Vancouver New Music’s 50th season kicks off with Vox Organi, the latest edition of its annual three-day festival, featuring performances on Vancouver’s largest pipe organ at Pacific Spirit United Church. From expansive dronescapes to novel sounds coaxed through uniquely crafted digital augmentation, an exciting mix of Canadian and international artists will approach this impressive instrument each with their own voice and vision.
Festival highlights include a series of new and previously composed, unperformed works for solo organ by Sarah Davachi (Oct. 21) and a new, long form work for organ and electronics based on loscil and Lawrence English’s collaborative album, Colours of Air (Oct 20). On Sunday, October 22 English will also host a free workshop, The Listener’s Listening, co-presented by Vancouver New Music and Publik Secrets.
In ATEM, Sandra Boss stages a dialogue between human and machine. The MIDI-technology of the church organ is taken into play, not only to explore the super-human powers it has to offer, but moreover to expose its sonic possibilities where rhythmic patterns appear as structural and timbral effects. Suppression, exhaustment, excitation and release all coexist in this piece.
Since the early 1990s Blake Hargreaves has explored the sonic and expressive possibilities of the pipe organ through experimentation and improvisation. Recently this practice has expanded to deliberate encounters with unfamiliar instruments, excavating new creations at each novel interaction. Hargreaves has documented such actions with nearly 100 pipe organs across the Americas and Europe. Bringing this practice to the context of a live happening with the massive Casavant at Pacific Spirit is an honour and privilege for Hargreaves, to explore the realities of the present through the complex lens of the organ’s construction, community and land.
Ferrari / Brennan / Lázara will present a performance for pipe organ, voice, percussion, synthesizer, and for the neo-gothic stone building that houses the Pacific Spirit United Church. This collaboration draws from a shared interest in the acoustics of space, in buildings as bodies as instruments, and in offering modes of listening that puncture the hierarchy between audience, performers and religious architecture. It combines elements from their individual practices with voice (Lázara), percussion (Brennan), amplification & audio feedback (Ferrari), with collective sonic interventions and micro-choreographies for lungs and fingers recalling a time when the pipe organ relied on the labor of more than one organist to produce its sounds. Costume design by Shizen Jambor.
This performance was developed from a series of improvisations, and sound interventions Ferrari, Lázara and Brennan performed in the Fall 2022 in different catholic churches in Brescia, Italy as part of Ferrari’s project in increments of 13 – a sound library of graphic scores, field recordings, and sonic fictions drawing from popular medicine, and oral histories of the valley where she grew up in northern Italy.
Lawrence English and loscil present a new, long form work for organ and electronics informed by their 2023 collaborative album, Colours of Air. Using computer and human controlled acoustic pipe organ sounds mixed with real time processing, the duo revisit the spirit of their studio album which featured recordings of the pipe organ at the Old Museum in Brisbane, Australia.
What really happens when humans interface with a machine? Which of these two elements is really in control? Is it the human who dominates…or is it the machine itself that secretly drives the human in their choices? Who is playing who?
These ancient questions will be explored by the organist Giulio Tosti within his performance, which will be set as a long acoustic improvisation, exploring the auxiliary electronic elements of the Casavant organ – its Piston Sequencer, Crescendo Pedals….with the aim of recreating a machine-like language, but adding the uncertainty and organicity of a human body playing.
gamut inc will perform AGGREGATE #11, a piece created in 2022 during an artist residency of the Goethe Institute in the Villa Kamogawa in Kyoto. Here, electronic music processes such as pulse width modulation are used on the organ, arranged into dense textures that interweave with algorithmically generated harmonic and rhythmic material to create larger forms. A kaleidoscope of processual forms of expression that reconcile the mechanical and the organic.
Sarah Davachi is a composer and performer whose work is concerned with the close intricacies of timbral and temporal space, utilizing extended durations and considered harmonic structures that emphasize gradual variations in texture, overtone complexity, psychoacoustic phenomena, and tuning and intonation. Her compositions span solo, chamber ensemble, and acousmatic formats, incorporating a wide range of acoustic and electronic instrumentation. Similarly informed by minimalist and longform tenets, early music concepts of form, affect, and intervallic harmony, as well as experimental production practices of the studio environment, in her sound is an intimate and patient experience that lessens perceptions of the familiar and the distant. Davachi offers a program of new pieces for solo pipe organ as well as previously unperformed organ pieces from Davachi’s 2020 album Cantus, Descant.
Photos by:
Vera Gamboa and Heather McDermid
