My friends Graham Walker, Ian Bateson and I attended the Turning Point Ensemble’s Zappa Meets Varèse and Oswald –The Present Day Composer Refuses to Die on Sunday, January 29 2017 at 3pm. It was at the sonically powerful Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre at SFU’s Goldcorp Centre for the Arts.

The opinions you will read below are purely subjective and keep into consideration that I am not a music critic and my knowledge of music is a rudimentary ability to read music and an even more rudimentary ability to play the alto saxophone.

The whole concert can be defined thusly: Peaches (and cream) and regalia.  It was a totally sweet delight to the ears and to the eyes.

As a product (me) of the 20^th century born in 1942, the idea of contemporary music was all about not understanding the not quite atonal music of Alban Berg, Arnold Schoenberg, and Anton Webern. It was also about hating those composers and opting for the lyrical tonality of the romantics. The latter is what my pianist mother liked to play and to listen.

That brings me to the musicians of the Turning Point Ensemble. If you go to a varied palette of concerts you will note that you recognize many faces. The reason for this is that most of those musicians play for other symphonies and groups. You might think that it has to be a mercenary impulse to make money. That could be part of it. I believe it has to do more with feeling too comfortable with what one does. I believe it has to do with realizing that you might not want to play one more Bach double violin concerto or one more Vivaldi Four Seasons.

I would define this as the challenge to feel unsettled and to glory at that fact and feeling.

My two prime examples are violinist Marc Destrubé and bassist David Brown. Destrubé has a curriculum a mile long that ranges from playing and heading baroque orchestras and a Washington DC based string quartet to playing Bartok with his Microcosmos Quartet in Vancouver. And, he is a member of the Turning Point Ensemble.

David Brown and Jeremy Berkman

David Brown has been playing the string bass for the Vancouver Symphony for years and could comfortably end his career there. And yet as a member of the Turning Point Ensemble I have seen and heard him play a 6-string bass guitar while surrounding himself with all kinds of black boxes with lights and pedals.

David Brown extreme right

He is happy (I believe) to be restless in what he does.

And that is what you get with the Turning Point Ensemble. They are a bunch of restless musicians eager to try new territory with a smile on their faces. That they do so while playing in our presence, is what makes the music that they play not only more accessible but also enjoyable. It is one thing to listen to a bit of music you have never heard without seeing the musicians. That can be alienating and confusing. But seeing these musicians play and to notice instruments you may have never experienced before is part of the surprise. Because I see these musicians all over the place I can safely say that many are now my friends. They patietly answer my questions. At Turning Point Ensemble concerts they are not up on a stage. They are right there. You just stand up and go to them and ask them whatever you want. Even the chap with the muted (!) tuba, Drew Dumas puts on his pants one leg at a time.

The concert we heard had some funny moments and a few difficult ones. But every time you hear a difficult piece of music (that is all new not because it is new but because you have never heard it) as was Edgard Varèse’s Octandre which was composed in 1923 the next bit of music will be just a tad easier to digest. Music, unless it’s pop music, has to be listened to and digested.

Owen Underhill's bow tie

My first experience at a Subhumans’ concert around 1980 was sheer horror. I soon learned the thrill of loud music and the rapid but minimal playing of an electric guitar. Now “Slave to My Dick” almost sounds like a nursery rhyme. And all the notes played by Thelonious Monk sound not like the right wrong notes but like the right, right notes.

Sharman King's bass trombone

Where in Vancouver can one listen (live) the symphonic music of Duke Ellington, a Stravinsky tango or many a contemporary Canadian composer such as last afternoon’s John Oswald? Only in two places. One is the Turning Point Ensemble and the other in the Vancouver Symphony’s yearly New Music Festival (about to end as I write this).

What is new Music?


This service by restless musicians to a restless or to a perhaps too comfortable audience is something that is special in our city sometimes seen (and are they wrong!) cultural backwater.

As I am no music critic I can only say that the Zappa was special and the Varèse was interesting. Both were made more than the sum of their parts by the video projected designed by Vanessa Goodman and Dayna Szyndrowski aided by the production designer Julie-anne Saroyan.

David Brown's bass

Music in Varèse’s time seemed to be about modernity, electricity, progress, the building of bridges and an unstoppable humanity. The design team chose appropriate videos that seemed to mimic the intention of the music that was trying to blow apart the musical boundaries of their time.

As soon as the first half of the concert was over I told my companions that I expected the worst from John Oswald. After all he was a living Canadian composer. He could not possibly by lyrical and more accessible as my ever popular and favourite local composer Jocelyn Morlock. Of course I was an ignorant idiot. From the first notes of Oswald’s piece Refuse (a world premiere!) we all smiled in unison with the musicians. There is a new word in my vocabulary coined by the composer himself “plunderphonics”. Bits of 60s themes from the Pink Panther, James Bond and the Beatles shared the stage with music that challenged me ever so nicely.

Is new music with a sense of humour at odds? Certainly not!

And finally I must mention that sitting centre front row at a Turning Point Ensemble Concert brings in one more delight. In most symphony concerts you see, always the musical director from about the shoulders up. This is not the case at these concerts. You see the Artistic Director (otherwise called the conductor by we the masses) Owen Underhill from head to toe. And this is special. Underhill conducts his orchestra using Argentine Tango movements. I am an expert at this (but a lousy tango dancer) as I am an Argentine. Besides his swaying hips you cannot but note what he does with his shoes. It was so arresting that last night his shoes competed with cellist Marina Hasselberg’s avant-garde leg wear and short shorts (I could not discern if they were shorts or a skirt).

Marina Hasselberg's cello

Mr. Underhill oozes calmness and sweetness. Even without a tux (but he did wear a bow tie, a first, I understand) there is also an elegance.

Marguerite Witvoet & Owen Underhill (whose directing? That's an unanswered question.) Adrian Verdejo, extreme left in a pinch could be a rock star with his electric guitar. Have people forgotten that Zappa began as a guitarist?

It is my belief that the Turning Point Ensemble serves us well with this man at their helm. If there is no Order of Canada forthcoming for him then there is no musical justice in this world.

My friend Graham Walker is a graphic designer of note, an enthusiast of baroque and challenging music who likes to bring his sketchbook to concerts. Of the Octandre sketch he tells me (and perhaps some of you might discern it , I could not) that on the left of the drawaing each bar spells one of the letters of Zappa.

Jeremy Berkman, Ellen Marple, Sharman King & Drew Dumas

Dancers Anya Saugstad and Diego Romero, choreography by Rob Kitsos. Dance performed for Zappa's G-Spot Tornado (1992)