In 2020, when the live music industry was at a virtual standstill, I wrote “Lekking Birds” for Kornel Wolak (clarinet), Amahl Arulanandam (cello) and Michael Bridge (accordion). Commissioned by The Women’s Musical Club of Toronto, the work received its “premiere” in November 2020, in an empty concert hall in Toronto, live-streamed only to a select group of subscribers. I watched the live stream from my house in Vancouver, drinking wine with my trio of stuffed Mices (Masters Sneaky Mouse, Elph and Orph) and I cried.
The pandemic really made me understand how much I value live performance. Recordings can be great, for obvious reasons, but I like to be in the concert hall, surrounded by other people, feeling their response. I like the whole ritual of it. I like getting feedback from the audience. I love going out for drinks with the performers and other composers after the show, to celebrate success and commiserate about things that didn’t go as well as we hoped.
The experience of this particular premiere – watching friends play to an empty hall on my laptop screen while drinking with small stuffed animals – was so depressing at that moment in time that I just broke down and cried. I think because of that association, I kind of put this piece on a shelf for three years. I couldn’t touch it. But I recently dug it up and listened to the recording more thoroughly and discovered that I am really quite proud of the piece. I love this particular combination of timbres so much that I spent the last four minutes (Third Choreography) cycling through one short chord progression. The accordion – sitting somewhere between winds and strings in its timbre – blends the clarinet and cello so perfectly. It’s molten chocolate pouring from vessel to vessel.
And here recording does have a beautiful advantage over live performance: because of the close placement of the microphones, you can really hear the phrases travel from instrument to instrument, from left to right speaker or earbud, in a way that would not be as apparent in a hall with such a small ensemble. And this is really what the piece is exploring, passing material back and forth with small variations to mimic the fluttering, hopping group mating displays of the blue manakin bird.
A big thank you to Kornel, Amahl and Michael for this immaculate bird display.