Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response At The VSO
Sunday, January 18, 2015
Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) is a neologism for a perceptual phenomenon characterized as a distinct, pleasurable tingling sensation in the head, scalp, back, or peripheral regions of the body in response to visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or cognitive stimuli. The nature and classification of the ASMR phenomenon is controversial, with strong anecdotal evidence to support the phenomenon but little or no scientific explanation or verified data.
Wikipedia
The 2015 VSO Composer in Residence, Jocelyn Morlock told us on Saturday
that her piece The Tingling Sensation had been inspired by the above reference
in Wikipedia.
This second VSO New Music Festival (Thursday, Friday,
Saturday and today) was full of such tingling.
Two Thousand and Fourteen for me was full of new music. I
have resolved since I am an amateur and certainly not a music critic of any
kind to re-define New Music.
For me New Music is any music I have not heard of
or listened before. With that as my definition all that 17th century
(very fashionable in Vancouver) music played by Stile Moderno, Pacific Baroque
Orchestra and Early Music Vancouver is new music. So is the new music of the
many concerts I attended in 2014 by the Turning Point Ensemble. That the
Turning Point Ensemble played the music of Duke Ellington in a concert in 2012
(where else and by whom would you listen to Ellington these days) just confirms
that fresh music can be old, particularly if you have not heard it before.
In the 80s and 90s as a magazine photographer I had a ready answer for two problematic and quite frequent phone calls. One was from Maclean’s Magazine that would want me to take a picture within hours, take the raw film to the Air Canada desk at the airport and be paid $50. The other would have been an invite to a photographer’s stag. Imagine being surrounded by drunken photographers and not a woman in sight!
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| West Coast Energy Hall |
As our population ages, arts organizations have seen
their audience age. Soon, (perhaps not!) they will be avoiding all the arts
programs of our city to play bridge in a comfortable home in White Rock.
So it is with my appreciation and all the rest of those
who know in Vancouver to see someone like the VSO’s Music Artistic Director,
Bramwell Tovey champion new music and take us from those blah doldrums.
You would think that any festival that would begin with a
super sextet, Standing Wave and then combine it with another super sextet to
play the music of Steve Reich could not possibly find something to match that.
I thought that but I was wrong.
The first night I had the privilege position of being
behind Standing Wave on a chair with a few other lucky persons inside the
cavernous Orpheum Stage. Perhaps the most startling moment was seeing Allen
Stiles's (Standing Wave pianist) four sheet display of Reich’s music. It looked
all the same!
We heard music (becoming popular now) of Claude Vivier
arranged by Michael Oesterle, Pulau Dewata (and more Vivier yesterday
Saturday). This music is never boring and it keeps you alert. Not so, but
equally wonderful was John Luther Adams’s The Light Within. This was music with
no pause or silence of any kind. This piece and the Steve Reich Double Sextet
featured a taped background drone-like track and the musicians (12 of them for
the Reich) had special earphones to mark with click when they were supposed to
enter. All this complex miking was done by ex-CBC sound engineer/genius Don
Harder. Consider that his participation (not to record the Standing Wave and
the second sextet) was solely for the purpose of audience enjoyment and you
might understand Tovey’s disappointment of what he sees as a collapse (I
strongly agree) of the erstwhile and most useful participation of the CBC in
helping educate Canadians on the wonders of live music and exposure to the new
music, particularly that of Canadian composers.
Thursday’s composition Theft by Jocelyn Morlock amply proved that this composer not only can read music but good Latin American Literature, too. Theft was inspired by her reading of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Thursday’s composition Theft by Jocelyn Morlock amply proved that this composer not only can read music but good Latin American Literature, too. Theft was inspired by her reading of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Rebeca, it soon becomes evident, is afflicted with an
insomnia that also causes memory loss.
Without losing an iota of her memory perhaps Morlock
takes advantage of her insomnia to write her music. Consider that Saturday’s
That Tingling Sensation was finished this January - lots of sleepless night for
her!
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| Jocelyn Morlock & Bramwell Tovey |
I cannot end Thursday’s account without citing that not
only is it special to listen to Steve Reich live I have to state here that
during his Double Sextet and John Luther Adams’s The Light Within I distinctly
could smell Cannabis sativa wafting to the back where I was. It reminded me of
a concert in the late 60s in Mexico City’s Bellas Artes at a Ravi Shankar
concert. I could not see the stage because of the cloud of smoke.
I absolutely cannot stand massed choral music. It may
have begun sometime in the late 70s when I heard at the Luv-a- Fair a disco
version of Handel’s Hallelujah chorus while watching moustachioed men dance.
But Saturday’s Choral Magnificence with the Phoenix
Chamber Choir directed by Graeme Langager sprung some surprises that might
eventually convert me to their cause. For one he had this strange way of
rearranging his choir so that sometimes the men where in the back and the women
in the front (conventional) and then he would mix them. In one of the most
beautifully orchestrated manoeuvre I have seen from the hands of a conductor he
gestured and the chorus moved into place as if they had been choreographed by
Crystal Pite.
For me the justification for the evening was the
collaboration between the Phoenix Chamber Choir, Bramwell Tovey and a VSO
String Orchestra for Arvo Pärt’s Berliner Messe.
No matter how much I harp of the beauty of 17th
and 18th century baroque music there is nothing like the low sound
of 4 or 5 basses to bring ceremony to music. That I went to a Roman Catholic
boarding school in the late 50s and that I sang Gregorian chant meant that for
once I knew the lyrics of this beautiful Latin Catholic Mass. Thanks to Tovey I
went to church on Friday!
Saturday was a day that I thought would be hard to follow
after Thursday and Friday.
This was not so and part of it is that this New Music Festival
has organized a music program (music before the concert and music after the
concert) in the West Coast Energy Hall ( a pleasant lounge that serves booze
and curiously you are not allowed to tip the friendly persons behind the bar)
that features avant-garde stuff. Thursday it was pianist Bogdon Dulu playing compositions
of Marc-André Hamelin, Friday the UBC Woodwind Quintet, and of Saturday more
below. On all four nights jazz pianist Miles Black plays after the concert in
the lounge. On Friday he played an exquisite version of one of my faves, Dave
Brubeck’s homage to Duke Ellington, The Duke. It is my hope that tonight Sunday
he just might surprise us with his syncopated rendering of John Cage’s 4’33”.
Saturday finally brought new music symphonic music up
front. Two of the composers, Jocelyn Morlock and Ottawa’s Kelly-Marie Murphy
are authentically of this century. Harrison Birtwistle and Canadian Claude
Vivier are not. But remember new music is music you have not heard before.
Birtwistle’s Night’s Black Bird (with lots of chimes (deathly bell-like sounds)
and lots of bass was (as I imagined it) a funeral in a ghostly, dark and rainy
little English town churchyard. It was lugubrious music that put me into a deep
spell of depression (a pleasant experience when you know you can thwart it with
Miles Black and liquor later). Kelly-Marie Murphy’s composition Blood Upon the
Body, Ice Upon the Soul (a concerto for violin, Nicholas Wright, and orchestra
had as inspiration a neighbour of Murphy and her family in Dartmouth. He was young
teenager with a fondness for pellet guns. It seems that he was a psychopath and he killed at least once. The composition was another, not quite so lugubrious (thanks to
beautiful lyrical solos by Wright) piece, based on the psychopathic
fluctuations of McGray. This piece left me drained and yes there were lots of
bass and deathly chimes.
But I must end this with two citings of note. One is that
the evening’s pre-concert concert featured Vern Griffiths’s (Standing Wave, VSO percussionist) students
playing works by Jordan Nobles(Constellation) and Jocelyn Morlock (Hatch) which
were both played by the musicians being in different levels around and above
the West Coast Energy Hall. The music (sounds) was coming from everywhere. But
lastly they played John Cage’s 1941 (brand new to me) Third Construction which complete with a sea
conch sounded almost like the soundtrack for that 1959 Brazilian film by Marcel
Carmus, Black Orpheus. I wanted to dance and I should have had I known of the
dark music to come.
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| Bad ass VSO bassist & cellists |
But it wasn’t all that dark thanks to Morlock’s fresh and
brand new That Tingling Sensation.
And not wishing to embarrass her in any way, VSO
violinist Karen Gerbrecht, and my fave red-haired violinist looked luminous.
Tonight's last day, Sand and Stars featuring the music of Kelly-Marie Murphy, Frderick Schipizky (not often do you hear compositions by bassists), Jocelyn Morlock, Marcus Goddard, Toru Takemitsu promises more tingling sensations and particularly as Morlock boasts that her Ornithomancy a concerto for Flute (Christie Reside) and orchestra is in her opinion her best work yet. I find it most interesting that I first met Morlock years ago when the Pacific Baroque Orchestra commissioned her to write a new work for a baroque orchestra. It just comes to prove that almost anything can be new music if you open your ears to it.
If you look carefully you might note that Maestro is wearing some new Fluvog shoes. Morlock finally convinced our hip musical director to be hipper.
Tonight's last day, Sand and Stars featuring the music of Kelly-Marie Murphy, Frderick Schipizky (not often do you hear compositions by bassists), Jocelyn Morlock, Marcus Goddard, Toru Takemitsu promises more tingling sensations and particularly as Morlock boasts that her Ornithomancy a concerto for Flute (Christie Reside) and orchestra is in her opinion her best work yet. I find it most interesting that I first met Morlock years ago when the Pacific Baroque Orchestra commissioned her to write a new work for a baroque orchestra. It just comes to prove that almost anything can be new music if you open your ears to it.
If you look carefully you might note that Maestro is wearing some new Fluvog shoes. Morlock finally convinced our hip musical director to be hipper.
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| Karen Gerbrecht |
Duke Ellington
Pacific Baroque Orchestra
the ornamental twiddles of a baroque orchestra
Claude Vivier & the Turning Point Ensemble
very new 17th century music from Stile Moderno
Karen Gerbrecht
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| Miles Black |
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| Phoenix Chamber Choir |
