Contemporary music is about exploration
This is the first in a series of three columns by Tania Miller, who retires this spring after 14 seasons as music director of the Victoria Symphony. In the series, Miller reflects on memorable aspects of her tenure here.
Next weekend, the Victoria Symphony is celebrating Canada’s 150th anniversary with a pair of concerts that embody several of the themes that have been most important to me throughout my time with the orchestra. One of those is music and young people (we’ll get to that Sunday). Today, I want to talk about the relationship that we have with the contemporary arts of our time.
Next Saturday, at Alix Goolden Hall, we present a special concert entitled Our Canada, which presents the voices of locally based, nationally renowned Canadian writers such as Patrick Lane, Rachel Wyatt and others, paired with composers including Victoria’s own Tobin Stokes, as they use words and music to share wide-ranging impressions of the stories, the struggles, the history, the people and the defining aspects of what it is to be Canadian.
To me, one of the greatest privileges over the years has been to present music of our time, our culture, our country. We’ve had amazing experiences creating contemporary music presentations and premières around special parts of Victoria culture, through such projects as the Emily Carr Festival, the Victoria and the Sea Festival, a celebration of Victoria’s Chinatown and two Lest We Forget concerts in the Bay Street Armoury, one featuring a musical tribute to Canadian Scottish Regiment piper J.C. Richardson.
The Victoria Symphony has surrounded itself with creative and talented composers who have changed all of us over the years. Experiences such as Jared Miller’s evocative wind chimes in his recent Holocaust-inspired work Lament of the Wind will not be easily forgotten. Hundreds of composers over the years, in multitudes of New Music Festivals, Explorations and Odyssey concerts, as well as masterworks concerts, have affected our experiences and thoughts with their talents and ideas.
Many of these contemporary presentations were enhanced and deepened by collaboration with virtually every part of the Victoria arts and culture community, from choirs and chamber groups to art galleries and museums, educational and religious institutions. The Victoria Symphony and the community at large have been enriched by collaboration and the coming together to explore something that was an integral part of our community, and, in so doing, brought us all closer together.
Contemporary music isn’t about music that is unattainable and formless. It’s about exploration. About wonder. It’s about experiencing ideas and directions that are current and meaningful to our own lives, and from the voices of people who are a part of our own world, not the contexts and culture of people from other communities or times.
When good contemporary music is presented in a thoughtful context, it gets us thinking, moving, exploring and reacting in an open way, and results in a fresh and often surprising experience for all of us. And sometimes it isn’t about context at all. It’s an exploration into a new realm of sound or experience. Art for its own sake of expression.
Isn’t it interesting that we’re used to admiring brand-new works of visual art on which the paint is barely dry, attending the first performance of an original play or reading the latest novel that has just been published, but historically, new music has had a more antagonistic struggle with audiences. Here in Victoria, I admire the openness of our audiences and the growth we have all made together as we explored many new worlds of music over the years.
All of these moments have brought us closer to understanding the more traditional repertoire of the orchestra. We listen in a different way, have less confining restrictions on what we expect, while becoming more diverse in what we define a great artistic experience to be.
What seemed strange now seems familiar. Our context for what harmony can be widens, our appetite for surprise begins to awaken.
It has been a privilege and pleasure for me to be a part of such a dynamic and forwardthinking musical organization, and to have the opportunity to ensure that composers of our time have a platform to explore, to develop and to expand the art form. The future of music is rich and diverse, deserving and complex, surprising and exciting.
After all, it is the future of us!