Tag Archives: Soundstreams

Soundstreams post-mortem

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It’s been about a month since I returned from Toronto and I’m just waking up from my post-masters hibernation. I’ve done no composing since the Soundstreams workshop, and after deadening my brain with hundred-year-old dust and pain fumes at a heritage house reno over the last four weeks, I feel ready to jump back into creative activities.

I had a fantastic time at the Soundstreams Emerging Composers’ Workshop with the Gryphon Trio, and our mentors R. Murray Schafer and Juliet Palmer (see this entry and this one). As mentioned earlier, we were to bring sketches for a new piece for piano trio to be completed after the workshop. I am primarily working with combining fragments from a folksong I recorded in Ukraine with the more timbral ideas and extended techniques I started exploring in The Child, Bringer of Light.

There is a loose narrative in this piece inspired by a group of folksongs dealing with the subject of young women growing old prematurely from hard labour and abusive marriages. One of these songs explores a beautiful metaphor for this idea. A lonely young woman throws a flower into a river hoping that it will reach her people. When her mother finds it floating in a still pool, she wonders why it has wilted despite being in water, why her daughter has aged before her time. My piece will follow the progression of this flower on the river starting with the woman’s excited anticipation of a new marriage, going through the rapids of all the hardships she encounters, and ending in that dark and still pool.

Soundstreams: Piano Trio, Sketch 1

The rough beginning exploring the nervous excitement of a new marriage.

Soundstreams: Piano Trio, Sketch 2

The rough ending, the wilted flower arriving in the still pool. I am exploring ideas similar to the opening, but cast in a darker light.

Soundstreams: Piano Trio, Sketch 3

This material was meant to go in the middle section of the piece, but it became apparent that the overall feel of the sketch doesn’t really fit in the soundworld I am exploring in Sketch 1 and 2. I will probably extract certain gestures from this sketch and reshape them into something more consistent with the opening and closing of the piece. 

During the first two sessions I had with the trio, I started to suspect that the traditional notational system was not really doing a great job capturing the feel I was looking for in this piece. It was too confining. I figured out that the performers needed more room for spontaneous reactions to each other and time to engage all the timbral effects I was asking them to perform. The music needed room for stretching. After rewriting one of the sketches without measures and will less rhythmic precision, I was amazed at how the music magically locked into itself. Considering the freedom that my notation implied, it was remarkable how close the performers’ interpretation came to what I had imagined. I felt like I tapped into their natural tendencies and allowed them to simply play.

Thank you so much to the Gryphon Trio for being so amazing to work with and to the workshop organizers for creating this amazing opportunity.

The first six days of Soundstreams

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It’s been a crazy week here at the Soundstreams Emerging Composers’ Workshop in Toronto. The days have been packed with composing seminars with R. Murray Schafer and Juliet Palmer, reading sessions with the Gryphon Trio, various professional development talks, and reunions with many friends. My jetlag combined with overexcited insomnia means that I have mostly been running on adrenalin and copious amounts if tea.

Despite the sleep deprivation, I’ve been having a really wonderful time. I am really enjoying working with the Gryphon Trio. Jamie, Roman and Annalee have been extremely supportive and patient as we try to communicate and explore our ideas. They have a great sense of humour, which makes the whole process fun rather than stressful. It turns out that scordatura (funky tuning) can be a little annoying (to put it lightly) for string players with perfect pitch; they expect to hear a certain note and something else comes out. Annalee is being a very good sport about it though (thank you!). I am enjoying the pulsating, shimmering textures I’m getting from the strings, but finding that I need to go even further into that world, away from the very solid sound of traditional playing. I’m still struggling with fitting the piano into this soundworld.

There has been no drama among the participants, but, since everything is being recorded, we feel like we are on reality radio of some sort (or should I say podcast?). It would be a pretty borring reality show for the average viewer since we all get along…We all have very different aesthetics, so it’s an interesting learning experience. Adam Scime has these crazy dense textures and very detailed string writing. Gabriel Dharmoo is working with Carnatic material from India, with lots of heterophonic unison playing and quiet noisy textures in the strings. Caitlin Smith is incorporating jazz and Turkish traditions. Graham Flett is doing some trippy things with Schumann and string harmonics. Emilie LeBel is combining her gradual, shimmering textures with very broad melodic lines.

Juliet has already asked us what we are planning to steal from each other (Adam Scime, I WILL have your trilly-glissy figures!). I am very curious to see where these pieces will end up. Will there be any cross influences creeping in?

We had a very special treat today: a visit to Murray Schafer’s farm! We got a tour of his current work in progress – a massive theatrical, musical and spatial experience – that’s being erected on his property. He also very generously gave us some of his scores and books as gifts after showing us his publishing house located in his basement. I am now the happy owner of two of his beautifully hand-drawn scores: a chamber opera Loving, and The Black Theatre of Hermes Trismegistos from the Patria cycle. He even gave me the LP recording of the opera! I am very pleased and excited.

Excerpts from the score The Black Theatre of Hermes Trismegistos by R. Murray Schafer

Excerpt from "The Black Theatre of Hermes Trismegistos" by R. Murray Schafer

Excerpt from "The Black Theatre of Hermes Trismegistos" by R. Murray SchaferI love how the lines of the staves turn into waves in the second one. If you like what you see here, get yourself to your nearest CMC library and check out these gorgeous scores. You can also buy them from Arcana, Schafer’s very own publishing label.

Off to Toronto!

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After successfully defending my masters thesis a couple of weeks ago, I’m happily on my way to the next adventure. I’m off to Toronto for the Soundstreams emerging composers’ workshop, which starts tomorrow. I am super excited about this opportunity to work with R. Murray Schafer, Juliet Palmer and the Gryphon Trio, and to meet the other participants. In addition to composing and reading sessions, there will also be some professional development seminars covering topics such as “From emerging to emerged,” “The art of artistic directing” and “Marketing and PR.” There will also be a visit to Mr. Schafer’s farm!

The format of this workshop will be a little different from the other two I’ve participated in (Carnegie Hall and NAC). Instead of coming in with a completed piece to rehearse and tweak, we were asked to bring sketches to try out with the ensemble. The piece will be completed after the workshop.

I’ve spent the last four weeks trying to wrap my brain around a new tuning on both violin and cello. I tried to keep the tuning unchanged at first, but the open strings are so familiar and predictable. And, with the strings being turned in open fifths, the harmonics pretty much form a D major scale.

The moment I started fidgeting with the tuning pegs, the sound assumed a new darkness and mystery. The new tuning also opened up some interesting possibilities for natural harmonics and double stops. I think the pain of keeping track of how everything is notated vs. how it really sounds is well worth the effect. We’ll see what the ensemble has to say.

My primary goal for this piece is to fuse several directions in my composing, which up to now have mostly be confined to different pieces. I am trying to integrate my fascination with Ukrainian folksong with the kind of colour manipulations I was exploring in my solo cello piece, The child, bringer of light. I am taking snippets of a folksong I recorded in the village Kozats’ke, Kalyna Malyna, which has really touched me both in terms of its musical content and meaning, and making them emerge out of and dissolve into various harmonic trills.

A sketch for an upcoming piano trio

I rented a cello and a violin to experiment with these ideas and get a feel for the tuning, but the challenge has been imagining what it will all sound like together. Being so preoccupied with the strings, I’ve also been a little neglectful of the piano, a shortcoming I am hoping to fix by and by. Anyway, I’m excited to hear it all at my first session on Tuesday. Keep tuned for further updates!