La Mujer Detrás Del Antifaz
Saturday, January 24, 2015
antifaz.
(De ante- y
faz).
1. m. Velo, máscara o cosa semejante con que
se cubre la cara, especialmente la parte que rodea los ojos.
Real
Academia Española © Todos los derechos reservados
La mujer
detrás del antifaz
Julianne Austin
Buenos Aires
Emma
Bourke es una de esas mujeres que, gracias a su atractivo, -si es que lo tiene
oculto debajo de su anticuado estilo-, pasa desapercibida totalmente.
Emma es
secretaria desde hace tres años de Tristan Cole, su jefe y uno de esos hombres
que, definitivamente, cualquier mujer con ojos en la cara se voltearía para
ver.
Tristan
es guapo por donde se lo mire; divertido, galante, seductor hasta el hartazgo,
y también un mujeriego sin remedio. Y Emma, inexorablemente, se enamoró de él
casi desde el mismo día en el que fue contratada por Cole Publicists...
Pero tal
parece que Tristan tiene ojos para cualquier modelito que lleve faldas... o
pantalones bien ajustados. A decir verdad, él tiene ojos para cualquier fémina
alta, delgada, rubia y hermosa, use la ropa que use... Pero nunca alguien como
Emma Bourke.
Es en el
baile de máscaras que organiza la empresa, a beneficio de un hospital
materno-infantil, que Emma decide por una sola noche, dejar su ropa pasada de
moda y lucir prendas seductoras.
Tristan
se ve atraído por aquella diosa de curvas dignas de provocar un infarto y se
dedica toda la noche a seducirla, aunque en ningún momento puede averiguar la
identidad de la mujer detrás del antifaz.
Emma
supone que las cosas para Tristan seguirán como siempre: conquista, noche de
pasión, un ramo de flores al otro día y después, ¡si te he visto, no me
acuerdo!
We Wear The Mask That Grins And Lies
Friday, January 23, 2015
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,--
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be overwise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!
Emily Dickinson
It was not death for I stood alone
The Music in the Violin Does Not Emerge Alone
I tend my flowers for thee
Lavinia Norcross Dickinson
Pray gather me anemone!
Ample make her bed
His caravan of red
Me-come! My dazzled face
Develops pearl and weed
But peers beyond her mesh
Surgeons must be very careful
Water is taught by thirst
I could not prove that years had feet
April played her fiddle
A violin in Baize replaced
I think the longest hour
The spirit lasts
http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2014/03/i-left-them-in-ground-emily-dickinson.html
http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2014/01/i-felt-my-life-with-both-my-hands.html
http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2011/03/currer-bell-emily-dickinson-charlotte.html
http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2011/06/i-could-not-see-to-see.html
http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2011/06/blonde-assasin-passes-on.html
http://blog.alexwaterhousehayward.com/2012/12/you-almost-bathed-your-tongue.html
Bullet Catch - A Wonder Of An Ilusión
Thursday, January 22, 2015
 |
| Rob Drummond - Ilusionista |
Bullet Catch a one person (not all the time) play written
and performed and co-directed (with David Overend) by Rob Drummond (a Scotsman
from Glasgow) runs from January 15 to February 7. I attended the official
opening, at the Revue Stage on Granville Island, his last Wednesday, January 21. Since Mr. Drummond gets shot by a 9mm
Beretta by the end of the show you must suppose three things:
1. Rob Drummond has good life insurance.
2. He somehow survives this ordeal and is able to catch a
previously marked bullet between his teeth.
3. No theatrical institutions, in this case PuSh International
Performing Arts Festival and the Arts Club Theatre Company who co-present
Bullet Catch would take the chance of having an empty theatre for many days if
the star, Rob Drummond were not to survive the almost point blank shooting.
Like many presentations by PuSh Bullet Catch cannot be
cornered into a category. I will not proceed here to give you any further
information on what it is or isn’t. Suffice to know that the slightly longer
than 60 minute show is funny, entertaining but best of all it is about a man who
believes in the goodness within us all in spite of all the pitfalls of our history
until now.
But I must warn you. We can be lucky and thank the
heavens that Mr. Drummond does not sell, door to door, in Burnaby, Electroluxes
and Encyclopaedia Britannicas with a side gift of steak knives. You would not
have a chance to say, “No.” And pity anybody going to Kingsway or Marine Drive
to buy a used car. Mr. Drummond would saddle you with the worst car ever made,
a Chevrolet Epica.
Somehow this would-be wrestler could sell you anything
with his disarming smile and manner. I was sold, satisfied with my
current Malibu and Hoover (a canister).
What makes Bullet Catch special is how in an age of
special effects where we must be wowed more and more with escalation in order
to be amazed, this show brings back the idea of magic and not knowing how these
effects are done. I would like to call Mr. Drummond not an playwright/actor/magician
but a playwright/actor/illusionist. Good magicians are best defined as illusionists
as we all know (or do we?) that magic does not exist.
I love how different languages define and use similar
words. In Spanish ilusión is much like illusion in English. But there is a secondary definition in
Spanish that is far more important and more used. An ilusión is a combination
of a hope/desire that you may daydream about.
No
rechaces tus sueños. ¿Sin la ilusión el mundo que sería?
Ramón De Campoamor
Don’t reject your dreams. Without ilusión what would the
world be?
It was this double meaning of illusion that for me kept this
show where firmly where it should be. It is a positive manifestation of the goodness in us
all. And that this might be your coclusion after having a good laugh is worth
the admission to whatever this play is or is not.
Warning: In this play Mr. Drummond reveals one of his
magic tricks. While I was taking his picture he told me that a fine New York
City firm had insured him. I wonder if it includes a provision for being done
away by the Scottish Association of Magicians for revealing the trick. So when
Mr. Drummond shows you how a particular trick is performed I suggest you take
his advice and close your eyes. If not how can you keep believing in the power
of magic?
My Rosemary and I, while living in Burnaby did succumb to the persuasion of a Drummond-like Italian who with the promise of free steak knives in our hands pulled a Cyclonic Vacuum Cleaner from his hat and we ended up paying (in interest) twice the value of the machine.
Haydn’s Seven Last Words – Crucifixion of the Earth
Wednesday, January 21, 2015
 |
Don José Marcos Ignacio Sáenz de Santa María y Sáenz-Rico
|
Haydn’s Seven Last Words – Crucifixion of the Earth
January 24, 2015 | 8:00pm | Pre-concert chat with host
Matthew White at 7:15
Orpheum Annex 823
Seymour Street, 2nd floor
In 1785 Josef Haydn
wrote a chamber work based on the Biblical seven last words spoken by Christ on
the cross. Traditionally, the words or phrases are spoken, followed by a
meditation on those words, then by the music. EMV, in collaboration with Green
College at UBC, have invited renowned BC poets Robert Bringhurst and Jan Zwicky
to prepare poetry for each of the seven movements that stimulates a dialogue
based on the universal human qualities in the text and also in Haydn’s deeply
affecting music.
The above is all you need to know about this wonderful
concert and I could leave it at that. But if you are slightly curious the
events, ancillary and direct that led Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) to write the
piece are most interesting and curious.
I have always found it fascinating to know that Haydn was
a gifted soprano singer who because of his talent ended up as a boy-singer in the choir at St. Stephen’s in Vienna. George van Reutter the cathedral’s musical director
had received a complaint from Empress Maria Theresa that Haydn, now 17, was
losing his ability to sing the high notes. Van Reutter called in Mathias Haydn,
Joseph’s father, and amateur harpist, and suggested that a surgical solution could save
his son’s singing career. We can be thankful to Papa (the real Papa) Haydn that
his son’s nether parts were kept intact and somehow they equipped the man to
become a great composer.
We must go back to March 1519 when Hernán Cortés Monroy
Pizarro Altamirano founded the Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz in thanks for having
arrived unscathed from battles with the local natives on Good Friday. To make
sure his troops stayed Cortés burned the ships. From there he moved inland to Tenochtitlan and New Spain was eventually called Mexico.
Don José Marcos Ignacio Sáenz de Santa María y Sáenz-Rico
a priest ordained in 1738 had been born April 25, 1738 in what was then called
the New City of Vera Cruz. His father, Pedro Sáenz de Santa María y Sáenz de
Almarza was an important businessman. In 1785 the priest’s father died and
subsequently the businessman’s eldest son who was a marquis. This is how our
priest (most important later on in dealing with Joseph Haydn) became, by
inheritance a noble priest.
Around 1730 in Cádiz, Spain, there was a semi-secret
religious group of saintly men (a cofradía) who met once a week in an
unfashionable and probable zone of ill repute to discuss spiritual matters. The
Bishop of Cádiz went in mufti to check them out. Seeing that all was in order
(perhaps the men had been warned in advance) the bishop told them to continue
their laudable indeavour but that they should do it not in a house but in a
church. The place they found was called La Auxiliar del Rosario, a modest
oratorio of the 16th century. The men then called themselves la
Cofradía de la Madre Antigua. In 1756 they began repair work to spruce up the
old oratorio. The oxen which were carrying out the construction debris sank in
a hole on San Francisco Street. They found an underground cavern.
Now the year before there had been a catastrophic
earthquake in Lisbon (read Voltaire’s Candide) which brought 30 meter tidal
waves to Cádiz. It was suspected that was the reason for the hidden cavern. The
Diario de Cádiz (newspaper) in 2004 asserted via the archaeologist Inmaculada
Pérez that the cavern at one time had been the Phoenician temple to Astarte.
Some say that Western Europe's oldest continuously occupied city is Cádiz. It was founded by Phoenicians who called it Gadir or Agadir.
Our noble priest Don José was assigned to be the
spiritual leader of the Cofradía in 1771. He had inherited a fortune from his
brother and nephew so by 1781 he decided to improve the cavern chapel which was now
called Oratorio de la Santa Cueva (cave) but today is called La Iglesia del Rosario.
Don José had a friend who was an avid art collector. He was Don Sebastián Martínez Pérez.
He was a personal friend of Goya. Don Sebastián was also a doctor so
Goya came to Cádiz for treatment. There is a portrait of Don Sebastián by Goya
at the Metropolitan in New York City. Don José commissioned Goya to paint three
works, The Parable of the Wedding, a Last Supper and the Miracle of the Loaves
and the Fishes.
Cádiz is at the mouth of the Guadalquivir and higher up
is the city of Seville famous for its Holy Week ceremonies. Cádiz had the
tradition of holding a three hour long reading of Christ’s Last Seven Words on
Good Friday. Between the words there were sermons so that it all lasted three
hours. Don José through his his musician friends Marquis Méritos and Marquis
Ureña contacted Haydn who was the fashionable composer of the time in Spain to
write a musical work for the ceremony.
Haydn himself explained the origin and difficulty of
writing the work when the publisher Breitkopf & Härtel issued (in 1801) a
new edition and requested a preface:
Some fifteen years ago I was requested by a canon of
Cádiz to compose instrumental music on the Seven Last Words of Our Savior On
the Cross. It was customary at the Cathedral of Cádiz to produce an oratorio
every year during Lent, the effect of the performance being not a little
enhanced by the following circumstances. The walls, windows, and pillars of the
church were hung with black cloth, and only one large lamp hanging from the
center of the roof broke the solemn darkness. At midday, the doors were closed
and the ceremony began. After a short service the bishop ascended the pulpit,
pronounced the first of the seven words (or sentences) and delivered a discourse
thereon. This ended, he left the pulpit and fell to his knees before the altar.
The interval was filled by music. The bishop then in like manner pronounced the
second word, then the third, and so on, the orchestra following on the
conclusion of each discourse. My composition was subject to these conditions,
and it was no easy task to compose seven adagios lasting ten minutes each, and
to succeed one another without fatiguing the listeners; indeed, I found it
quite impossible to confine myself to the appointed limits.
The work, called “Las
siete últimas palabras de nuestro Salvador en la cruz” was finished in the
winter of 1786 and was inaugurated in Vienna
March 26, 1787 and in Cádiz on Good Friday April 14 of the same year. One
of the instruments used was a Stradivarius cello made in 1720 and presently
owned by Mexican collector Carlos Prieto. Don José paid Haydn in a most unusual way - sending him a
cake in which Haydn discovered was filled with gold coins
Manuel de Falla (1876-1946) who was born in Cádiz said
that as a young boy he attended a performance of the Haydn work and that it
helped inspire him into his career in music.
In Spanish these are the last 7 words:
1.
Padre
perdónalos porque no saben lo que hacen. (Lucas 23, 34)
2.
En
verdad te digo que hoy estarás conmigo en el paraíso. (Lucas 23, 43)
3.
Mujer,
ahí tienes tu hijo, y al discípulo Juan: Ahí tienes a tu madre (Juan 19, 26-27)
4.
Dios
mío, Dios mío, ¿Porqué me has desamparado? (Mateo 27, 46)
5.
Tengo
sed (Juan 19, 28)
6.
Todo
está cumplido (Juan 19, 30)
7.
Padre,
en tus manos encomiendo mi espíritu (Lucas 23, 46)
Those Spanish words are familiar to me. Since I could remember, when I was five (1946) my grandmother and mother would call me around 1pm from playing outside in the garden on Good Friday. On this day we did not turn on our radio to listen to music. My mother and I would kneel and my grandmother María de los Dolores Reyes de Irureta Goyena would read the above words to us. We stopped the Good Friday prayers around 1952.
In the beginning of the 60s my mother, my grandmother and I moved to in Veracruz. We lived on Calle Martín Alonso Pinzón. Martín Alonzo was the captain of La Pinta, Columbus's second caravel on his first voyage of discovery.
 |
| Alex with María de los Dolores Reyes de Irureta Goyena |
There are further curious interactions of historical characters around this Haydn composition The Seven Last Words of Our Saviour On the Cross.
In 1800 Lord Nelson and his mistress Emma Hamilton
stopped in Vienna on their way (overland) from Naples. They were invited to
visit the Prince and Princess Esterhazy. They were feted and served by 100
grenadiers (all 6 ft tall or taller) and they heard a performance of Haydn’s Missa in Angustiis, henceforth dubbed
the Nelson Mass. Haydn and Nelson
exchanged gifts, the pocket watch Nelson used during the Battle of the Nile and
Haydn’s quill with which he wrote the Miss ain Angustiis. Emma Hamilton, who
was a fine soprano, sang a Haydn choral work.
In the kind of connections (some might say blurry) that I
adore I would like to finish here with these facts. Don José, our rich marquis
was born in Veracruz. General George Meade who defeated Robert E. Lee in
Gettysburg was born in Cádiz. During the 20-day siege of the Battle of Veracruz
from March 9 to March 1847 in what came to be known as the Mexican/American
War, a young engineer, Captain Robert E.
Lee found a way around the city which
prevented the city from being demolished in what was the United States’s first
amphibious landing.
The battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805, within sight of
Cabo Trafalgar, meant that the Spaniards in Cádiz would have been witness to
Nelson’s decisive victory.
Traditionally the last of the 7 words are from Luke 23:46. But Haydn chose Matthew 27:51ff. for an eighth movement (plus one more as introduction for a total of nine movements). Why? I have my suspicions but I will not elaborate.
That last movement is labeled by Haydn:
Il terremoto (Earthquake) in C minor – Presto e con tutta la forza.
And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; And the graves were opened ; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose.
When I listen to this last movement I will also imagine oxen falling into a hole on San Francisco Street in Cádiz.
Below is the illustration being used by Early Music
Vancouver to promote Saturday's concert. Early Music Vancouver Artistic
Director Matthew White saw in my rose scans (roses from my garden scanned on my
Epson Perfection V700 Photo) good uses for illustrating the programs and
calendar of EMV. He asked me what we could possibly do for Haydn's Seven Last
Words – Crucifixion of the Earth. We walked around the garden to my very large
and sprawling Rosa 'Albertine' which had finished blooming. It blooms profusely
but only once. I pointed at the thorns.
"These brutal thorns (some of the most vicious of all roses) represent the
suffering and crucifixion of our Lord. The emerging young shoot is His
resurrection." And that was that.
Little Dancer Aged 14 Grows Up
Tuesday, January 20, 2015
 |
| Sandrine Cassini |
When I just turned 14, I moved to Paris to see if my dream
could become my life. I was struggling with anorexia, I was full of doubt and
fears...then I met an angel...my dance teacher became my dance mother, taught
me more than steps but a philosophy, a method, a different approach that made
me stronger than I could have imagined. I learnt how to love myself again and
never ever follow when all was asked for was blending in.
Today is the saddest day... she became a star in the sky,
after being a star on earth. Forever I will try to follow your steps Wilfride
and make you proud, now that you are watching from above.
Sandrine Cassini
Wellington, New Zealand
Civitas, New Music, Bramwell Tovey, Sean Rossiter & Don Harron
Monday, January 19, 2015
 |
| Don Harron 1924-2015 - Bramwell Tovey 1953 - Sean Rossiter 1946-2015 |
On Thursday January 15 I attended a memorial for
multi-tasking writer Sean Rossiter who died on January 5. On Saturday January
17 former CBC Radio man, Don Harron passed away. Beginning January 15 and
ending January 18, I attended the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s New Music Festival (the second one). In two days, January 15 and yesterday January 18
Musical Director Bramwell Tovey made it a point to harangue (in a nice way as
only he can) the destructive repercussions on music and thus on our cultural
life by the dismantling of the CBC as it “devolves into irrelevancy “ [that’s
my choice of words and not the maestro’s]
It is for this, and some of you who might have gotten this
far, that the three men are above and I am not in the least hinting that the
only one living and standing is about to die. Of this I hope not as Mr. Tovey
is an underappreciated gem of a man whom we only deserve if we have a small
collective inclination to head toward an excellence that until now has defied
us and defined us for lacking thereof.
On my left by my computer monitor is my copy of Thomas
Cahill’s Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea – Why the Greeks Matter. I have been
thinking plenty about the Greeks (the ancient ones) since Thursday’s memorial to SeanRossiter at Sun Yat-Sen Chinese Garden.
I attended something similar in 1991 after the death of
Harvey Southam a man I had worked with when he edited his local business
magazine Equity. I went to his memorial at Christ Church Cathedral knowing what
I would experience. It was a memorial in which I did not see anybody who was
not white and the minister talked eloquently about summers in Qualicum. I knew
then that our city had changed.
On Thursday I noticed one black woman, Constance Barnes
and one Chinese man, architect Joe Wai. I saw a South Asian man whom I did not
know. The rest at the event were all mostly aging white men and women. It was
definitely one day that did not have to predict a different and rapidly configuration of the
polis.
I use that Greek word on purpose. I could never live or
retire in the country. I am a city man used to living in big cities, Buenos
Aires and Mexico City, old cities, Veracruz and new cities, Austin. I have yet
to make up my mind about Vancouver.
It is patently obvious that the first humans who lived in
caves could not have a city. But their social activities made the men group
together to hunt while the women (who had yet to predict the birth of Gloria
Steinem) stayed in the cave to weave and cook. The city as what we know as a
city had to wait for these folks to domesticate animals and plant grains. Then
they stayed put and cities happened.
For the Ancient Greeks, particularly the Athenians, there
was no such thing as a country or a homeland (it had to wait for that uncouth not-quite
Greek, Alexander to do so). They lived in their polis or city-state. To quote
Cahill:
…Athens was a city not a country; and the Greeks never
thought to unite all Greeks [Do we want Albertans with us?] speakers in one
political union. Because each Greek gloried in his singular excellence and each
Greek clan gloried similarly – it was hard enough to unite a city. Each city or
polis – from which came our words politics, politician, metropolis – thought
itself unrivalled in some essential quality and revelled in its reputation…
The continual buzz of conversation, the orotund sounds of
the orators, the shrill shouts from the symposia – this steady drumbeat of
opinion, controversy, and conflict, could everywhere be heard. The agora (market place) was not just a
daily display of fish and farm goods; it was an everyday market of ideas, the
place citizens used as if it were their daily newspaper, complete with
salacious headlines, breaking news, columns, and editorials. For more formal
occasions, there nestled besides the Acropolis the hill of the Pnyx, where
thousands of citizens voted in the Assembly. They faced the bēma (speaker’s platform)
and, behind the speaker, the ever-changing backdrop of Athens itself. Though
there were wooden benches, set into the steps of the hill, participants were
too taken up by the proceedings to bother to sit down. The word the Athenians used for their Assembly was Ekklēsia , the same word used
in the New Testament for Church (and
it is the greatest philological irony in all of Western history that this word,
which connoted equal participation in all deliberations by all members, came to
designate a kind of self-perpetuating, self-protective Spartan gerousia - which would have seemed
patent nonsense to Greek-speaking Christians of New Testament times, who
believed themselves to be equal members of their
Assembly.
Sean Rossiter and his involvement in the Vancouver Urbanarium Society (a very active civic institution that fizzled out in the
late 90s, brought architects, city planners and politicians to discuss civic
issues that mattered to all as citizens. Many of these lectures or symposiums
happened in a lovely auditorium called the Judge White Auditorium which was
inside what was then the Robson Square Media Centre. That auditorium disappeared
from public view when the University of British Columbia decided it needed a
presence in our city. This presence is either unknown by most of the citizens
of this city (who are patently aware of the active participation of Simon
Fraser University not only in what used to be the Sears department store by the
waterfront, but also in what was Woodward’s) or as evanescent as the
development of jet packs to liberate us from land-based congestion.
Sean Rossiter brought to us an understanding of what was
going on in City Hall from 1975 until 1991 in his Vancouver Magazine column 12th & Cambie.
While I was a friend of this man who made me feel part of
the city I never discussed his taste for music, art, theatre or dance. We
shared stories about the city as a liveable place. It was he who called me up
one day to recommend (I obeyed) to tell me that urbanist Jane Jacobs was in
town and that I should photograph her.
When I arrived in Vancouver with my Canadian wife and two
Mexican-born daughters it was CBC Radio and Television that informed me on the
correct pronunciation of Newfoundland. It was CBC TV that first exposed me to
the wonders of Guy Lafleur. Working as a
stills photographer at the new CBC building on Hamilton Street helped me feel I
was part not only of a city but of a country.
The best source of information about Canada came to me in
my darkroom in the morning when I listened to Don Harron’s CBC Radio program
Morningside. I had a particular liking for his delicate good taste and charm. Harron
filled in the huge gaps I had about Canada.
Years later I was invited into a trailer booth to watch a
man direct all the cameras of a Hockey Night in Canada game. This seemed more
complex (it surely was) than being an air traffic controller. At about the same time my friend CBC
cameraman Mike Varga, during a trip I made to Edmonton to photograph doomed Vancouver Canucks Bill LaForge for article for Vancouver Magazine, invited me to sit inside his camera booth by
the ice. The man on the other side sitting on a bench stared at me (I had photographed
him a few months before) was Wayne Gretzky. It was then that I began to feel
Canadian.
The polis of the Greeks wasn’t all about politics and
civic duties (for those few, we have to admit, who were citizens in a
city-state full of slaves) it was also about drama and music and dance. The
Greeks had yet to put the arts into compartments. It was all art.
Going to the four-day New Music Festival, the second one, at the Orpheum
put me into that exciting contact into a very active arts scene full of Canadian
composers who in spite of their excellence somehow make their music accessible
and non-alienating. It is a wonder to watch and listen to so many musicians who
could play anywhere in the world (and many do) but choose to stay in Vancouver.
It is Bramwell Tovey, much adored in New York City who
chooses to stay in this city even though we all know and he made us patently aware
that our CBC, our Mother Corporation, has aged into irrelevancy. We long lost
the Radio Orchestra. It was in 2008 that Canadian violinist James Ehnes won
Canada's first Grammy for best instrumental solo performance (with orchestra)
for his recording with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra called Barber/Korngold/Walton: Violin Concertos.
It was produced by Denise Ball and the very famous (for those of us who know
him) sound engineer Don Harder for CBC Records. Since 2008 there has been no
further collaboration. Mr. Harder these days is more often seen playing the bagpipes
in his lovely kilt- an obvious loss to the musical framework of our city.
CBC Radio (and what follows is the personal opinion of
this Philistine) now is a radio scape of middle-of-the road, eminently forgettable
popular (un?) music, banal programs with the exceptions of the excellent Ideas and the most intelligent program in
radio The Debaters. The rest come me via on the hour or half-our news when I am
in my car. The only reason for ever watching the local news on CBC TV, was to
listen and to enjoy the presence of Gloria Macarenko. Was she moved aside to
bring in ethnic talent from the East?
The continuing slide of our once fine daily, the Vancouver Sun, seems to mimic the CBC as it, too, is becoming irrelevant in spite of still having some very good and serious columnists. Gone recently is my friend Rick Ouston whom Malcolm Parry at Vancouver Magazine used to assign to write about the state of newspapers in our city in what is now a distant past.
Watching Tovey conduct, watching him enthuse about the
music we are about to listen to, seeing how he is championing real Canadian
musical talent using an accessibility based on wit and charm is a pleasure that
more of us should value and appreciate.
I have considered myself a snob for too many years (to my
detriment). I have championed baroque music and modern dance. I might tell you
I refuse to go to another Nutcracker. But it took this last weekend, and
particularly this Sunday, for the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra to teach me the
value of the sound of 5 basses tuned down to a lower register, an explanation
by Ottawa composer Kelly-Marie Murphy (Black
Sand) as to what a lion’s roar percussion thing was composer and to enjoy a
composition based on the feeling of touching sand glass (Sea Glass Music) by composer and bassist Frederick Schipizky. Furthermore
in future night trips to Seattle as I drive as close to the speed limit as I can
through that startling under-the-freeway-freeway in the city that I have not
only the bridge crossing music crossing music of the Clash’s London Calling but
most of Murphy’s composition with their nicely loud and fast tempos with definitive
drum solos.
It was Jocelyn Morlock’s sense of humour that made her
brand of new music (Ornithomancy ,
Concerto for Flute and Orchestra) seem like something I would like, which
indeed I did.
And in the end it was Bramwell Tovey’s brand of cultural
civitas that made me feel that there might be some hope for our city. After
all, he has three more years to involve us in his city and make it also ours.
In the history of Rome, the Latin term civitas (plural
civitates), according to Cicero in the time of the late Roman Republic, was the
social body of the cives, or citizens, united by law (concilium coetusque
hominum jure sociati). It is the law that binds them together, giving them
responsibilities (munera) on the one hand and rights of citizenship on the
other. The agreement (concilium) has a life of its own, creating a res publica
or "public entity" (synonymous with civitas), into which individuals
are born or accepted, and from which they die or are ejected. The civitas is
not just the collective body of all the citizens, it is the contract binding
them all together, because of which each is a civis.
Wikipedia
While I may sound positive so far I see in our immediate future a retreat of us all to our caves. Do we live in a city and take advantage of what our city can offer? Or do we live in our homes, indulge in social media, eschew actual human contact and listen to music on earphones all by ourselves? Do we listen to comfortable and predictable music while willing to indulge in the varied cuisine of Vancouver and not much else? Have we given up on our CBC, ready to see our Vancouver Art Gallery move with the detritus of stuff we are rarely moved to explore? Do we know who or current city Poet Laureate is? Are we willing to go to modern dance while appreciating the discipline of classical ballet?
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 |
In this 21st century Vancouver try finding
someone who will accompany you to a concert of early music, new music or even
the symphonic music of Shostakovich.
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.
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.
Claude Vivier’s Orion, complex the first time around
(will I ever be able to hear it again?) was more lugubrious stuff that featured
the trumpet (a pair in one place) with some innovative muting (a plumber’s
plunger) helped along by that expert muter Jeremy Berkman (plays for the
Turning Point Ensemble and has new music in his soul).
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.
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| Karen Gerbrecht |
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| Miles Black |
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| Phoenix Chamber Choir |
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