Update on the Vancouver 2010 Olympics commission for Turning Point Ensemble

Last night the Turning Point Ensemble performed a great concert at Ryerson United Church in Vancouver featuring the World Premiere of a new work by Vancouver composer Jacquie Leggatt and a program of great Canadian music. A great concert: polished and exciting performances.

But today's post is my 2010 Olympic commission update.  I delivered the parts to the ensemble of the music I have written so far for the chamber concerto commission. I have completed two of the five movements:

1. Curling
2. Short-track speed skating

The other three movements are still in sketch form.

It has been fascinating to write music that is somewhere in a nether-world between evoking the spirit of the games, and sonifying the actual rhythms of the winter sports. The musicians are athletes! They are competing, and then at other times they are working as a team. There are so many similarities between music and sports that I find myself scratching my head when people try to say that arts and culture are somehow a world apart from sports. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Look at their movement! It's all a dance, whether the dancers be actual dancers, or musicians dancing through their movements, or hockey players twirling on the ice. All are negotiating ups and downs, fast and slow…

Yet to come: movements 3, 4, & 5:

3. Skeleton
4. Freestyle skiing
5. Hockey

Stay tuned!

Standing ovation for Kai Ma and John Oliver at Typhoon Morakot Fundraising Concert

On Friday September 18, I accompanied the wonderful Taiwanese-born Ottawa counter-tenor Kai Ma in a fundraising benefit concert for the survivors of the Morakot Typhoon that devastated southern Taiwan last month. The concert was organized by the Egret Music Centre in Vancouver, and all proceeds from the tickets sales of the concert went to the relief fund.

Our program of music by Frescobaldi, Grandi, Dowland, Mozart and Beethoven was given a standing ovation. We performed an encore medley of two Taiwanese songs. At the end of the piece, I joined Kai Ma in song; I sang a few phrases in Taiwanese, then we sang in duet to close the show. It was lots of fun. I also played three guitar solos to introduce each section of the program.

I haven't performed early music in quite a while and was thrilled to revisit some "old friend" composers. Since I spend the majority of my time composing at a desk these days, it was refreshing to spend more time than usual practising my trusty Kohno No. 30 classical guitar in preparation for the concert. Kai made the task an easy one; he is an inspiring singer to accompany.

Needless to say, if any concert presenter reading this is interested in our program, we'd be glad to discuss an engagement.

I'd like to express my thanks to Cecilia Chueh, director of the Egret Music Centre, for organizing this event and inviting us to perform.

Mel Bay releases classical guitar anthology including 4 Oliver compositions.

Contemporary Anthology of Solo Guitar Music

By Charles Postlewate

I am proud to announce the release of this Mel Bay publication, to which I contributed 4 compositions, titled Sea Spray 1, 2, 3 & 4.

This is the first compilation of guitar music specifically composed for right-hand technique that includes the little finger. The 57 compositions include original pieces in the Easy-Intermediate to Intermediate -Advanced levels by renowned guitarist/composers from Europe, North America, South America and the Caribbean. Music by Ernesto Cordero, Carlos Dorado, Jim Ferguson, David Flynn, Gerald Garcia, John Hall, Ricardo Iznaola, James Lentini, John Oliver, Charles Postlewate, Mirko Schrader, Burkhard “Buck” Wolters and Luis Zea show the advantages of a five-finger technique in the playing of scales, chords, arpeggios, tremolos and harmonics. They also show the advantages of using the little finger for speed, accuracy, strength and balance. All of these compositions are edited and fingered by Postlewate, pioneer in the use of a five-finger technique. This book is a companion to Anthology of Nineteenth Century Guitar Studies for Five Fingers of the Right Hand (MB21153), compiled and fingered by Leonhard Beck and edited by Charles Postlewate. Standard notation only. In English and Spanish.

DIRECT PRODUCT LINK:

http://www.melbay.com/product.asp?productid=21290

Labyrinth Event a success!

The August 11 performances at Christ Church Cathedral of John Burke's Labyrinth music were a success. Both performances sold out (likely because only 100 tickets sold for each). The continuous performance, in about a dozen sections, created an intense experience, as the music journeyed from simple minimalism to rather more intense musical surprises. Due to the repetition of musical material for long stretches of time with minimal or gradual changes in texture, the sudden changes to a new section had a similar effect to a Philip Glass score, but the harmonic movement is entirely a different beast, taking this music to a place rather far removed from the OpArt-related Glass style.

Today's entry reports my thoughts on the first performance of "La Sombra Espiral" for guitar and string quartet. This special event required that I sit on stage in the orchestra waiting to play for 40 minutes! For a number of reasons, that became a rather unnerving experience. First of all, it was my first participation as musician in this ritual event, and I had essentially no idea how "La Sombra" would sit in the overall concept. Then there is the first performance jitters, which are to be expected.

It is an unusual thing for classical musicians to perform while people engage in any activity other than concentrated concert-hall listening, especially with music designed to engage the listener in a special way, as Burke's music does. So as I sat for 40 minutes watching people walk the labyrinth – which sometimes became quite crowded – I thought about how they might be dividing their concentration. Would they bump into each other if they got lost listening to the music while walking? Would they be able to listen and pay attention to the walking? With the labyrinth so full of people for the first half of the performance, I became convinced that it may have been a wise decision to limit the number of people who could actually walk the labyrinth at any one time. Then, a surprising thing happened: as soon as it was my turn to play, the labyrinth was suddenly empty. This completely changed the atmosphere in the room, as now everyone was seated and it felt just like a regular concert. So suddenly, all eyes were on the musicians. Okay: normal concert now… Strangely, I had prepared myself to play the piece to motivate labyrinth walkers: now it was just a regular concert!

The second performance at 9 p.m. was much better than the first for all the usual reasons, but also because the labyrinth had the perfect number of people on it when my piece came around. Having bult up certain expectations the first time around which were not realized in the first performance, I was ready for the ideal conditions of the second and so was quite pleased with how things went. And the first performance jitters were behind me.

I think John Burke's labyrinth music project is very special. It posits to help those who attend to achieve a catharsis, or to "work through personal issues." The event needs to be presented and handled in a very sensitive way – as it was here, with the possible exception of the traffic problem mentioned above – that is informed by the feedback of those who attend the event. In this way, it can build a dedicated following for a special type of sensitive music-lover who may also be seeking to attend the event to reflect on their own existence. In this way, it is not so far removed from the goals of those who attend performances of the more serious works from the classical music canon.

First performance of Labyrinth Sold Out

MusicFest Vancouver's first performance (6:45 pm) of the Labyrinth music of John Burke at Christ Church Cathedral in Vancouver on August 11 is sold out! Get your tickets in advance only from Ticketmaster for the second show at 9 pm. Only 100 lucky souls will get to witness each show!

La Sombra Espiral for guitar and string quartet by John Burke

On August 11 I will be performing (classical guitar) the premiere of La Sombra Espiral for guitar and string quartet by Canadian composer John Burke at MusicFest Vancouver, a work I commissioned from John a few years ago.

This music, designed both as concert music and as sonic "assistance" for those engaged in walking the labyrinth at Vancouver's Christ Church cathedral, is hypnotic and continuous, yet evolving in ways certainly unexpected if compared to the usual reference points for this sort of music: minimalism and New Age music. John Burke's music is unclassifiable in this regard.

My anecdote for today is to shed a little light into the process of internalizing the music, that is, practising and preparing for the concert. Usually a musician will prepare the music by identifying the difficult passages, working them until they are smooth and under the fingers, and then integrating them into the musical passage in which they exist. With minimal music, the challenge is more often mental and muscular stamina: the repetition and the counting put me, as a musician, in a different relationship with the sound I am making. There is time to "view oneself" performing the music. But such viewing is a distraction and the result of a busy mind. So I find I need to conquer the technical challenges, just as usual, but then, to actually perform the music, I need to put my mind into a meditative mode. In this respect, performing Burke's piece requires of me to enter the stream of the music in a similar way that the audience might: to quiet the mind and the body, and to focus on the sound. Those walking the labyrinth may have a two-fold task, making the possible rewards of the experience double: focus on the walk and the music at the same time. For those who enter the stream of John Burke's composition entirely, there will be a few surprises.

There are two performances of the work on August 11, the first at 6:45 and the second at 9 pm. More information here.

Chenoa Anderson's "Birds of Paradise Lost" completed

I've just finished the first version of my composition for amplified flute and computer for the great Canadian flutist Chenoa Andreson. The work is designed to be performed by a duo of solo flutist and computer musician. The flutist plays into a microphone which is attached to the audio interface of the computer. Once in the computer, the flute sound is transformed in real time to be sent out the loudspeakers in the hall.

The computer part is uniquely designed to run exclusively with Ableton's "LIVE" software. For anyone unfamiliar with the software, it allows the mixture of realtime processing and the launching of audio files with an interface that is easy to set up and use. The company also provides a 14-day completely functional trial version that allows the user to open any previously-saved files and play and manipulate them (but saving is disabled). This allows a composer to create an entire working document that can be sent anywhere in the world because the software runs on both Windows and Macintosh computers. The computer keyboard is used to control the flow of the processing and computer performance, so no extra devices are needed to perform the work. All that is needed is audio cables to go from computer to sound mixer. Very simple, this piece could be played anywhere.

The title comes from the nature of the sound materials themselves. Chenoa sent me recordings of herself performing various special flute sounds and techniques. After I multitracked the sounds and created the first few minutes, the title came to me, and it has stuck. (The connection to the Milton text is an echo rather than any direct reference to meaning in this great classic.)

The solo acoustic instrument (here the flute) is processed through various multiplication and sound colour manipulation techniques to create an entirely new sonic beast that evokes soundscapes and sound textures one would normally associate with nature and/or industrial noise; yet within the large sound, one hears the "motives" that are the source of it all, as performed by the soloist. With electronic music, it is possible to go further than "motivic development" as the primary source of forward movement in music. Where the primacy of sound rules, excitement is created using other means than the (harmonic) modulation techniques of times past. We speak of "textural transformation" rather than "modulation" – although "modulation" in electronic music refers not to chord changes, but to "frequency modulation", which is another beast. "Birds of Paradise Lost" presents a seeming contradiction between consonance and dissonance, with microtonal chromaticism colliding with beautiful tonal resonances.

Is "dissonance" defined purely by the resonating/beating properties of musical intervals and sounds? Or does the rate of change also contribute to perceived "dissonance"? As Stockhausen, Grisey and others have observed, the structure of moving sound, from still (static) to hyperactive (chaotically dense movement) is a complex web of interdependent components. For example, a dense cluster of quiet, slow-moving microtones can be quite peaceful if the beating of the intervals – the sound texture – has a very slow rate of change. It is the behaviour of the sound over time that defines its level of tension for the listener. As is often the case in my music with manipulated sound, the texture may seem fairly busy, but the underlying rate of change is often quite slow. This allows the listener into my sound world, which often contains very high, sometimes "rough" sounds.

This is music for those who would like to hear music beyond the equal-tempered music for pianos and pop-computing: music for curious minds and thirsty ears.

Premiere yet to be determine, likely 2010.