{"id":29029,"date":"2016-04-24T21:24:40","date_gmt":"2016-04-25T05:24:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/?p=29029"},"modified":"2018-09-10T22:14:21","modified_gmt":"2018-09-11T06:14:21","slug":"standing-waves-acousmatic-a-synaesthesiacs-feast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/standing-waves-acousmatic-a-synaesthesiacs-feast\/","title":{"rendered":"Standing Wave\u2019s \u201cAcousmatic\u201d – a Syn\u00e6sthesiac\u2019s Feast"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Synaesthesiac\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Adventurous. Uncompromising. Inimitable. Sought-after. How great to hear so many superlatives in Vancouver\u2014that are justified<\/em>. As violinist Rebecca Whitling welcomed us to their \u201cAcousmatic\u201d concert at the Orpheum Annex last Sunday, she seemed to tear up at the prospect of finding even more superlatives with which to thank her fellow musicians. Standing\u00a0Wave has been around for a long time\u2014long enough to have either earned those superlatives legitimately or to have them dashed on the rocks of hyperbole\u2014but tonight they were well warranted.<\/p>\n

Evanescence<\/h2>\n

The first work, Gordon Fitzell\u2019s Evanescence<\/em>, was presented as but an amuse-bouche<\/em> for the ears (amuse-oreille?). This was perfect as my ears needed time to adjust. I\u2019ve been to enough electro-acoustic concerts to know that the batting average for electro-acoustic music isn\u2019t that good\u2014either it fizzles out due to technical glitches or the two media never quite reconcile leading to a cage match. But thanks to some excellent planning and artistic leadership from Giorgio Magnanensi and others, Evanescence <\/em>proved how satisfying electro-acoustic can be. Surrounded by waves of intriguing sound and my ears sufficiently amused, I was ready for more.<\/p>\n

Red Arc \/ Blue Veil<\/h2>\n

Although I missed the promised palindrome in John Luther Adams\u2019s Red Arc \/ Blue Veil<\/em>, I revelled in all the visuals implied by the work\u2019s title. For the record, syn\u00e6sthesia had once been my friend until the day I discovered that I was alone in the assumption that each of the four Brahms symphonies had its inherent colour (Number 1 is blue, 2 is yellow, 3 is a dusty pink, and 4 is avocado-green). So it was gratifying for Adams to permit me to let my ears once again see colour.<\/p>\n

John Luther Adams is to music what Edward Burtynsky is to photography. To convey the enormity of the landscapes of his native Alaska and his concerns over the deterioration of our natural world, Adams is now writing music intended for performance out-of-doors. To get a sense of the titanic forces Adams wrestles with, listen to his riveting talk, \u201cMusic in the Anthropocene<\/a>\u201d (given last year at the Banff Centre), in which he described the role of the artist in a world of Climate Change. Against such a canvas, Red Arc \/ Blue Veil <\/em>was a comparatively small and intimate meditation on \u201cthose inner sounds that are the life of the colours\u201d to quote Kandinsky.<\/p>\n

Subject \/ Object<\/h2>\n

Foreshadowing the physical comedy that was to come in his music, James O\u2019Callaghan slunk onto the stage nervously for his talk about Subject \/ Object<\/em>. Percussionist Vern Griffiths was quick (and classy) to put O\u2019Callaghan at ease allowing us to get in touch with his kinesthetic approach to sound. Not at all a grammar lesson as its title implied, O\u2019Callaghan\u2019s Subject \/ Object <\/em>was an attempt to \u201crationalize the irrational\u201d by turning objects into subjects. It\u2019s as if Standing Wave\u2019s Pierrot-plus instrumentation wasn\u2019t quite enough for O\u2019Callaghan, so he poked and prodded about the stage looking looking for more stuff to play with\u2014usually to great comic effect.<\/p>\n

While the players diligently performed their parts, an array of surreal theatrics ensued. Balloons popped inside the piano, a kitchen chair was dragged dramatically across the stage and then subjected to other indignities from the percussionist\u2019s toolkit, and we all squirmed as a bucket of \u201cwater\u201d was tipped into the open piano (although electronics came to the rescue just in time with appropriately watery sounds). Nothing overlooked, even the click of flutist Christie Reside\u2019s high-heeled shoes was employed as musical counterpoint (I\u2019m not sure if a composer who\u2019s comfortable referencing Ren & Stimpy <\/em>would be aware of this, but Reside\u2019s transit across the stage was a perfect homage to Michael Snow\u2019s Walking Women<\/a><\/em>). Bravo to that.<\/p>\n

O Superman<\/h2>\n

The featured work of the evening was an electro-acoustic adaption of Laurie Anderson\u2019s 1981 art rock hit O Superman <\/em>set for Standing Wave by Vancouver composer Alfredo\u00a0Santa\u00a0Ana.<\/p>\n

I suspected that some form of calculated risk was involved in casting Veda Hille to sing this role (and I don\u2019t mean a box office calculated risk, although that may have accounted for fifty percent of the audience), but why substitute Anderson\u2019s deadly accurate chops for Hille\u2019s folksy peeping except to avoid, as Santa Ana put it, casting \u201cone of those Art Song singers”?<\/p>\n

While her vocal range may comprise the full octave the song demands, vocal quality and diction were moot as she leaned heavily on the FX processor, intended in the original as an expressive device. Veda Hille, O Veda Hille. It\u2019s like walking into the room in time for the laughter but too late for the punch line. \u00a0Still, Santa Ana artfully exchanged phrases from violin to flute to bass clarinet and onward giving the art rock original an air of chamber music without sacrificing the sensibility of the source material.<\/p>\n

Finale<\/h2>\n

Even if Standing Wave had\u00a0lower standards or\u00a0were perhaps more weird, they\u00a0would still retain their\u00a0hold as Vancouver\u2019s premier new music ensemble with their\u00a0ability to seamlessly integrate solid musicianship with glitchless electronics.<\/p>\n

In addition to all the gear and high production values, their kitchen-party warmth\u2014whether the informal\u00a0extemporizing of Vern Griffiths or pianist Allen Stiles\u2019s comic timing\u2014helped ensure that they could programme pretty much whatever they please and still come across as refreshingly accessible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Adventurous. Uncompromising. Inimitable. Sought-after. How great to hear so many superlatives in Vancouver\u2014that are justified. As violinist Rebecca Whitling welcomed us to their \u201cAcousmatic\u201d concert at the Orpheum Annex last Sunday, she seemed to tear up at the prospect of finding even more superlatives with which to thank her fellow musicians. Standing\u00a0Wave has been around […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[47,48,49,50],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29029"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29029"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29029\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29449,"href":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29029\/revisions\/29449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}