It is easy to be complacent. It is easy to go to a program of Mozart. I can no longer abide going to listen to Bach’s Concerto for 2 Violins in D minor, BWV 1043. I have heard it too many times. In my car these days I am listening to The Rosary Sonatas of Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber, a 17^th century composer. It is more difficult to pull yourself together (as the English are fond to say) and go to a challenging evening of new music. But I do my best not to be complacent.

I attend the concerts of Turning Point Ensemble and whatever other new music concerts I can find including the wonderful once-a-year-baby of VS0 conductor Branwell Tovey, the New Music Festival.

I find it strange that the members of Vancouver’s avant-garde mostly have gray hair. Whatever happened to youth in their quest for the new, the daring and the experimental? It would seem that our city’s avante-garde would have to be renamed (and I am doing so) as the Petit Avant-garde.

The Petit Avant-garde including my friend the genius (alas retired!) CBC sound engineer Don Harder were there tonight at the Telus Studio Theatre Chan Centre at UBC for the first of the series Masque put together by Nu:BC Collective (tonight) and the other two forthcoming ones by Turning Point Ensemble and Musica Intima (and friends) featuring  the Nu:BC Collective, Paolo Bertolucci on flute, Corey Hamm, piano and Eric Wilson on cello. Turning Point’s Artistic Director Owen Underhill was also in attendance and he told me, “You are lucky to be here as the last work in the program, Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969) is something that you get to hear only once in your lifetime performed live.”

Adam Da Ross, Diane Park, Paolo Bortolussi, Corey Hamm, William George, Brian Nesselroad, Eric Wilson, Mark Ferris & Françoise Houle

And consider, too that the three works in the program, Converse (2015) by Bob Pritchard, Souffles Primitivs (2001) by Christian Calon and Heroes in the Seaweed (2015) by Keith Hamel (unlike Bartók he smiles a lot) where works by living and breathing composers. Two composers, Pritchard and Hamel were present in the audience. While Maxwell Davies composed his work in 1969 my Spanish grandmother would say “todavía vivitos y coleando,” or all are alive and wagging their tail.   

There was a good reason for the presence of  Keith Hamel and Bob Pritchard (wearing for the first time a Noël Coward style Chinese smoking jacket, a clashing bow tie and orange socks). Both  in some ways were sort-of-like conductors or perhaps as extra performers in the back of the room. This sort of thing is called interactive electronics. I experienced this intriguing method of playing music in 2014 at a Turning Point Ensemble concert at the Woodward’s downtown campus.

The system in which the individual composers sitting by a big Mac and an assorted combination of equipment I hardly recognized, modify the music being played by the performers or they add stuff. There are no real pre-recorded tracks being played (perhaps a few). The result is sound that travels the acoustically interesting Telus Studio (so says Don Harder) through multiple speakers all over the room (ceiling and wall). The sounds of the performers not always come from the conventional use of their instruments. In some cases pianist Hamm was ignoring the keyboard and concentrating on scratching the works of the piano, or cellist Wilson would bang on his instrument or howl vowels into a microphone (in Pritchard’s work). But it was flutist Bortolussi  facing an array of microphones who did stuff with his flute that in many cases precluded the conventional blowing. In Souffles Primitivs he worked on (perhaps a better term than play!) a bass flute, an instrument I had never seen before.

Corey Hamm

The key to enjoying (tolerating some would say) this music is not to be too worried about understanding it. The idea is that composers want to try new things and performers get bored with the conventional repertoire. Just go to any Turning Point Ensemble concert and you will note that many of the performers also play for the VSO or other traditional symphony orchestras. For me new music is the champagne soother between heavy meals.

Many think that new music is scary and serious and yet all three works had lots of very obvious humour, one that as a member of the audience you can share and feel like you are part of it.

At one time philosophers and philosophy seemed to be most important in our understanding of how we think, live and die. Now I would say that role has shifted to the arts and particularly to that new-music composers are pushing that envelope. Pritchard’s piece involved the idea that vowels reveal our emotions while consonants are all about information and content. The three musicians played their instruments but also repeated vowels and consonant (at times it was very funny). The work left me thinking. Is Pritchard right?

Hamel’s second work, Heroes in the Seaweed was an ode to the man that he admires (an admiration shared not only by most Canadians but the world) Leonard Cohen. The performance included (I forgot to look back so I don’t know if Hamel’s wife soprano (but sometimes alto) the Reveren Liz Hamel was saying the words of Cohen’s songs and poetry live or it had been pre-recorded. Her voice is splendid and soothing.

Paolo Bortolussi & his bass flute

The second half of the concert (after I interacted with the cognoscenti Petit Avant-garde) consisted of a complex, moving, impressive, troubling work by an English composer who perhaps not unlike Scottish marmelade might have the words “By Appointment to the Queen, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth Purveyor of Music to Her Court) stamped on his forehead. It was at the beginning of the work that I noticed the four golden “cages” that were lowered to encompass not only Bortolucci, and Wilson but also virtuoso clarinettist Françoise Houle and deapan (but not for long) violinist Mark Ferris. There was an additional change as behind was percussionist Brian Nesselroad wearing a black top hat. He look ominously funereal. All the performers had red, whit and blue tufts of feathers (?) and the whole set had been designed by the elegant Diane Park (My,that red dress she was wearing!) with staging by Adam Da Ross.

The big surprise was the sudden appearance of tenor William George dressed as a bullfinch (King George III, the mad king had an obsession with these feathery friends). He did more than sing (lyrics pulled from the writings, on record of King George III and Randolphe Stowe). In the 8 songs, William George, see-sawed between lucidity and out and out madness. This was scary and I kept thinking to myself what other baritone could possibly do this?

When George repeatedly says:

I am nervous. I am not ill 
but I am nervous.
If you would know what is the matter with me
I am nervous 

I understand that we still have to understand madness and the stigmas still attached to it. We would never ever use the word straight jacket in a sentence and when George put on his coat backwards it was all so reinforced.

It was at the end of Song 7 that George entered Ferris's cage and snatched his violin. He went back to the centre of the stage (I kept thinking he is not going to smash it, is he?) while Ferris expressed unusual shock. George then smashed the violin on the floor and returned the pieces to Ferris who then lay down on the floor apparently dead in shock. It was then than percussionist Nesselroad, with black top hat and a huge marching band drum appeared as death and he led a howling George out of the room.

William George

From left, Bob Pritchard (note the smoking jacket) & Keith Hamel