Sonic Topographies – VNM Festival – Oct. 16 – 19, 2014
Vancouver New Music Festival 2014
Sonic Topographies
Sound, music, and sustainability
October 16 – 19, 2014
Composers and sound artists all over the world are turning their ears to the music of the earth and its people to reconsider what artistic creation means in a context that fosters sustainable ideas about creativity, culture, and tradition. The festival showcases composers, musicians and sound artists who are fostering new, sound-based explorations of ideas that emerge from natural, interlocking cycles and alternative systems of thought.
Tickets
Thursday, October 16, 2014
Akio Suzuki | Annea Lockwood | Hildegard Westerkamp | John Luther Adams
Doors 7PM; artist talk with Annea Lockwood 7:15PM | Concert 8PM
This event will be broadcast live by CiTR at 101.9FM, with live streaming and podcasts available at citr.ca
Orpheum Annex (823 Seymour Street, 2nd floor)
Akio Suzuki (Japan)
A legendary Japanese sound artist Akio Suzuki has been performing, building instruments, and presenting sound installations for nearly 40 years. His music is simple and pure, exploring how natural atmospheres and sounds can be harnessed and then set free. To experience his art is to lose oneself in the sound that surrounds us.
www.akiosuzuki.com
Akio Suzuki – Analapos (A-1) Opening Music For Yokosuka Museum of Art (excerpt)
Akio Suzuki – Analapos (A-1) Opening Music For Yokosuka Museum of
Community partner: Powell Street Festival
Annea Lockwood (New Zealand/US)
Jitterbug (2007)
For six channel tape and three musicians.
Jitterbug counterpoints hydrophone recordings of aquatic insects and fish, with three musicians’ interpretations of the markings on rocks collected from the area near Glacier Park, Montana in which Lockwood made the recordings. Featuring JP Carter (trumpet), Peggy Lee (cello), and Lisa Cay Miller (piano).
www.annealockwood.com
Hildegard Westerkamp (Vancouver)
Liebes-Lied/Love Song (2005)
For cello and electroacoustic soundtrack.
Based on the poem Liebes-Lied by Rainer Maria Rilke and its English translation by Norbert Ruebsaat, Liebes-Lied/Love Song is a meditation on love. Readings of the text combine with recordings of Anne Bourne’s improvised explorations on the cello and environmental sounds to create the soundscape of the piece, over which cellist Peggy Lee performs live improvisations.
www.sfu.ca/~westerka
www.peggylee.net
John Luther Adams (US)
Ilimaq (2012)
For solo percussion and electronics.
Virtuosic percussionist Scott Deal (US) performs Adams’ expansive, richly layered work for solo percussion. Ilimaq was commissioned by University of Texas, Stanford University, the Walker Art Center, and Duke University.
www.johnlutheradams.com
scottdeal.net
Friday, October 17, 2014
Raven Chacon | John Luther Adams | Georg Friedrich Haas | Hildegard Westerkamp | Tristan Murail
Doors 7PM; artist talk with Raven Chacon and Leslie García 7:15PM | Concert 8PM
Orpheum Annex (823 Seymour Street, 2nd floor)
Raven Chacon (US)
From the Navajo Nation, Raven Chacon uses unique instruments in this live performance: bone whistles, light-drums, and antler harps, in addition to voice, are all processed and over-driven by various electronic and electric devices. Chacon’s music ranges in dynamics from meditative quiet hums to abrasive scrapes and piercing screeches, speeding up and slowing down throughout its course.
www.spiderwebsinthesky.com | www.postcommodity.com
John Luther Adams (US)
The Light Within (2007)
For alto flute, bass clarinet, vibraphone/crotales, piano, violin, cello, and electronics.
Vancouver’s Ethos Collective perform Adam’s The Light Within, a sublimely textured work for small ensemble inspired by installation artist James Turrell’s explorations of light and space.
www.johnlutheradams.com
ethosmusic.ca
Georg Friedrich Haas (Austria/US)
Sextett (1992/1996)
For flute, clarinet, percussion, piano, violin and violoncello.
Written in 1992 and completely reworked in 1996, Haas’ Sextett begins with two voices, moving in quarter-tones, evolving into a complex, and precise exploration of pitch, in concert with the “absence or loss of pitch” (UE). Sextett will be performed by Ethos Collective (Vancouver).
ethosmusic.ca
Hildegard Westerkamp (Vancouver)
Like a Memory (2002)
For piano and two electroacoustic soundtracks.
Like a Memory explores that area of aural perception in which we hear music in sounds and sounds in music, where scrap metal structures become musical instruments and the piano becomes a strange sound sculpture.
www.sfu.ca/~westerka
Tristan Murail (France)
Territoires de l’oubli (1977)
For solo piano.
Murail’s longest single-movement work to date, Territoires de l’oubli is a massive exploration of the piano’s resonance, unfolding in a huge curve of continuously evolving textures. Masterfully performed by William Fried (US), this is a musical experience not to be missed!
www.tristanmurail.com
Saturday, October 18, 2014
Leslie García | John Luther Adams | Hildegard Westerkamp | Annea Lockwood
Doors 7PM artist talk with Hildegard Westerkamp 7:15PM | Concert 8PM
Orpheum Annex (823 Seymour Street, 2nd floor)
Bio-Box – Leslie García (Mexico)
Sound artist Leslie García performs live with her plant-based, biofeedback interface, Bio-Box. At once live performance and laboratory, Bio-Box establishes audio communications between different living systems (mosses and algae) generating micro-voltage from the gestural responses of these bodies to physical stimuli such as light, vibration and touch. By rendering these electrical responses audible, the interface gives us access to the high sensitivity and complex sensory systems of different plants.
lessnullvoid.cc
John Luther Adams (US)
Four Thousand Holes (2010)
For piano, percussion, and electronics.
Percussionist Scott Deal (US), and pianist William Fried, (US) come together to perform Adams’ Four Thousand Holes, a piece described as a “sometimes lush, sometimes fragile, rhythmically complex and technically demanding work for piano, mallet percussion and ghostly electronic “auras”—electronic sounds created by processing the acoustic instruments’ sonorities” (Jim Fox, Cold Blue Records).
www.johnlutheradams.com
scottdeal.net
willfriedweb.blogspot.ca
Hildegard Westerkamp (Vancouver)
Fantasie for Horns II (1979)
For solo French horn and two electroacoustic soundtracks.
Composed in two stages, beginning with a composition created from recordings of horns from the Canadian Pacific and Atlantic coasts – trainhorns, foghorns, factory horns and others – in Fantasie for Horns II, the tape composition becomes the acoustic environment for a live French horn, an instrument which, in turn, has had a long history as sound signal in many parts of the world. Featuring Nick Anderson (French horn).
www.sfu.ca/~westerka
Annea Lockwood (New Zealand/US)
Buoyant (2013)
Stereo electroacoustic work.
Buoyant interweaves water recordings made on the shore of Flathead Lake, Montana, and clangorous gangplanks moving with the Hudson River at the Hoboken Ferry Terminal, with a small boat harbor on Lake Como, Italy.
www.annealockwood.com
Dusk (2012)
Stereo electroacoustic work.
In Annea Lockwood’s Dusk, bats zip past and Willie Winant creates long sonic trails with large gongs above the deep pulsings of a hydrothermal vent in the Pacific seabed.
Sunday, October 19, 2014
Michael O’Neill | John Luther Adams | Annea Lockwood | Hildegard Westerkamp
3:30PM concert | 2PM free panel discussion – note early start time!
This event will be broadcast live by CiTR at 101.9FM, with live streaming and podcasts available at citr.ca
Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS), University of British Columbia (2260 West Mall, UBC Point Grey Campus)
Michael O’Neill (Vancouver)
stone garden *
For gamelan, bagpipes, and voices.
stone garden is an intercultural work for Balinese gamelan beleganjur, Scottish bagpipes, Ukrainian bilij holos (white voice or pure voice) singing, and chorus. It is a rumination from a personal perspective on end-of-life matters, recognizing the shared traditional role of beleganjur and bagpipes in cremation/funeral ceremonies. Weaving through the piece, with light, humour, and gravitas are the words of celebrated Vancouver poet Gerry Gilbert. stone garden will be performed by Beledrone, an ensemble formed in 2012 to play a series of works for Balinese gamelan beleganjur, bagpipes, and voice.
* World premiere, commissioned by Vancouver New Music with the assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts.
John Luther Adams (US)
Songbirdsongs (1974-80)
For two piccolos, and three percussion.
John Luther Adams’ Songbirdsongs creates a mesmerizing, and shifting sonic landscape of birdcalls, water, and wind. Performed by Daniel Tones (percussion), Mark McGregor and Brenda Fedoruk (piccolos).
Annea Lockwood (New Zealand/US)
floating world (1999)
For stereo tape.
floating world is an immersion in place and transience. Lockwood invited eleven friends whose own work with environmental sound she much admires to make recordings in places of personal, spiritual significance to them.
www.annealockwood.com
Hildegard Westerkamp (Vancouver)
école polytechnique (1990)
For eight churchbells, mixed choir, bass clarinet, trumpet, percussion, and electroacoustic soundtrack.
Dedicated to the 14 women slain at École Polytechnique in Montreal in 1989, école polytechnique invites the audience to listen inward and search for what is sacred, what cannot be compromised, what cannot be allowed to be killed inside us and therefore not in the world. école polytechnique is meant to provide the sonic environment for such a journey inward. Performed by Musica Intima, Daniel Tones (percussion), Al Cannon (trumpet), and AK Coope (bass clarinet).
www.sfu.ca/~westerka
http://www.musicaintima.org/
Media sponsors:
CiTR
