Like Mixing Oil and Water
That’s how Toronto composer Linda Catlin Smith described the task of writing music for an ensemble that combined the Super Nova String Quartet and the Evergreen Club Gamelan. We’ll hear the results in a concert from Halifax, that we’re broadcasting this Sunday night, just after 10:30. The difference is not just that the Balinese Gamelan instruments are mostly made of metal, while the string quartet is primarily wood (they do use metal strings). The whole system of tuning and notation are different for each tradition. So what did Linda do? She decided to make each group recognizable, but transparent. The sound image she wanted was like two trees whose trunks are separate, but their branches are growing together. She calls the piece In High Branches. Ana Sokolovic took the opposite approach in her work for the combined groups. It’s called In Between. She wanted the challenge of writing something fast, so it starts out like a competition, then the two groups come together at the end.
Why even try to cross such a great divide? The simplest reason is probably because musicians are a curious bunch. The first time Western composers heard the Gamelan was at the Paris Exhibition in the late 19th Century. Claude Debussy immediately set to work trying to imitate what must have been a mind blowing sound. The result was his amazing String Quartet.
Our concert on Saturday night also crosses over the border between East and West. Montreal percussionist Shawn Mativetsky is one of Canada’s principal promoters of the tabla and he’s commissioned lots of new pieces for the instrument. We’ll hear him in three different works by Bruno Paquet, Paul Frehner and Jim Hiscott. Even though Shawn is trained in the tabla, most of the composers he works with aren’t. Jim Hiscott realized that it would take years and years of study before he could do create something meaningful within the Indian classical tradition himself, so he decided to try and find ways to allow Shawn to improvise in his piece called Shadow Play. Still not easy, but if you can relax the structure of your own music enough, it’s possible to find some common ground. Jim has learned how to play the Balinese Gender, so he also makes reference to that tradition in this piece.
I’ve worked across the cultural divide myself (in my pieces Inuit Games, Creation Stories and Children’s Stories). It’s not easy. But I completely agree with Jim, the best way to make this work is to allow each component to have its own integrity and figure out a way to let them cross into some commonality. Bjork does this incredibly well. She’s worked with Inuit throat singing (Tanya Tagaq), African kora, the Japanese shō, and in the opening track to Sunday’s show, the Chinese pipa. Min Xiao-Fen turns in a killer solo on that piece “I See Who You Are.”
Once the genie’s out of the bottle, there’s no putting it back. I think that musicians are going to be sharing their traditions more and more. It’s almost impossible to keep any tradition “classical” in our time. There’s so much music around the world and it’s all bumping into each other. I happen to think that’s a great thing, even if we don’t know where it’s leading us.
Oh yeah, I also promised the video link for the Vegetable Orchestra from Vienna…
