Here’s a lovely new recording of my piano trio Toss a flower on the water. This slightly revised version was performed in Kamloops on May 25 and features Annette Dominik (violin), Martin Kratky (cello) and Naomi Cloutier (piano) of the Chamber Musicians of Kamloops.
Here are a couple more pages from my in progress manuscript Through closed doors for two violins. Almost half done!
Scroll down to earlier entries to see more pages and info about the piece.
Here’s another page from the violin duo Through closed doors commissioned by the Thin Edge New Music Collective (see previous posts for more info on this work). Four pages down, twelve to go! Woo!
Now that the violin duo Through closed doors has been premiered and the music tested for errors, I have started making the final score. Drawing inspiration from medieval illuminated manuscripts, I am creating a two-colour score with large rehearsal letters built right into the wavering staves.
The first page from “Through closed doors”
I have estimated that the whole score (title page and notes included) will take up about 16 pages, so this should occupy me for the next month or so.
This work was commissioned and premiered by the Thin Edge New Music Collective.
So I’ve been planning this idea of burning musical notation onto a wooden door for over a year now (see this post). I finally got around to trying it out on a scrap piece of wood the other day. To my intense relief, it worked! Phew!
This is an excerpt drawn from my new violin duo Through closed doors. The Thin Edge New Music Collective premiered the musical portion of this piece in February. Soon I will start burning the score onto this lovely door.
I was playing around with layout while I was composing (must have ripped it all off and rearranged it at least three times). I had to make sure I didn’t compose too many “inches” for any particular section. I wanted the different sections to work with the structure of the door so that musical pauses corresponded with the physical need to walk around corners. The next step is to strip off the remaining paint and varnish (breathing in some chemical fumes for inspiration) and sand the surface to a nice, smooth finish.
On Wednesday (March 5), the Gryphon Trio will premiere my piano trio, Toss a flower on the water, which was created as part of the Soundstreams Emerging Composers’ Workshop. The performance will take place in the lobby of Roy Thomson Hall as part of a pre-concert event happening at TSO’s New Creations Festival, starting at 7:15 pm. The concert will also feature works by all the other workshop composers: Gabriel Dharmoo, Emilie Cecilia LeBel, Graham Flett, Adam Scime and Caitlin Smith. Click here for more info.
Toss a flower was directly inspired by my trips to Ukraine to research traditional folk vocal performance practice. In addition to recording many beautiful and often mournful songs, I also heard many stories. A common theme throughout my travels was domestic abuse, which is rampant in rural Ukraine. There are many folksongs dedicated to the subject as well.
This trio borrows thematic material, in a very fragmented form, from the folksong “Kalyna Malyna” which I recorded in October 2012 in the village Kozats’ke. This song compares a young woman stuck in an unhappy marriage to a guelder rose bush, its branches simultaneously weighed down by dew and wilting in the sun. The title of my trio refers to an image from another folksong on the same subject. Here a similarly abused young woman tosses a flower on the water to send a message to her loved ones. When her mother finds the flower wilted despite being in water, she laments the hardships which have caused her daughter to age before her time.
The original folksong is very cut up, its pieces emerging from and dissolving into shifting textures and colours, like the flower being carried and tossed by the force of the river. You can hear my original sketches here.
This trio was very difficult for me to finish. The subject matter is heavy. It was hard to keep track of the scordatura (different tuning) on both violin and cello. And I was trying to combine my love for Ukrainian folksong with my fascinating with string timbral effects. The final stages of the composing process also happened in Ukraine, right when the protests were starting up. The piece is now irreversibly tied to the momentous and tragic events, which have rocked the land of my birth in the last three months.
I am dedicating this premiere to Ukraine and its people’s ardent struggle for a better life and for freedom from corrupt governments both within and beyond its borders. Let these cycles of abuse finally break.
I just want to say that I am thrilled with how the Thin Edge concert went last Friday. Gallery 345 is a beautiful space with great acoustics. The new violin duo, Through closed doors, looked great in there and Ilana and Suhashini sounded FANTASTIC! I couldn’t be happier with the piece at this stage in the process.
Photo by Terry Lim. Performers: Ilana Waniuk and Suhashini Arulanandam.
I am happy to say that the notation seems to be working exactly as planned. I feel so lucky to work with such adventurous and dedicated musicians. Now I’m waiting for the recording (and taking a little breather) before making some revisions and starting on the next stages: making the final layout of the score and engraving the door (if this sentence is confusing, look down at the last two posts).
I am also extremely happy to have met the cellist Dobrochna Zubek, who performed The Child, Bringer of Light. It was great working with her to prepare the piece. She approached it with thoughtfulness, sensitivity and a strong desire to make it her own. She is now the fourth performer to take it on and it’s fascinating to hear the transformations the piece goes through each time.
Photo by Terry Lim. Performer: Dobrochna Zubek.
Speaking of The Child and its transformations, the piece will be performed at the end of March by Claire Poillion in a brand new arrangement for viola. I am very curious to see how the piece will transfer to this instrument. The performance will be my Uruguayan debut (check the Events page for details).
As discussed earlier, I am working on a piece for two violins built around an antique wooden door. Since this piece is already in an unusual form, I thought I would make it even more complicated by trying out some new notational techniques. I have completely done away with dynamic markings and bow pressure indications. Instead, I am using the staff lines themselves to shape the musical line. As much as possible, I am also trying to incorporate accents into this more visual system.
I think the result is very intuitive. The dynamics are completely relative and bow pressure is not an ugly black wedge above the staff. I am hoping this approach will eliminate the arguments about the difference between mp and mf, and give the performers an opportunity to react to the page in a more emotional and intuitive way. It also makes the staff look like wood patterns, which makes me happy.
I think this sort of notation would only really work with certain types of material. What I’m writing is fairly simple in terms of melody and rhythm, and the music doesn’t move up and down the staff very much. In fact, much of it happens below it or above it. So far, Ilana and Suhashini are not reporting any problems with legibility, but I think it would become an issue if I was writing anything much more complex. If the spacing between lines changes too much, I think it would be difficult to maintain any sort of reference point.
Since I will be engraving the score onto a wooden door, this project must involve several stages. I would like to really test out the music before committing it for eternity to such a solid medium. The musical portion of this semi-theatrical work will be premiered by the wonderful Thin Edge New Music Collective in Toronto on February 21. The door itself will follow at a later date. I will also be making a colour paper score using some fancy markers and calligraphy pens (see my past hand-scoring work here).
I started off 2014 with a brand new piece: a violin duo for Thin Edge New Music Collective. This piece is a fortuitous coming together of a commission and an idea that had been stewing at the back of my mind for quite some time.
To earn a living, I spend quite a bit of time restoring antique wooden doors, windows and all their trims. I have grown to really love these unique pieces built from beautiful oldgrowth timbre and hardened by a hundred years of service. I spend quite a number of hours with each piece slowly peeling off years of paint, sanding away the grime and revealing the highly varied wood patterns beneath.
Staring at the wavering lines made me think of musical phrases. Imagining notes on a horizontal wooden surface brought to mind early vocal music performed around a table. The individual parts would be oriented towards all four sides of a sheet of paper, which was placed in the middle of this table so all the performers could see their music. Naturally, I thought, wouldn’t it be cool to engrave a score onto a door?
So when Ilana Waniuk from Thin Edge asked me to write a violin duo for her and Suhashini Arulanandam, sparks started flying from my brain. Imagine two young women, dressed in black, playing their wooden violins around a wooden door! Visual perfection!!!
The chosen door in its original condition
Now imagine that the chosen door was also attacked with a hatchet or cleaver at some point leaving a jagged hole in one of the panels. DRAMA!!!!
After the attack, the hole was patched with a little piece of plywood
So I’ve spend the last few weeks working out the relationship between these two imaginary women trapped on opposite sides of a locked door. This relationship does not seem very peaceful, I must admit.
The door being stripped of the cheery green paint
** The door was generously donated by a friend. Thank you! **
I know I’m a little late on this, but it’s been busy! My 2013 had a fantastically overloaded ending. Here’s a summary of my year:
1. Finished my opera On the eve of Ivan Kupalo in early January. It was premiered in late January at the Happening Festival in Calgary. It was like delivery a baby I had been carrying for 3.5 years.
2. Also in January, I went to the Banff Centre for three weeks.
3. In February, Thin Edge New Music Collective toured my piece Bridal Train through Banff, Vancouver, Victoria, Toronto and Montreal. They performed it again in Italy in the summer.
4. In April, I defended my thesis and finally graduated. Yey!
5. In May, I travelled to Toronto for the Soundstreams Emerging Composers’ Workshop, where I got to work with the Gryphon Trio, R. Murray Schafer and Juliet Palmer. Had a great time.
6. In August, I spent 4 weeks in France, Spain and Italy with my lovely boyfriend. Yey! Had my purse and passport stolen in Barcelona. Boo.
7. In the summer, I won some SOCAN awards.
8. Sometime in the fall, excerpts of The Child appeared in the arts journal Manor House Quarterly.
9. At the end of October, I went to Toronto for a few days for Rachel Mercer’s amazing performance of my piece The Child, Bringer of Light presented by New Music Concerts. Did I say it was amazing?
10. Straight from Toronto, I traveled to Kosice, Slovakia for the beginning of the ISCM World New Music Days. About 3.5 days and 8 concerts later, we moved on to Bratislava for more ISCM goodness (4 concerts for me). The highlight of this fair city was meeting Kaija Saariaho again. One of the best parts about the Slovak portion of this festival were all the fantastic student volunteers whose work continued well into the night during tours of the local bar scene. From there, we travelled to Vienna, where my solo accordion piece, Light-play through curtain holes, was performed by Alfred Melichar. It was one of the few pieces containing triadic harmony floating in an ocean of hardcore modernism. In total, I saw approximately 20 concerts in 10 days.
11. To top off my ISCM experience, I also returned back to Bratislava on the last day to see Saariaho’s new arrangement of her opera La Passion de Simone commissioned by the Melos Ethos Festival. It was fantastic. The next day I travelled to Kyiv via Riga. In this 24 hours, I had stepped foot in 4 European capitals (if you count the Riga airport).
12. After the ISCM, I spent three weeks in Ukraine, just as the protests were starting up. I visited a couple of villages with my excellent guide, Iryna, and recorded some great songs.
13. After getting back home in December, I fought very hard to finish the piano trio Toss a flower on the water, which will be premiered by the Gryphon Trio in March as the official wrap-up of the Soundstreams workshop. It was extremely hard for some reason. Then I temporary died over the holidays. Phew!
So far it’s not looking like 2014 will be any less busy. Woo!