Yiddish for Pirates meets the HPO
Ahoy hearties! Come listen to his words. They tell some story. What’s it about, you ask? Gary Barwin, 54, the Belfast, Northern Ireland-born, Hamilton-based novelist, poet, musician, composer, educator and multidisciplinary artistic explorer, will take the spotlight at the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra’s Literary series, presented in partnership with A Different Drummer Books, on Thursday, Nov. 29 in The Studio at FirstOntario Concert Hall.
As you’ve no doubt already guessed, Barwin will be reading from his 2016 novel, “Yiddish for Pirates,” which garnered him the $15,000 2017 Leacock Medal for Humour, the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, a Hamilton Literary Award, not to mention nods for a Giller and a Governor General’s Award for Literature. Barwin won’t be reading the whole 337-page story. After all, you can’t cross the briny deep in two hours, either. Instead, Barwin will offer up hearty excerpts seasoned with musical selections, a few of them being premières of his.
To set the mood, Barwin will take out his alto sax, the very same horn his parents bought him when he was a teen, strap a Vandoren two-and-a-half strength jazz reed to the mouthpiece, the inside of which he’s modified with orthodontic wax,
and begin to improvise on a “Nigun,” a traditional Jewish wordless melody.
“When I was studying saxophone as a teenager and I was also studying for my bar mitzvah, I always figured that when I was listening to the chanting that they did in the synagogue it always reminded me of the kind of stuff that (late great jazz saxophonist) John Coltrane was doing in terms of modal music,” said Barwin to the Spec. “So, to me, this is my Jewish John Coltrane improvisation thing that I hear.”
After Barwin reads the prologue to “Yiddish for Pirates,” the HPO String Quartet will perform American composer and multiinstrumentalist John Zorn’s “Kol Nidre.”
“It’s just beautiful and haunting, and to me, it’s very evocative at creating this mood of possibility and of mystery,” said Barwin of Zorn’s musical take on the traditional Yom Kippur recitation. “Some of the pieces are these beautiful, mysterious pieces, and they work as nice in contrast to some of the parts I’m reading, which are funny, they’re lively. And so, it’s nice to go back and forth, switching the moods.”
Barwin, who holds a PhD in music composition from State University of New York at Buffalo, composed “The One Where All Goes Well” for string quartet about a month ago to highlight his novel’s epigraph taken from Voltaire’s “Candide” — “We are going to a different world … and I expect it is the one where all goes well.”
“In the middle of it, it’s got a traditional Jewish klezmer song, a dance song, and then I wrote some other melodies that were klezmer-like around it with a kind of a minimalist accompaniment,” said Barwin of his composition. “It’s contemporary, but not very dissonant.”
To attune to his novel’s nautical
and New World themes, Barwin chose American composer William Grant Still’s 1948 “Danzas de Panama” which will be followed by a chestnut, Manuel de Falla’s “Spanish Dance No. 1,” both in string quartet versions.
In addition to Barwin’s “The One Where All Goes Well,” there’ll be two other premières of his, “Shoulder Dance,” a musical nod to Aaron, the novel’s ribald parrot narrator, and to end, an oceanic ode, “Endless Blue.”
As for the former, it’s a recent arrangement of one of Barwin’s old tunes, now set for string quartet with an obbligato part for tin whistle played by the composer himself.
“It sounded like a European
folk dance that would be appropriate for being aboard a ship,” said Barwin of his “Shoulder Dance.” “It’s kind of like a hornpipe.”
The latter, also an arrangement of one of Barwin’s old tunes, is built upon a repeating ground bass.
“It’s amazing to me how powerful an idea it is to combine reading with music and a little bit of staging, just even a little bit of lighting,” said Barwin of the literary concert. “To me, it makes it leap into three dimensions.”