VSO NEW MUSIC FEST
FROM BEACH TO HEAVY METAL
of Not all the music in this year’s edition of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s New Music Festival is entirely new. One whole night, the New Music for Old Instruments: After Bach collaboration with Early Music Vancouver on Friday (January 19), is devoted to contemporary compositions that reference the music of the Baroque era. Other works, such as Jocelyn Morlock’s Night, herself, draw from global traditions that are even older. And at least one world premiere touches on motifs—glissandos, slides, and passages of frenetic virtuosity—that have been developed over the 50-year history of a style that might be surprising to some: heavy metal.
It’s all part of a trend in contemporary through-composed music to step back from abstraction, gather inspiration from the past, and then move boldly forward again—a trend, Morlock says, that offers a great deal of pleasure to composers, performers, and listeners alike.
“I’ve loved it since I tried it because it was so much fun,” the VSO’S composer in residence reports, on the line from her Vancouver apartment. “I think part of it, sometimes, is using music that you love for your own specific purposes, rather than starting kind of from the ground up, where any language is permissible. It’s interesting to maybe start with someone else’s language and play in that toybox. That’s why it’s fun for me.
“It’s sort of like wearing vintage clothes with something modern at the same time,” she adds.
Of the three pieces that Morlock has in the New Music Festival, two make explicit allusion to the musical past. Her older work Revenant, which will be revived for the After Bach program, is based on Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Musical Offering, although Morlock essentially asks her musicians to play the great German’s theme backward. (Such was his genius that this makes complete sonic sense.)
“That’s the spine of the piece, and then there are numerous variations on that as it goes along,” she explains. “But that is where I started from.”
Night, herself, which will be premiered as part of Dawn to Dusk: From Aurora to Winter Sky on Monday (January 22), applies a similar compositional strategy to excerpts from Henry Purcell’s proto-opera The Fairy Queen—but it closes with an extended ostinato passage that is inspired by, but doesn’t directly quote, the overlapping rhythmic patterns of Balinese gamelan music. It’s just one more sign, Morlock says, that classical music is no longer restricted to the European tradition.
“Anything is permissible,” she notes happily. “And that includes combining various styles, certainly. It’s an interesting thing to be allowed to do.”
Further evidence that classical music is moving into a more inclusive phase will be found in Marcus Goddard’s Violin Concerto, which—in a significant coup for the VSO trumpeter and composer—will be premiered by American soloist Rachel Barton Pine as part of Dawn to Dusk. From her home in Chicago, Pine reports that she knew she wanted to perform Goddard’s music the moment she heard his string quartet Allaqi—and that if the concerto’s first movement is at least in part derived from metal, it’s the perfect fit for her abilities and interests.
“It’s not that an audience member is going to sit there and hear some kind of crossover-rock piece, ’cause that’s not what it’s about,” says the violinist, who has already performed astute and convincing chamber-music arrangements of Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” and Metallica’s “One”.
“But just as Bartók or Dvořák would take eastern European folk music and incorporate it into their ‘high art’, in a similar way the more serious genres of heavy metal are ripe for inclusion in our language of classical music. It’s really come full circle, because a lot of those subgenres have been inspired by classical all along.”
Pine will also join VSO concertmaster Nicholas Wright in performing Anna Clyne’s Grammy Award–winning Prince of Clouds and Morlock’s evergreen Cobalt as part of Cobalt Clouds and Clear Blue Seas on Saturday (January 20). What links all three pieces, she says, is that they offer accessible pleasure to the listener while also giving the performers a chance to find their own personal voice, without the pressure of playing pieces already defined by past generations of virtuosos. “One thing that I like about all three of the works that I’ll be doing is that while there’s some use of extended techniques, they don’t go crazy with it,” she says. “There’s definitely still the traditional violin playing, where you’re going to hear the singing voice of the violin, and the exciting virtuosity of the violin—you know, the violin played as ever, but with these composers’ modern twist. “And for the audience,” she continues, “I think that they’re going to hear everything they like about hearing a violin concerto, in terms of the lyricism, in terms of the really intense, fiery passages and virtuosity and warmth and passion. But they’re also going to hear three pieces that they’re not familiar with that are going to be really exciting new discoveries—and that’s just an absolute thrill.”
The Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s New Music Festival takes place at various venues from Thursday to Monday (January 18 to 22).