. And not one I had considered prior to the concert.

The most accessible piece, for me, was Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 1 by composer William Jordan, with Edmond Agopian on violin and Suzanne Hardick on piano. The instruments were familiar and the melodic structures were easier to understand and follow.

But to Lorne they were boring. He has heard them a thousand times before and they represent the staid and the safe, not the innovative frontier of new music. As a fiction writer, I could see the parallel to popular genres like detective potboilers that follow a formula and, while they may offer up swashbuckling tales, are ultimately tedious because I’ve seen it all before.

Armed with my new point of view, I could better appreciate what the composers and performers were trying to achieve. Aaron Gervais, a young Edmonton composer now working in San Diego, crafted a piece called Hockey Story. It was inspired by Brazilian pianist Luciane Cardassi’s quest to understand Canada’s game. Did it succceed? To my ears, not really. The structure of the music and the endless repetition of hockey terms (Slapshot! Penalty! High sticking!) did not evoke a sense of the brutal ballet that is hockey.

But it was a game try and it speaks to Lorne’s principal point about new music: the success of an individual composition is not as important as the process that gave birth to it. From that process some important music will be born.

Will any of the music featured in Happening 2010 become important? I don’t know and I’m certainly not qualified to judge. But after some to reflect, I’m glad I had the opportunity to experience Monday’s concert.

If you’d like to attend any of the remaining concernts, or take in a roundtable discussion or lecture, you can visit the festival’s web site for more information.

Get the Flash Player to see this content.