Preview
Happening New Music Festival
January 26 to 30
Rozsa Centre (U of C)
When people want to know what is "happening" in the realm of new music they now have a place to turn.
With a focus on electroacoustic, chamber and orchestral music, Happening is an ambitious and exciting new music festival in Calgary. Although the music department at the University of Calgary had been known to host new music at a student level, over the past two years the festival has grown into something far more organized. Festival organizer David Eagle, a composer and professor at U of C, is using the festival to present music beyond the usual classical canon, in atypical venues using contemporary technology.
In this vein, Happening is offering free nightly electroacoustic concerts during the festival. Presented in octaphonic sound, the Great Hall will feature eight speakers set in a circle, allowing the composer to shift sounds in space. Traditional concert-going audiences are used to hearing performances from the front, but this environment allows audiences to experience sounds from all directions, as we would outdoors. Composer Carrie Alain will present the première of Wilderness Song, which includes recorded sounds from elk herds in Alberta. On the same night, David Eagle will perform the Alberta première of his electronic piece, Paths – shaping it and recomposing it in real time.
Happening also features chamber and orchestral works. New and young composers from Alberta are featured along with some fine classic 20th century pieces. Compositions by Arnold Schoenberg, Witold Lutoslawski, Dmitri Shostakovich, Henry Cowell and Gyorgy Ligeti, too rarely played in Calgary, are included on the impressive concert agendas. Several performance-based works are also pursuing the festival’s theme of challenging our notions of the traditional concert: Bible Babes, Messaging in the Noosphere, and the Land’s End Chamber ensemble show King Gesar. On Friday night, the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra will step away from formality with a cabaret-style show of five new works by Canadian composers.
One of these pieces is A Tangle in the Throat, by Alberta composer Laurie Radford. Influenced by the ubiquitous communication technology present in our society, Radford questions the thrust of energy and innovation applied to communication. "If everyone has a cellphone," asks Radford, "are we actually having better communication? I have an image of an intense tangle."
The piece struggles to say something coherent and to find direction, but with its vigorous changes speaks to the irony of improved communication technology with frustrating results.
Radford is the featured composer of the Happening festival with five of his pieces performed over the week. Currently teaching at the University of Alberta, much of Radford’s art reflects questions of music and technology. In the last several years he has worked on integrating signal processing and live performance, "bringing aspects and finesse of the studio with the live musicians." que le terre s’ouvre (2001), another Alberta première, creates confrontation between the electroacoustic music and the live saxophone (played by Jeremy Brown). A variety of sources are used to create the sounds, including the ringing of bells and the rubbing of a balloon. The sax is immersed in sounds, and Radford finds a dialogue of all possibilities. Sometimes the sax drives the sounds, sometimes the sax is overwhelmed by sound.
A Florus Exchange (2003) also challenges the live player, this time flutist Sean Clarke, with live computer sampling and rearranging. Here Radford takes the flutist’s music in live time and changes it by sampling, speeding it up or down, moving it backwards or stretching the length. The flute is the source for all the sounds generated by the computer. These manipulations are played live and the flutist must respond musically.
"There is a score with a certain amount of fixed material," says Radford, "but also in the score some freedom to play what comes up spontaneously, or play material they have already organized, and here they are required to improvise with the computer."
Aside from performances, Radford will be participating in lectures and master classes offered to U of C music students and the general public. Radford will speak about the political, legal, artistic and social ramifications of sampling and technology in music today.
Classical music is clearly in transition and Radford notes the new generation of performers and composers studying now have grown up with computers and sampling. Playing with a computer or improvising is not strange for upcoming musicians – they are more willing to try new things and have fewer fixed notions of classical music. Sampling is normal in techno and electronica and most concert goers are used to seeing someone play a laptop on stage. The rigidity of the classical genre is now being challenged by technological innovations. The Happening festival gives a chance to hear a classical take on the current movements in music, and will appeal to those who may be interested in sampling but previously shied away from the usual classical performance. With the many concerts and free events throughout the day, there is a great opportunity to hear the new and the now.
For a full schedule see http://newmusic.ffa.ucalgary.ca |
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