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Tonight’s Toronto Symphony New Creations Concert to close the festival was a demonstration of the old maxim “less is more”, an epithet I used to use as a personal motto (at least for its pun-potential).  If I had any objection to the programming by Owen Pallett and Peter Oundjian – who did a marvelous job with this series—it’s in the feeling that the minimalist music was all in the same program, namely tonight’s concert conducted by André de Ridder.  When relatively similar pieces follow one another –a pattern we also saw in the first concert of the festival with a darker hue of composition—I’m not sure that we can hear their excellence quite so well as if they’re in contrast to what they accompany.  If concerts were meals, we wouldn’t want three salads last Saturday and three soups tonight, but rather to spread out the soups and the salads so that they don’t seem to be in competition with one another, AND to enhance the flavour of the entire meal.

But that’s a small quibble, especially when this last concert felt so much like the best of the three.

Tonight three composers gave us four pieces without intermission other than the time required to reconfigure the orchestral players and their instruments & equipment onstage:

• Nicole Lizée’s Zeiss After Dark: Sesquie for Canada’s 150^th
• Cassandra Miller’s Round
• Daniel Bjarnason’s Emergence
• Nicole Lizée’s Black MIDI

Composer Nicole Lizée (photo: Murray Lightburn)

My age may be showing in my suggestion about the way the pieces were presented: an approach more consistent with the way one would assemble a gallery show or installation –where the thematic consistency is possibly the most important issue rather than my quaint thoughts about how the pieces sound together –than the old-fashioned way concerts were programmed in the last century.

We began with another Sesquie, those two minute salutes to Canada’s 150^th anniversary.  I am breathless with admiration for the way Lizée writes her program notes, again more in alignment with the art world than the old classical world I know.  Zeiss After Dark would replicate in music something ground-breaking in the history of cinematography, even as we saw Lizée on that most curious interface: looking simultaneously into the past while employing revolutionary tools that break new ground, as though revising our notions of historiography.  When Stanley Kubrick filmed a candlelit scene in Barry Lyndon he was simultaneously reaching into the past – to show us an optical effect we never see on film nor terribly often even in our own lives; yet to do so was a kind of advanced trick of recording history, a kind of time-travel.  How she might have asked herself would a composer go back in time to record something similar if intangible and elusive from Canada’s history?  With the same or analogous aural tools to hear as though in that unilluminated place: where the light helps us hear rather than see.  We got something deceptively simple, and while that may mean something minimalist on the surface, it was a slippery surface, one that I grappled with and would like to hear again, as I can’t pretend that I understood it.  This was the most probing and elusive two minutes of any of the Sesquies I’ve yet heard, but come to think of it, the year is yet young, I’m sure I’ll hear more.

Cassandra Miller came forward, interviewed by the ever-charming Peter Oundjian, who helped her unpack her compositional ideas in Round.  I’m grateful for their exchange, which confirmed my suspicion that there was more than a bit of whimsy in how Miller came up with her program note, alluding to Plato’s ideas on how to put children to sleep.  This is a very daring admission at a concert, when the usual goal is to avoid putting people to sleep.  The piece is not at all soporific but a charming bit of pattern music whose textures & repetitions would be recognizable both to the fans and haters of Philip Glass.   I was reminded of the sound-world of Colin McPhee, but without any allusions to Balinese rhythms.

Daniel Bjarnason’s Emergence began in an even quieter place than Miller’s score. His three-movement work has a pair of outer movements coming from a slow reflective place, while the inner movement was the pulsing heart at its core.  We were encouraged to look for the Icelandic geology in the piece, and it was surely there in hidden fires and bursts of air under its cool surfaces.   Where Miller seemed to want to soothe –not just in her notes but in the sonic world she created—Bjarnason was often poking at prodding us with percussion, inner voices and gradual changes in the predominant timbre.

I am not a newspaper writer, who would lead with the big story. Instead I wrote this in sequence because I have so much to say about the final wonderful piece on the program, Lizée’s Black MIDI, a commission from the TSO & Kronos Quartet.  Yes it comes with a preamble, the requirement to understand its language, but that’s a very rewarding stipulation when it comes right down to it.  Black MIDI is a series of short compositions for orchestra & string quartet, with films projected above that illuminate what we’re hearing.  I’m tempted to call the work a series of short films, resembling documentary in some respects but much more fanciful than what we usually see of the genre, and far more oblique in the approach to expression.

Black MIDI is ostensibly about one narrow phenomenon, yet is in effect a history of music.  MIDI is the invention that currently is the usual way that machines make music, the interface that makes most synthesizers work (at least of the 2^nd generation digital variety, as opposed to the analog machines Moog and Walter Carlos showed us so long ago) and enables the crew to synchronize a band with their accompanying light show.  “Black MIDI” is a genre that Lizée uses as an opportunity to investigate the fundamentals of music and music making. If we can imagine that the notation of many notes on a screen will make many notes to be heard, then imagine if that is taken to the extreme, so many notes that the screen is almost blackened.  This extreme case of what a machine can do served as an exploratory playground.  For twenty electrifying minutes we investigated music from first principles.  Black MIDI serves Lizée perfectly to illustrate the implications of technology in the creation of music. If black MIDI didn’t exist she’d have to invent it.

An example of Black MIDI I found online via google.

Lizée offers us a profound meditation on the relationships between mechanical and manual, the interface between the human and the machine, a curious parallel to the one she explored briefly to open the concert.  Indeed we could expand beyond music to explore the relationships between human and machine if she so chose, as this is a profound subject.  Where her two minute Sesquie proposed a way we might frame the question –by implying that we might look back by avoiding our usual apparatus and instead using the toolkit of the past—so too with Black MIDI.  In one film we seem to dance around on the interface between the human and the mechanical, watching students singing the notes drawn on the board by their teacher .  It must be a music conservatory as they have classic staff lines on the board. And so what if instead of writing (in chalk) first this single note, or that single note, while the class sings this note and then that note, we get the dense clusters of Black MIDI on that board? It’s a funny thought, comical in the way it soon outstrips what the humans can do.

Or what if we probe the problem –as she phrased it—of Black MIDI? I saw at least two possible problems.  Humans aren’t machines, which cuts both ways.  Humans have limits, as we observed watching people try to play quickly, watching the fellow in one of the short accompanying films trying to keep up, beginning to resemble a cartoon or puppet as he got quicker and quicker.  And when the notes get too fast they may disappear into a blur, like parts of a pulse or heart-beat.  But that interface is a complex one (meaning that problematic one between human and machine, not MIDI), whether we’re trying to go back in time (as in the Sesquie) or pursue the goal of progress.  We are within shouting distance of some of the ideals of modernism, which I say with Schönberg very much in my head after having interviewed Against the Grain about their Sunday collaboration with TIFF and having played through the piano parts of Pierrot lunaire.  Modernism sometimes seemed to want to liberate music from the human element, to make music purely abstract in its ability to obey science & mathematics, rather than emotions and expressive principles.  Lizée seems ambivalent when we see a Black MIDI scarf being knit in one of her short films as though in a nightmare, organic and involuntary but a reminder that scores were once handcrafted by Beethoven, Mozart, Schönberg and all the other composers of past centuries: when the candlelight alluded to in that Sesquie was the only option other than daylight.

I think the piece has a great deal to offer, and could be made longer if Lizée had any interest in exploring further, even if the length right now feels taut with suspense & dramatic tension.  I hope to encounter this work again, perhaps in a video.

~~~~~~~

And I realized as I re-read this: but I didn’t make any mention of the music. How indeed did Lizée approach telling this story? We had a series of eight titles representing eight segments to the performance, perhaps eight distinct films:
i. Kronoscope
ii. The Tuning Fork
iii. Pictionary Night
iv. MIDI in the Schools
v. The Problem with Black MIDI
vi. The Scarf
vii. 1978
viii. Cassette Culture

The first section sets up the sometimes self-reflexive performance where the Kronos Quartet are located at the front of the stage. We began without them, so in this section their live persons walked onstage, took up their instruments, made adjustments, etc.

In the second section we had one of several quasi-autobiographical segments, as the composer told us her story, a mysterious process whereby she received a tuning fork and an ear, represented as a disembodied object. This is not the only time she will reference the music-making process in ironic fashion, seeming at a great distance from it, and showing us the ambivalence I spoke of earlier. The tuning fork is struck and off we go.

The third plays with our sense of the process, as we look at a game with players who employ a set of game procedures.  Pictionary begins with a mystery and the requirement to decode the mystery, being a charming analog to what performers do with musical scores. There’s a moment when the quartet players being tearing & shredding paper, but I can’t recall if it’s during this segment or not. I think we see the first of several recurring images, of a small piece of paper that might resemble a black MIDI piece or chunk thereof, that gets ingested onto a human tongue, seen in close-up. And of course people do sometimes observe that yes music does come into the interpreter and become a part of the musician, so we’re seeing an ironic portrayal. Sometimes these ironic moments made me laugh, whereas i could see that others might call it pretentious.

As you may have already noticed, I swallowed it eagerly.

I have already described segments IV, V and VI very superficially. In each case there were moments when we saw something that might be black MIDI music, but the score –played by the TSO and the quartet—may or may not have been actual black MIDI. At times the music was a blur of enormous numbers of notes, when the visuals suggested something like black MIDI. But could the TSO + Kronos actually execute such music? I don’t know. What we were hearing was at times highly ironic, as for example, when the “Problem” section was examined in a series of repeated little segments of film, repeated as though the person and these few seconds of his life as he spoke were to be played and sampled like a bit of a vinyl record being scratched for house music, or some digital equivalent.

The last two –1978 and Cassette Culture – refer us back to old technologies that permitted some of the experimental / compositional possibilities of the digital MIDI world, although we only see that now with the benefit of hindsight.

The images & ideas will be reverberating in my head for days.

Tonight’s New Creations Festival Concert by the Toronto Symphony gave us a closer look at the co-curator Owen Pallett, who stepped into the spotlight with a premiere of his own, alongside two other world premieres and a recent composition from south of the border.  We sampled three substantial works of diverse flavours, after another Sesquie.

The more I encounter these short pieces –commissions designed as two minute celebrations of our Sesquicentennial, and therefore called “Sesquies” – the more I see in them.  Restrictions can be an incentive to creativity, as I’m finding in every one of these lovely little works.  Harry Stafylakis called his offering “Shadows Radiant: Sesquie for Canada’s 150th” and I’d have to say that it’s the most celebratory one I’ve heard so far.  While we did hear a trace of Oh Canada, the main thing was to let loose joyfully.  Nevermind misgivings we may have at this point in time, carpe diem on July 1^st 2017.

Composer Aaron Jay Kernis

Then, as promised yesterday, it was time to hear what James Ehnes could do, in a new violin concerto written just for him.  And while I had an eye-opening experience last night hearing Ehnes’s Bach solos –both up close and personal in the intimacy of the RBA, and as I binge listened on youtube—it’s as though composer Aaron Jay Kernis wanted to build on that, knowing the violinist’s strengths.  In the first and last movements we heard wonderful solos. In the first movement there was more than a hint of the baroque even if the orchestra burst forth with a post-romantic barrage, at times overwhelming the subtleties of Ehnes’s violin.

Kernis fills me with optimism, hearing a piece that sounds so fresh, full of new sounds & ideas.  At times there was a kind of irony to the self-reflexive texture in the orchestra, chopping up phrases in response to short phrases from the soloist. The orchestral sound could be big and dissonant, or softly reflective, mellow but still very new sounding in its invocation of quasi-jazzy sonorities.  The moods were varied, and chosen with a solid sense of authority, in the clear delineation of movements that were at least following a familiar template, right up to the rhythmically vigorous closing movement. And then a few minutes before the end, I watched Ehnes play a cadenza, creating sounds I’ve never heard from a violin before, as much a treat to hear, as to watch Peter Oundjian smiling like a cherub at this amazing performance right in front of him (lucky guy). I have to think that Kernis set out to challenge Ehnes: who more than met the challenge in the amazing passage at the end.  I must hear it again!

After the interval came more distinctive voices. First came heard Owen Pallett’s song cycle Songs From An Island, featuring bass-baritone Daniel Okulitch.

New Creations Festival Curator Owen Pallett (photo: Brian Vu)

After the overpowering intensity of the concerto, Pallett’s songs made a welcome contrast: but of course he knew that when he assembled the program.  Pallett’s texts are a surreal triptych on the edge of dystopian horror, litanies of delicately phrased nightmares underplayed in Pallett’s setting and delicately voiced by Okulitch’s mellifluous reading of the songs, like the gentle radio host inside your head.  I’d be tempted to call them minimalist, perhaps thinking of the way Philip Glass tippy-toed on the boundary dividing art song from pop song in his “Songs From Liquid Days” back in the 80s, but Pallett’s texts are much wilder, his settings closer to pop music than art-song from where I sat. This was a very accessible music, housing explosive imagery in the text, not unlike the way a bottle of nitroglycerine is packed in soft fabric.  Argh again I feel I must hear this again. There’s a great deal to unpack in those songs, which don’t reveal themselves readily in one listening (or so I felt).

And to close, the piece that made me smile throughout, Nick Muhly’s extraordinary Mixed Messages.  The program notes led me to believe that the piece was concerned about communication: and so it was.  I felt I was hearing a sonic picture of a brain, synapses firing, then mis-firing, an aural model of discourse, complete with the pulsing electricity of our nerves and the occasional pause before renewing the flow.  This too was a highly accomplished piece of such perfection I didn’t want it to end, yet felt totally contented when it did finally stop.

Pallett gave us four delightfully contrasting pieces, all wonderfully executed. The first two were conducted by Oundjian, the latter two boldly led by André de Ridder.  The TSO sounded fantastic throughout, particularly the brass, who were given a fair workout in the second half of the program.

Although today might be International Women’s Day, the TSO will celebrate it Saturday night, when three of the four compositions programmed by Pallett will be by women composers.  I can’t wait.

The Toronto Symphony’s 2017 New Creations Festival aka #NCF17 co-curated by Owen Pallett and Peter Oundjian began tonight.

And I couldn’t help feeling, this is what it should feel like when I go to the symphony.  Usually? The place is full of baby boomers like myself (although I think that’s normal for any of the serious performance experiences such as theatre, opera or symphonic music, some even more extreme in their demographic).  But tonight my wife and I were by far the oldest in our section, surrounded by 20- and 30-somethings.

The girl to my left –and I say “girl” without meaning to demean her, as I’m speaking of a female younger than my own daughter—was crying at the end.  The prevailing language in the applause was hoots and woots rather than bravo and brava.  And the place was surprisingly full considering how cold it is tonight.

I think most of that youthful cohort were there for the final piece on the program, an ambitious collaborative creation featuring Tanya Tagaq.

Tanya Tagaq (photo: Katrin Naleid)

At one point I almost said “pinch me”.  There we were at a concert featuring four pieces,  three actual world premieres, plus the fourth was a TSO co-commission, getting its Toronto premiere.  Heady stuff indeed:

• Reflection on “O Canada” After Truth and Reconciliation: Sesquie for Canada’s 150th by Andrew Staniland
  (world premiere/TSO co-commission) 
• Trauermarsch by Jörg Widmann for Piano and Orchestra
  (Canadian premiere /TSO co-commission)
• Iris by Jordan Pal
  (World premiere /TSO Commission)
• Qiksaaktuq by Tanya Tagaq, Christine Duncan, Jean Martin / Orchestrated by Christopher Mayo
  (World premiere /TSO Commission)

It felt genuinely festive, a buzz in the air.

New Creations Festival Curator Owen Pallett (photo: Brian Vu)

The first and last items on the program attempt to address profound injustices, while the second is a sort of funeral march.  Pal’s Iris  was a welcome change of pace in a provocative program from Pallett & Oundjian.  I look forward to the next two concerts in the series featuring James Ehnes, Kronos Quartet and the music of Nicole Lizée as well as that of Pallett himself.

Staniland’s Sesquie is an ambitious two minute work.  The sesquies are a series of co-commissions whereby orchestras all over the country are celebrating our sesquicentennial: in two-minute fanfares.  At first glance I wondered if the subject was too much for two minutes, but no.  Staniland does something of great simplicity and directness in taking Oh Canada and reframing it as a tune in minor, complete with the pompous sonorities of a fanfare to conclude.  No you can’t really talk about Truth and Reconciliation in two minutes, and yet one can at least call attention to the incompleteness of our national dream.

Trauermarsch was for me the most thoroughly realized idea of the evening.  I searched just now for an allusion to Gustav Mahler that must have been made in Peter Oundjian’s introductory remarks, given that I can’t find it in the printed program.  The title is the German word for Funeral March, that I can’t help thinking was transformed by Widmann, the composer, in many of the same ways that Mahler transformed the scherzo in his own symphonies: making a simple form into something almost unrecognizable and much more profound as a result.  The opening theme in the piano coalesces into a two-note motif that reminds me of the main theme of the opening movement of Mahler’s Ninth, except this one stays in minor throughout (whereas that one goes from major to minor): that is if it’s accurate to shoe-horn this music into that relatively conservative pigeonhole.  The suggestions of a minor key are sometimes strong, but there’s a lot more to the piece than that, including a piano part at times very lyrical and even tuneful, at other times verging on the percussive keyboard playing found in the concerti of Bartok or Khatchaturian.  I mention them also because while we were sometimes in ambiguous territory as far as tonalities were concerned, I don’t think we ever fully lost the tonal dimension in this wonderfully soulful piece.  And with pianist Yefim Bronfman, for whom the piece was written, there’s an ethnic dimension I couldn’t help feeling (particularly with his performance alongside Tagaq, and a pair of pieces alluding to the Indigenous Holocaust) as though Bronfman’s soulful playing were channeling Widmann’s central European angst through his fingers. At times the music was stunningly beautiful.

After the interval Jordan Pal offered something in a different colour –literally—in his bright explorations of timbres titled Iris, a work that seems thinly conceived in comparison to the apparent depths of the other three pieces, but still offered a terrific bit of contrast to the weight in the other pieces, cleansing our aural pallettes (and forgive me if that pun is unforgivable).

The five movement closing collaboration, is one I want to describe with care, given that it’s a collective creation, incorporating improvisation by orchestra players led by Christine Duncan as well as the impromptu vocal heroics of Tagaq.  And the subject is grief, the unutterable pain and loss of the missing and murdered aboriginal women. Here we ventured into the territory of the inexpressible, a daring exploration that felt genuinely risky to the life of the performer at the centre of the stage. It feels apt that attempting to express such pain should suggest a painful difficult process of expression, leaving me wondering (not for the first time), if Tagaq’s singing is painful. She was and is unafraid of making sounds that are like an exploration of every feeling, traversing the boundaries between lyrical beauty and visceral agony and back again.  I was taken back to my early operatic experiences before surtitles, where one didn’t  know nor necessarily care about precise meanings of  the words being sung: because one could still have a powerful emotional response to the body language, the tones, the music and the story being told.  The subject in this case is grief, explored via the stages enumerated by Kübler-Ross.  I found that I was a bit lost in the abstraction of it all, not quite sure what was meant to be said (at least speaking as one who came with the intention of writing about the experience): yet carried away by the power of the voice and the music all the same.  I’m not sure one needs to know, so long as one is feeling and responding.  And indeed the experience of Tagaq in her TSO debut–so many sounds, such a stunning and vulnerable performance–  was overwhelming.

The TSO’s #NCF17 continues Wednesday night at Roy Thomson Hall and concludes next Saturday.