Paul Steenhuissen recently interviewed me for his podcast series SoundLab. The interview was commissioned by Toronto’s New Music Concerts in preparation for the Ukrainian-Canadian Connection concert happening on April 4th, which will feature the premiere of my piece Weeping. Paul asked some very probing and difficult questions, which forced me to define my compositional practice and goals.
We discussed my work with Ukrainian folk music, focusing specifically on Weeping and the grieving songs which inspired and shaped it, as well as an earlier piece BridalTrain, which was commissioned by the Thin Edge New Music Collective. We also talked about my explorations of childhood, Carl Jung’s archetypes and the cello in the piece The Child, Bringer of Light premiered by Paul Dwyer at Carnegie Hall. Finally, we discussed my work with graphic notation and unusual materials in the piece Through Closed Doors, also commissioned by Thin Edge.
In addition to recordings of my music, the podcast includes archival as well as my own recordings of Ukrainian folks music, and a bit of my singing. You can listen to the podcast online or download it here.
I would like to invite all those who live in Vancouver, Victoria, Toronto or Montreal to attend one of the concerts given by the Thin Edge New Music Collective in the next couple of weeks. Thin Edge is touring with a very unique combination of instruments – flute, violin, accordion and piano – and will be performing my newest piece, Bridal Train.
Bridal Train was the result of some very intense work at the Banff Centre and draws heavily on a folksong I recorded in Ukraine.
Village Kozats’ke, Ensemble Berehynja: “Vesil’naja maty” (“Весільная мати”)
This folksong is part of the traditional wedding rite in the village Kozats’ke, which I visited last September (see the post here). It accompanies the baking of special wedding bread known as karavaj. The song has an interesting formal structure, primarily reserved for this kind of ritualistic repertoire, where six-beat cells go through various subdivisions to accommodate an irregular text. The six-beat cells can sometimes be replaced by shorter or longer cells (commonly four beats); I play with this tendency a little in my piece. These particular performers also do what we know as metric modulation, suddenly going into triplets and letting them become the new quarter-note pulse. This is something that I pushed further in Bridal Train. I think Thin Edge particularly enjoyed rehearsing those bits.
Here’s a list of all the concerts where you can hear this piece as well as music by Juan de Dios Magdaleno, Georg Katzer, Toshio Hosokawa, Uros Rojko, Hope Lee and a brand new piece for the full quartet by Solomiya Moroz.
VANCOUVER – February 1, 8 pm, CMC Vancouver, 837 Davie Street, $15-20
VICTORIA – February 3, 7:30 pm, Wood Hall, The Victoria Conservatory of Music, 900 Johnson St, $10-$15 (Presented by Open Space Arts Society)
TORONTO – February 10, 3 pm, Gallery 345, 345 Sorauren Ave, $15-$20
MONTRÉAL – February 11, 8 pm, Sala Rosa, 4848 boul. Saint-Laurent, $10-15
They are also doing a second show in Vancouver focusing on repertoire with open instrumentation, including some wonderful Cage pieces for violin and keyboard (performed by accordion in this case):
VANCOUVER- January 31, 9 pm, 1067 EAST, 1115b East Hastings, $5 (with guitarist/composer Jeff Younger)
I hope you come out to one of these shows and enjoy this unique ensemble. I’m super excited to hear my piece this Friday!
