David Pay's PEP Rally For New Music
Tuesday, October 28, 2014
 |
| Nicole Li - October 27 2014 |
Fortunately I do not
believe in a local cultural conspiracy theory that would suggest that at any
concert presentation of New Music, be it the Turning Point Ensemble or David
Pay's ambitious and edgy Modulus Festival (from October 23 to 29) a would-be a cultural terrorist could be out terminate with extreme prejudice all the
contemporary composers of our city. That would be easy since at these events
many of those composers are present.
Our would-be cultural
terrorist would be one who would have reverse views to Gavrilo Princip who in
his assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, Sophie,
Duchess of Hohenberg, in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, wanted to destroy the old
order. Our would-be Vancouver
cultural terrorist would be wanting to do the opposite which is to leave our
music scene as it is or was recently. And that would be a music scene that would remain boring and tried.
Five of those
composers (noted in the program of PEP or Piano and Erhu Project) with Corey
Hamm on piano and Nicole Li on erhu were present last night. These were Edward
Top, Jocelyn Morlock, Jared Miller, Dorothy Chang and Keith Hamel. Without
looking too far I noticed two more, John Oliver and Owen Underhill.
A smart bomb
consisting of a loud recording of any Tchaikovsky symphony with some extras
like any song by Neil Diamond and a Vivaldi Four Seasons would, in one fell sweep, terminate our
new music composers.
Last night I was not
there to listen to predictable music. This would have been impossible to begin
with as al five compositions on the program were world premieres. Pianist Cory Hamm and Erhudist (is that correct?) Nicole Li decided together a couple of years ago that our city was ripe for musical melding of cultures. Judging by this amateur's reaction last night to PEP, it was a felicitous success. I cannot wait for a possible composition my Mark Armanini for Erhu and Cello (Nicole Li and Marina Hasselberg).
Listening to all five
of the brand-new compositions I noted three things. The most “Chinese sounding”, an appraisal by this
musical amateur was Edward Top’s Lamentation. Edward Top was the VSO’s Composer
in Residence last year. This year’s VSO Composer in Residence, Jocelyn Morlock,
was the least “Chinese sounding”. 'Her Vespertine - II Verdegris was lyrical and after just a few seconds
of listening to it, Li’s Erhu sounded very much like the bowed string
instrument that it is.
Dorothy Chang’s Four
Short Poems of Fancy were whimsical and funny at times. The fourth movement, green sheep tango, was indeed a tango to this Argentine. Keith Hamel’s Homage to
Liu Wenjin (a recently departed Chinese composer) shifted between soft him to
soft Hamel. It was satisfying, respectful and if you happened to have seen
Hamel in the audience and noticed his soft smile you would have known why. He
is a gentle man who plays the lute. I first met up with Hamel’s music here.
It was Jared Miller
(born in 1988 which makes him three years younger than Nicole Li whose work, Captive,
with lots of complex banging on the piano and bowing on the Erhu that made me
sit up. I could have been listening to a meeting between Thelonius Monk and
Eric Dolphy. It felt primal and like the other four pieces I can quote Liz
Hamel (singer, recorder player and partner to Keith Hamel) “This was one
concert that was much too short.” I could have stayed for more.
In my musical
ignorance I can imagine Bach on a keyboard, plunking tentative notes while his
wife notes them down. I can imagine Beethoven sitting at the piano composing a
bagatelle and being flummoxed by having to imagine the sounds. In both cases
the composers were experts in knowing the capabilities of the instruments being
composed for. There is no record of Adolphe
Sax (he would have been 13 when Beethoven died) asking the master “Would you be
willing to compose something for my new instrument?”
How did these five
composers write the music for Hamm
and Li? One answer was forthcoming and immediate from Morlock who told me that
her Vespertine II Verdegris had been composed 11 years before for piano and
harp. I can only guess that Hamm,
Li and Morlock got together one day and adapted it. Of Top's "Chinese sounding" composition, she said, "He probably wanted to make it so."
It was Jared Miller’s
piece that led me to think that the act of composition of anything for a brand
new instrument (in this case the erhu, pronounced R-who, an instrument known in
China
for a millennium) must entail intimate knowledge of the instrument. I can
imagine Miller showing up a Li’s house and saying, “Show me what you can do
with that.” I wonder if there are any
places in Miller’s composition where Li might have needed to learn a new
technique.
All in all the evening
was one of big surprises in small packages in which the warm demeanor of Cory
Hamm’s face while he played made me think that had he been the principal at a
school I would not have been afraid to be sent to his office. It made the music, startling at times, much more reachable to me.
As for Nicole Li, a
very different young girl from the one I photographed with cellist Marina
Hasselberg for the Georgia Straight, I was amazed. In the photo session she was
a younger girl (I could swear she was wearing pigtails even if she wasn’t). At
the concert, long hair down, she was the Oriental femme fatale, an authentic
one that would have been played in the 50s in Hollywood by Gene Tierney. Li was wearing a
very tight long, black dress with a slit (a very long slit) on the left side. Her
shoes were beautiful, just right, and her bright red lipstick was reminiscent of
the Jazz, Red, Hot & Cool by Revlon worn by model on Dave Brubeck Quartet Cover by Richard
Avedon.
Nicole Li playing her
erhu was grown up, determined and playing her instrument (difficult not to note
here that she has lovely hands with long fingers) with an assurance of one who
has been at it for a long time. I have always been amazed at the sound and complexity that can come out of that four-stringed instrument, the violin. It is thus amzing the Li's erhu has only two.
It was most pleasant
to observe that in dressing up Li showed how important this debut was (including
the release of a CD with two more to come) and that those New Music Composers
and Corey Hamm himself (who did wear a suit) might have followed Li's elegant cue.
What is new music?
Addendum: As I stood with my ticket waiting to get into the concert hall of the Roundhouse I was hit by a nostalgic wave from my built-in GPS. I realized that on the very spot where I was standing, there were remnants of the tracks used by locomotives, in a not so distant past, as they were pushed to the outside where they were turned around as their bottom innards were inspected for repairs. It was in that spot where in the late 80s I was dispatched by Canadian Pacific Limited (I worked for them on contract) to photograph the Royal Hudson which was being repaired at what at the time was called the Drake Street Yard. While the memory makes me feel older it also makes me marvel at some of the marvelous opportunities that my camera was a passport for.
What is new music?
Addendum: As I stood with my ticket waiting to get into the concert hall of the Roundhouse I was hit by a nostalgic wave from my built-in GPS. I realized that on the very spot where I was standing, there were remnants of the tracks used by locomotives, in a not so distant past, as they were pushed to the outside where they were turned around as their bottom innards were inspected for repairs. It was in that spot where in the late 80s I was dispatched by Canadian Pacific Limited (I worked for them on contract) to photograph the Royal Hudson which was being repaired at what at the time was called the Drake Street Yard. While the memory makes me feel older it also makes me marvel at some of the marvelous opportunities that my camera was a passport for.
