Music and Dance in Different Rooms

Last night, we went to the sec­ond in a series of three con­certs by the Van­cou­ver Sym­phony at the Round­house, a Com­mu­nity Cen­ter in Yale­town. It’s an appeal­ing venue, because it’s unpre­ten­tious, and clearly busy doing what com­mu­nity cen­ters do; host­ing bas­ket­ball, ping-pong, hockey and other sports, pro­vid­ing classes for arts, crafts and learn­ing an instru­ment, etc.

For these con­certs, they’ve been using one or more of the black-box the­atres (with bleach­ers) for cham­ber music up to cham­ber orches­tra con­certs. If some­one was wor­ried that clas­si­cal music con­certs were bor­ing or stuffy, these con­certs are an anti­dote for that per­cep­tion. While just on the edge of being ‘gim­micky’, both of the con­certs so far have had lots of extra-musical attrac­tions. The first one, back in Jan­u­ary, included Voices from the Gallery by Stephen Paulus, with dra­matic read­ings by an actress who spoke for var­i­ous works of art (pro­jected above). We got to hear what per­haps Bosch’s Gar­den of Earthly Delights, Christina from Wyeth’s Christina’s World, the dour look­ing farmer from Grant Wood’s Amer­i­can Gothic, and even the Mona Lisa might have to say for them­selves with some colouris­tic, if a lit­tle over­whelmed music by Paulus.

Last night’s con­cert was sim­i­larly full of non-musical ele­ments. It was actu­ally a Dance pre­sen­ta­tion as well, with the VSO col­lab­o­rat­ing with the Kokoro Dance Com­pany. The most inter­est­ing part of this com­bi­na­tion was per­haps its logis­tics: the live musi­cians per­formed in one room (again, black box with bleach­ers), while the dancers per­formed in another (same setup). If you chose to sit in the room with the dancers, the music was piped in. If you chose to be in the room with the orches­tra (as we did), the dance was pro­jected on a large screen above, as seen by 3 cam­eras, some­times super­im­pos­ing dif­fer­ent views. For one of the works, In Mem­ory by Joan Tower (a poignant and at times rest­less trib­ute to a friend who had died as well as a reac­tion to the attacks of 9/11), the dancers and musi­cians switched rooms. I found the dance ele­ment some­what inter­est­ing, but much of it seemed extra icing on a cake that didn’t need it, at least for me. Pam felt dif­fer­ently, and was more drawn to the extra visual ele­ments. I sus­pect that her opin­ion was closer to the other audi­ence members.

For me though, the high­light of the con­cert was the last piece on the pro­gram, a piece called Mon­day and Tues­day by Michael Torke. I knew Michael as a fel­low stu­dent back in the 80s at the East­man School of Music in Rochester, NY. It was a time in my life when I was pretty depressed (I later learned that I was prob­a­bly suf­fer­ing from Sea­sonal Affec­tive Dis­or­der, as Rochester is one of the dark­est cities in North Amer­ica), so I don’t remem­ber much from those years. He was a bright spot amongst the com­posers back then, and I even went so far as to tell him after I heard his ground-breaking Vanada (a cham­ber piece based on Nabokov’s Lolita for elec­tronic key­boards, winds and per­cus­sion) and that I thought he was ‘the future’. He went on to work as a suc­cess­ful com­poser with rel­a­tively lit­tle aca­d­e­mic work (some­thing that is almost unheard of in Clas­si­cal Music cir­cles). He wrote sev­eral com­mis­sions for bal­let music, two ora­to­rios, orches­tral and cham­ber works, and a few operas. He was first Asso­ciate Com­poser with the Royal Scot­tish Orches­tra in 1998 and has since started his own record label, Ecsta­tic Records, which is car­ried by the iTunes music store. Mon­day and Tues­day was writ­ten back in 1992, and had its first per­for­mance that year in Lon­don with the Lon­don Sin­foni­etta. It reminds me some­what of the music he was writ­ing when we were stu­dents together, and if any­thing, sounds even more strongly influ­enced by Steve Reich, who we were both fas­ci­nated with at the time.

Actu­ally, I do remem­ber Michael hand­ing me the ear­phones in his dorm room to hear Reich’s Ver­mont Coun­ter­point and me grin­ning like an idiot as I heard it for the first time. I also remem­ber him say­ing ‘It’s like heaven would sound like, isn’t it?’ I also can recall the two of us try­ing to explain to his clar­inetist girl­friend why a par­tic­u­lar har­monic pro­gres­sion in the slow move­ment of Poulenc’s Clar­inet Sonata thrilled both of us.

I’d like to hear what he’s writ­ing these days, because I found many of his orches­tral works of the late 80’s and mid 90’s (Bright Blue Music, Javelin for the 1996 Olympics) bland and dis­ap­point­ing. He’s been busy in the inter­ven­ing years, and strangely enough, the last time I heard his music played live was back in school; It’s taken over 13 years and a move to a dif­fer­ent coun­try for me to hear a con­cert with a piece by Michael Torke on it again.