This recording was taken in the main hall of the beautiful passenger train station in Kiev, Ukraine.
Sounds of Kiev: Main train station
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Category Archives: Trips
Flatten your throat and sing
“Flatten your throat and send a nasty sound into your teeth.”
That’s roughly what we were trying to do in the student folk ensemble led by the well-known Ukrainian ethnomusicologist Yevhen Yefremov.
This week I was very lucky to sit in on a lecture on the modal organization of Ukrainian folksong given by professor Yefremov at the Tchaikovsky National Academy of Music. Professor Yefremov doesn’t just collect and analyze folksongs. He can also sing them complete with all the ornamentation, altered tunings, and the authentic village timbre. His lecture was full of musical examples, which he performed himself, from memory and without any lesson plans. Later in the day I got to participate in his student ensemble where we tried to decipher and imitate several folksongs from Ukrainian villages found on Russian territory. Who knows, maybe we’ll make a folk singer out of me yet.
Last night, Maria and I got our first real taste of live folksong performance, which took place not in a village, but on the 22nd floor of a very futuristic-looking Soviet apartment block in the Troeshchina suburb.* Iryna Danylejko, the lovely ethnomusicologist who is helping us with our expeditions, invited us over to her “penthouse”** apartment to celebrate her daughter’s fourth birthday. The apartment is filled with curious objects that Iryna and her husband Danylo brought back from various expeditions: hanging baskets, ornate icons, a giant wooden trunk and a small stone mill, to name a few.
Once we got through a couple of bottles of wine and a small decanter of rosehip-infused horilka (Ukrainian vodka), the four singers treated us to three folksongs. I spent most of today walking around my uncle’s empty apartment, tears streaming from my eyes from intense sadness and concentration, trying to sing one of the mournful songs through my partially squeezed throat. I should have really been writing the somewhat belated piano quartet for Ensemble Sonore instead. But folksong is my raison d’être in Ukraine, right? Sonore can wait, I hope.
Iryna sings in a folk ensemble Mykhajlove Chudo (Mихайлове Чудо). You can see and hear them here and here, and with the rock band N.Sh.N (Н.Ш.Н.) here.
* Yes, suburbs in Ukraine are made up of 22-story apartment buildings with not one single-family unit in sight.
** As Iryna’s husband, Danylo, called their humble, but cosy abode from which you can see most of Kiev.
Ukraine: first days
Achievements to date: learning how to use a cell phone with Russian menus and making a whole THREE phone calls to strangers (1 in Russian, 2 in Ukrainian).
My sister and I left Canada last Friday. Two days and several long layovers later, we have finally arrived in Kiev. I was disappointed to discover that the Chopin Airport in Warsaw did NOT have pianos OR Chopin impersonators playing mazurkas at every gate, as I hoped, but there was quite a bit of Chopin-related merchandize in the duty-free shops.
I was born in Ukraine, but I’ve been living in Canada long enough that my visits to the Motherland are always a bit of a culture shock. There is an insane contrast between the restored, shiny and super expensive centre with its luxury cars and fashionable, stilettoed women, and the slummy suburbs made up of endless blocks of Soviet-era concrete apartments*. The transit system also gets increasingly questionable the further you travel from the central areas. The neighbourhood I’m saying in boasts rickety 50-year-old trams featuring razor-sharp ticket validators (two of my fingers were bloody before I felt any pain) and old ladies in babushkas squeezing themselves through the dense crowd to collect transit payment.
To my great joy, I’ve discovered that one can see an opera for $1.20 at the National Opera House. That’s cheaper than a bag of chips in Canada. The most expensive ticket is about $25. The season also features several works by Ukrainian composers, which I read about but could not find back in Canada. I’m pretty thrilled. Next weekend should be a triple hit consisting of one ballet and two operas.
While searching for the opera house, we stumbled upon two street performers who could have made a perfect postcard of Ukrainian stereotypes. They were twin sisters – blonde, modelesque and dressed to the nines – playing banduras and singing Ukrainian folksongs in harmony. Unfortunately, I forgot my camera, but there was a creepy older man filming them quite closely on his iPhone so maybe you can find that video on the internet (here’s one with no sound, who needs sound with women like that?).
See my sister’s take on the situation here.
* Granted, there are lots of stilettoed women in the slummy suburbs too, hopping over puddles and weaving stealthy through streets dug up for plumbing repairs some years ago.
Bundle Update
I’ve been lost in opera/thesis land for a while, hiding out in my parents’ jungle-like garden home. I haven’t been keeping up with the outside world all that well (the vegetation is thick!), but I bring you a few updates on older stuff and a peek at a new initiative to promote experimental music.
A couple of weeks ago, in The Power of Bundles, I talked about a nifty site selling indie music as a pay-what-you-want bundle. With only 10 hours left to go, I went to check out its progress. It seems the sales slowed down a little after the initial spurt and the total now sits around $400,000. It’s a healthy $66,000 per album minus charity and the website’s share. More importantly, this music reached an audience of almost 50,000 people. Definitely an idea worth exploring for contemporary art music.
I’d like to point out a new experimental music company braving the web frontier. Soundcarrier Music Network* is a new site founded by Halifax musicians Norman Adams and Alex Kall active in the Atlantic improv scene. The site distributes “improvised, experimental, new and free music” selling both studio albums and high quality live recordings. The approach recognizes the value of distributing rougher concert recordings, which is especially appropriate for the more improv-based scene they cater to. The site also charges more for individual tracks longer than 10 minutes. Soundcarrier’s catalogue is still quite small and I’m not sure how they are promoting themselves, but it’s worth keeping an eye on them if you are into that sort of thing.
In Explores of New Frontiers I talked about a somewhat misguided use of crowdfunding platforms. I hoped to be wrong because they seem like a lovely organization, but a month in, that particular campaign is sitting at only $380. But they still have 27 days to go. Maybe their fans will come through in the end.
In other news, I finally bought my plane tickets to Kyiv (Kiev) and will have the pleasure of spending the night on a bench at the Frederic Chopin airport in Warsaw. I am expecting a piano at every gate featuring skillful renditions of mazurkas and nocturnes by the flight attendants. It should set me up nicely for my work in Ukraine (see Village Crawl in Ukraine).
* University-trained musicians love long names and ‘networks.’ Perhaps they felt the need to expand it out because there are already quite a few things named ‘soundcarrier’ floating around on the web, including a maker of amplifiers and a band.
NAC Workshop: My Ottawa Debut
I am writing this on the train to Montreal, the first leg of my epic 29-hour journey back to Halifax (still not sure how a train can take longer than a Greyhound bus). Last night was the final concert of the NAC Composers Program featuring five premieres by workshop participants (Lesley Hinger, Adam Scime, Patrick Giguère, Nicholas Omiccioli and me). The concert finished with a piece by Chen Yi, something with ‘Happy Rain’ in the title and the sound of a heavy metal band transcribed to Pierrot ensemble (it was extremely disorienting coming from a composer with such a bubbly and motherly personality).
The concert took place in a 2,000-person auditorium at the National Arts Centre. To avoid the awkwardness of spreading a tiny new music audience through such a grand space, they did the whole concert right on stage, audience included. The ensemble faced backwards with the audience looking past them at the empty multi-tiered hall. I was expecting the whole arrangement to be really sad, only highlighting the fact that this sort of show attracts so few people. But, it was actually surprisingly intimate. The audience and performers were very connected, while at the same time the empty hall added a kind of surreal grandeur to the whole event.
Gary Kulesha put on his filtered, public face and did a fantastic job running the pre-concert chat and leading the concert itself. The composing fellows were perched on stools facing the audience and Gary asked questions that were meant to draw the audience into the whole process of composing making us seem more human. During the show, he asked each of us one or two questions specifically designed to inform the audience about the single most important thing driving the piece. It was very educational, but personal at the same time. I think it helped the audience to connect with the composer and appreciate their intent, even if they didn’t get the soundworld of the piece.
The ensemble lead by Jean-Philippe Tremblay was fantastic. By that point they knew the pieces well enough that it felt like they were really performing them rather then just fingering the notes and counting rhythms. There was more of them in the music, more drive, more intention. It was very satisfying.
We were also fortunate to have all these well-known composers from all over the country at the concert and to have a chance to chat with them at the closing reception. It was interesting to hear the perspective of people who never heard anything from me before and also those, like Alan Bell, who have been watching me grow for some years. We were lucky that they happened to be in the city.
Most of us were leaving early in the morning so the sad hour of 3 am saw all of our drunkenly sentimental goodbyes. It is always devastating to leave such experiences. You are thrown together for this intense week seeped with creative and personal sharing. What in the ordinary course of life might have been months of social and professional interaction is super-concentrated into almost countable hours. You come out feeling like you’ve known these people for years, you are invested in them. Then the group suddenly breaks up and scatters all over the world, and all you are left with is a fattened Facebook friends list. Till next time, everyone!!
NAC Workshop: Day of Truth
Tonight is the climax of the NAC Composers Program with performances of five premieres at the Southam Hall of the National Arts Centre. There will also be a piece by Chen Yi. After a week of sweating, correcting and second-guessing, we have to release our babies into the world. The info for the “Future classics” event can be found here.
Last night was the penultimate and ultimately more ‘important’ event of this whole summer institute – the conductors’ concert. The five conducting students got their big break to conduct the NAC Orchestra through some favorite classics. This is the event that attracts all the donors.
Because it’s the 10th anniversary of the composers’ program, I was asked to represent all the summer institute participants with a ‘thank you to the donors’ speech. Naturally, since few of these people actually come to the composers’ concert, they had me speak at this event instead. It was a bit of a funny concept, but I’m happy that the composers were at least present in some form in the donors’ consciousness. Public speaking is also a kind of performance outlet for me so it was pretty cool to address about 1,500 people. Maybe some of them will even be curious and come out tonight to see what this being alive and composing thing is all about.
The pieces are all sounding great. The ensemble has done a fantastic job. I feel that they’ve really invested themselves. My piece has improved astronomically from the first read through. Once the players realized that they could be much more expressive with my material, it just turned into a different piece. It sounds much more like what I hoped to hear in terms of the intensity of the individual sounds and gestures. The all-too-typical structural problems endemic to young composers are still there, of course, but the piece seems to be standing and continuing to generate a barrage of earworms with dirty legato flavour.
There is also some sort of composers’ panel happening in the city today. It’s not open to the public and no one, not even the participants, seem to know what it’s about. There are representatives from all over the country and they are supposed to be at the show tonight. I finally get to meet a few names I hear everywhere and they’ll add a few bodies to the audience.
Speaking of the audience, apparently they do this concert ‘differently.’ Instead of spreading a 10-person crowd through a 2000 person hall, they just put everyone right on stage with the performers. I am really curious to see how that will work.
Dirty legato and musical parenting
I’ve been in beautiful Ottawa since Friday afternoon. After three intense days with the NAC Composers Program, I am enjoying a semi-day off. I have an interview with the CBC Radio 1 this afternoon (tune in around 4:45 EST). I also did an interview for the NAC blog earlier. You can check it out here in English or en français.
The last three days have been very emotionally conflicted. We spend our mornings in readthroughs and rehearsals, and in the afternoon the composers hide away in a little hot cave in the dungeons of the NAC to discuss matters great and small. Our mentors are Gary Kulesha and Chen Yi. Gary tends to be very provocative and blunt, while Chen Yi is always laughing and gesticulating excitedly. It’s a very contradictory dynamic.
There is a very talented bunch of young composers gathered here with different issues and strengths. Some pieces are very colourful and energetic, full of shimmering and juicy orchestration. In sharp contrast to that, there’s a piece that explores the idea of urban blight and the stark, decaying landscapes it generates. My piece seems to be a mishmash of earworms, which were plaguing people for hours yesterday. I’m also responsible for a new musical term – dirty legato.
We get to work with a dedicated ensemble drawn from the Orchestre de la francophonie conducted by Jean-Philippe Tremblay. The musicians are great, eager to make things work and try new things. They ask lots of questions and offer suggestions. Jean-Philippe jokes around all the time producing a welcome calming effect. They are playing new music from 10:30 to 4:30 every day. It’s quite a physical and intellectual marathon.
I was very depressed after the first two rehearsals, through no fault of the musicians. I am apparently not very good at communicating my intentions through the score. My markings are too classical and when executed with the precision with which performers tend to approach contemporary music, things just sound flat and shapeless.
After spending two days wallowing in self pity and berating myself for writing and awful piece, I decided to kick it into shape. I was a lot more vocal in the last rehearsal and tried to explain what kind of sound I was going for. That’s how we ended up with dirty legato. I really needed them to play more harshly and aggressively with more glissando and bow pressure, less like Mozart and more like Ukrainian folk singers. We all had a good laugh and it worked. I am really looking forward to the next rehearsal.
I think it can be much easier, emotionally, to simply throw away a creation you are not immediately happy with, to distance yourself from it, to disown it, to forget it ever happened. It’s harder to force yourself to really look at it, accept its faults and figure out how to highlight the strengths. Maybe it’s like being a parent and giving your work unconditional love while still seeing it for what it is. You made it and you are responsible for giving it a fighting chance. I’ll call it musical parenting.
The highlight of the week so far has been a visit from Ana Sokolovic. She spent the day with us yesterday sitting in on rehearsals and joining us for discussion in the afternoon. She talked about her own approach and gave us little private sessions. I love her music and she seems like an amazing teacher, combining very astute critique with a kind of excitement that is extremely encouraging. With some teachers, you come out of this kind of session feeling like you have so much to learn still that it is almost insurmountable and you will never measure up to whatever ideal they set up. Ana has a way of delivering critique that makes you excited about what you are doing and eager to improve.
Off to Ottawa!
I am at this very moment on the last leg of my 24 hour train journey from Halifax to Ottawa, where I will be participating in the National Arts Centre’s Composers Program with Gary Kulesha and Chen Yi. I will be workshoping a brand new piece, The Unanswered, for an 11-part chamber ensemble. I am super excited to meet the performers and the other participating composers. Check back for regular updates about my adventures.
This is also my very first North American train journey. Growing up in Ukraine, trains were a big part of my life. That is still the main mode of transportation out there and I often find myself feeling a little nostalgic when I see passenger trains pass me by. The experience has been quite pleasant (much more so than the bus), but a little cold. They are sure not stingy on the air conditioning.
Carnegie Hall Workshop: Post-mortem
The child, bringer of light received its première at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall on Monday night. The hall was reasonably full, the audience quite varied. We were even graced with the presence of a group of nuns in dark blue and brown habit. I know music is a big part of religious culture, but it was still awesome to see them there.
with cellist Paul Dwyer after the concert
I’ve had some very satisfying performances with soloists in the past. But this was really my best première. Having a chance to hear the piece every day over the course of a week allowed me to really understand its sound world and feel its existence in time. By the time we got to the actual concert, I was happy enough with the piece from a compositional point of view that I could simply enjoy the performance in all its glory. And what a fabulous performance it was! A big thank you to Paul Dwyer for bringing the piece to life in such an intense way.
Through this whole week it was also fascinating to watch the other pieces take shape. An instant favourite of mine was Edmund Finnis’ Relative Colour for string septet. He split the ensemble into two trios with the double bass acting as a kind of mirror line between them. It was one of those pieces, which made me think, “Damn! I wish I wrote that!” The subtle, low bass notes emerging beneath the high shimmer of the trios were earth shattering.
Edmund Finnis conducting his "Relative Colour" during the dress rehearsal. Performers from left to right: Aisha Orazbayeva, Anna Pelczer, Mira Luxion, Tony Flynt, Paul Dwyer, Emily Deans, Sarah Saviet
A piece that was a total surprise was Chris Williams’ San-Shih-Fan for cello and double bass. What first started out as a collection of cool but seemingly unrelated sounds, slowly morphed into a cohesive and very satisfying musical whole. The dynamic between the performers (Paul Dwyer and Tony Flynt) was delightfully playful, and made me wonder how the piece would look and sound if performed by two women, or a mix. The other pieces also came together very nicely through everyone’s hard work and passion. I feel lucky to have met so many talented and dedicated musicians and sincerely hope that our paths will cross again.
I am now safely stowed away in my little cubbyhole in Halifax, trying to process everything that’s happened and getting ready to dive into the chamber orchestra piece for NAC’s Composers Program. It will be a while before I can top Carnegie Hall, but this Ottawa workshop is a great experience to look forward to.
with Kaija Saariaho and Anssi Karttunen after the concert
Carnegie Hall Workshop: D-day
I’m sitting in Zankel Hall watching the dress rehearsals for tonight’s big show. I am nervously excited. The countless small surgeries were successful and The Child is now standing confidently on its feet. Paul Dwyer sounds truly amazing. I can’t say that enough. He has really made my piece his own, in his particular quiet and mysterious way. It has come to life in his hands.
My only task now is to get into a zen state of mind and enjoy the performance in all its totality without analyzing and second guessing myself.
I still can’t believe this is happening.