Corey Pierce

The new decade is beginning with a big bang as far as new music in Calgary goes. Following on the thunderous heels of the High Performance Rodeo’s Soundasaurus, the Happening Festival of New Music and Media is set to bring even more experimental sounds to the city. This annual University of Calgary event was founded nearly a decade ago by faculty member and composer David Eagle and has been soaring just under the radar ever since, exposing students and concertgoers to new musical ideas and practices.

Laurie Radford recently relocated from London to helm the Happening fest, and he defends the cutting-edge festival’s somewhat dated name. “It does have sort of a retro sound to it, but retro is often the source of the next big thing these days,” he points out. “It’s not that unusual to go back to a ‘happening’ time and find an interesting term that is maybe still relevant.”

Using words to describe and quantify music has always been problematic, and with new music comes new challenges. “I think words like ‘innovation’ and the use of technology are sort of the buzzwords today — they’re perhaps not as sexy as ‘experimental,’ ” Radford allows. “Some of these terms are loaded with a certain point in time. Avant-garde music is a term people don’t use much anymore because it’s sort of pretentious, perhaps, but it’s also connected with a [genre of] music from the ’50s and ’60s.”

In addition to concerts, the festival also features installations, lectures, video presentations and round-table discussions. Student involvement is key, with the University Orchestra and New Music Ensemble augmented by live electronics and performing new work by composers Eagle, Radford, Robert Normandeau, David Berezan and Hildegard Westerkamp, among others. The Alberta College of Art and Design Laptop Ensemble will be making a guest appearance.

Happening’s final concert, Net-Tets: A Network Music Concert, connects Calgary with the world, literally. Radford’s colleague Ken Fields spent six years setting up and running an electronic music lab while teaching at Beijing University. He now heads up Studio Syneme, an electronic-music studio and laboratory that can link musicians around the globe via the research network. “I think of it as kind of a form like computer music was, or computer art,” Radford says. “I would say you would call this network art or network music. We’re not really focusing on computers; we’re focusing on making networks resonate, if you will. We want to try to use the network as an instrument.”

Net-Tets will, for the first time, allow a Calgary audience to see and hear locals collaborating live with performers in Athens, Beijing, Belfast, Indiana and Singapore with high-definition video and uncompressed 16-channel audio. The technology hasn’t quite caught up with the vision, but it’s getting there. “Tech rehearsals usually go for a few hours and then the music rehearsals get less attention, sometimes,” Fields admits. "We want to reverse the ratio of 90 per cent tech to 10 per cent music. In a couple of years, I think that won’t be an issue. I think we’ll have software to manage connections, like dialling up a telephone.”

With a focus on technology, the Happening fest positions itself squarely in this millennium. “There’s a sort of a back-and-forth relationship,” Radford explains. “Scientists push technology in a certain direction and then we take it and go, ‘What can we do with this?’ and then by using it you go, ‘Well what we’d really like is this,’ and then the designers go back to the drawing board. That’s another thing that’s quite exciting: There is a dialogue between designer and artists so that these new instruments and these new systems for artistic expression are moving ahead in an efficient fashion.”