One-Page Score Project: Jonathan Davies/Rod Navarro

One-Page Score Project w/Vancouver Electronic Ensemble

“Jumping Score”

One-Page Score created by Jonathan Davies
Music and video composed and created by Rod Navarro.

This special spring edition of Vancouver New Music’s One-Page Score Project invites workshop participants to create their own one-page graphic score, and collaborate with a member of the Vancouver Electronic Ensemble to realize their creation.

Starting on Tuesday, May 19, 2020 we’ll host the live premiere of 2 new scores weekly at noon (PDT) for 4 weeks right here on our YouTube channel. We invite you to join us live, or listen later at your leisure.

………………………..

Artist Statement – Rod Navarro
“Jumping Score”

My approach to Jonathan Davies untitled one page graphic score
was to capture its very organic essence on the one hand and play with
the separate graphical areas on the page, on the other.

In his score I saw very organic shapes with sometimes no beginning nor end, as lines flowed into one another in a labryinthine manner, where positive or light spaces turned to negative or dark ones. Yet there was one thing I also noticed – it had several different parts to the image, not necessarily compartmentalized but uniquely their own.

In a sense I tried to read it as conventionally as I could from top to bottom,
right to left, where I could, but the score needed more that this; it needed to
be interpreted with a visceral feel trying to balance soft and hard, light and dark, the deeply meaningful and the whimsical. The main body of the interpretation is an organic swirl of granular sound where it tries to move through the light labyrinth, then through the dark labyrinth. I did this using an Arabic mode.

Arabic modes (some) tend to create tension in its first register only to resolve to a more “western” mode as it moves up to the second register. The tension for me can be summarized as a simple harmonic treatment of the 1st degree as a minor chord and the 2nd degree as a major chord. All I did was reverse this approach and write for the second register first and conclude with the first register. As the sound builds to a crescendo I wanted to end it on a whimsical feel as I saw Davies’ drawings of jumping people as people dancing, specifically dancing to hip hop rhythms and samples, b-boying, breakdancing etc. I combined this with a self referential idea where I recorded our Zoom meetings, in preparation for creating the One-Page Score Project, and our conversational audio became part of the piece itself. Out of this context (and Davies’ tentative title) comes the name to my interpretation “Jumping Song.”

ROD NAVARRO is a local Vancouver musician, percussionist, composer and electronic musician with more than 20 years experience. Rod is a musician who favours the unconventional, exploratory aspects of music. He balances his love of avant-garde music with his love of Afro-Cuban music sometimes blending the two with unexpected results. Rod has studied percussion with local teachers as well as done extensive self-study with a keen interest in Middle Eastern, Afro-Cuban and jazz music and rhythm. His interests in electronic music blends his cross cultural ideas with avant-garde influences as well as heavy influences of bass music and its many genres.