FUELLED BY EXCITING NEW SOUNDS
Annual festival showcases cutting edge music by wide range of artists
If you ever wanted to hear a propane tank being repurposed as a musical instrument, now’s your chance.
Some half-a-dozen of them will appear in the seventh Now Hear This New Music Festival, which starts March 21 and runs through March 25.
The propane tanks have been adapted to act as resonators for pre-recorded voices, live amplified brass and electronics in a new work by Edmonton soundscape composer Ryan M. Hemphill. Overfill Undergrowth, as the work is titled, is part of a concert of such-cutting edge works called Live Mix II, at Holy Trinity Anglican Church (9:30 p.m., March 24). Its companion concert, Live Mix 1, takes place in Studio 96 (9:30 p.m., March 22).
To be able to encounter this kind of experimentation is one of the welcome elements of the festival. It is always wide-ranging, usually featuring some of the classics of the modern avant-garde repertoire alongside new compositions.
Organizer New Music Edmonton actively encourages composers to submit new works for the festival and, as artistic director Ian Crutchley explains, it doesn’t ask those composers to follow any theme.
“Over the last couple of years, we’ve received so many wonderful proposals to perform here we don’t feel the need for a theme — we like the festival to reflect the diversity. Edmonton has an awful lot of avant-garde underground music — the festival reflects this.”
This year, a new element is being added: modern jazz. Edmonton’s Don Berner Trio will appear at Studio 96 (7:30 p.m., March 22) with Argentine-Canadian composer and sound artist Nicolas Arnaez for a “combination of straight ahead and free form jazz, dance, electronic, electroacoustic and chamber music.”
New Music Edmonton has also brought together three jazz musicians for a special concert at Holy Trinity Anglican Church (7:30 p.m., March 24).
New York’s Dave Burrell/Steve Swell Duo will be joined by Edmonton
Over the last couple of years, we’ve received so many wonderful proposals to perform here we don’t feel the need for a theme.
drummer Mark Segger. Pianist Burrell, now in his 70s, has played in bands led by Archie Shepp and Marion Brown, and recorded extensively. Free jazz trombonist and composer Swell is a veteran of bands stretching right back to Buddy Rich and Lionel Hampton.
“We’ve never had avant-garde jazz in the festival,” Crutchley says. “These are going to be stunning, wild, crazy concerts, with major figures on the international scene.”
The festival has regularly featured a major cutting-edge composer of the last half-century. In 2014, it was R. Murray Schafer, 2015 featured Ligeti, 2017 the music of Pauline Oliveros. This year, it is the colourful and widely influential avant-garde Argentine composer Mauricio Kagel (19312008), who spent most of his life in Germany. He was an experimentalist who explored crossovers in various media, often creating dramatic musical events, even more often imbuing his music with irony or surrealistic humour.
The specially formed Kagelian Ensemble, led by renowned Argentine conductor and composer Miguel Bellusci, will perform selections from Kagel’s Die Stucke der Windrose (Holy Trinity Church, 7:30 p.m., March 23). The concert also features a work for string quartet and electronics by Nicolas Arnaez, performed by the Vaughan String Quartet. It finishes with the world premiere of a Kagelian musical theatre piece by Bellusci.
The soundscape concert at City Hall in last year’s festival was so well received that the concept is being repeated this year. A band of some 20 Edmonton musicians, spread all around the City Hall atrium, will perform Pauline Oliveros’ sonic ritual Earth Ears. It last about an hour, incorporates music the players bring themselves, and is designed to gradually fill up the space with an evocative soundscape (2 p.m., March 22).
Catherine Lee’s combination of oboe and electronics can be heard in an afternoon concert on March 24 at Holy Trinity Church (2 p.m.). She was raised in Edmonton, and now lives and teaches in Oregon.
The final concert takes place at a venue new to the festival, but certainly not to Edmonton music lovers: the Yardbird Suite. Ultraviolet, Edmonton’s own new music quartet, will play a variety of contemporary works for their combination of flutes, saxophones, cello and piano. The concert includes Cothemus by Hong Kong awardwinning Canadian composer Alice Ho, whose music is now played all over the world but has been little heard here, and Theme for the Largest Organism on Earth by Edmonton pop-rock artist Doug Hoyer.
For those who have wondered what the festival might be like, but have never quite taken the plunge into new music, this year offers a new and welcome feature.
Holy Trinity Anglican Church invited New Music Edmonton to give a preview of the festival in its regular Wednesday afternoon series of concerts. A group of those playing in the festival will be introducing and playing the kind of music you can hear at this year’s events, and admission is by donation (12:10 p.m., March 21).
“I think that our festival has changed every year,” Crutchley says, “and we feel particularly excited about this one — the sheer variety of the types of music is a promising outlook for the future for us.
“If you come to one show, you will find you will want to explore more!”