{"id":29838,"date":"2019-04-01T11:03:54","date_gmt":"2019-04-01T19:03:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/?p=29838"},"modified":"2019-04-02T07:17:08","modified_gmt":"2019-04-02T15:17:08","slug":"tarogato","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/tarogato\/","title":{"rendered":"Finding a New Voice for the T\u00e1rogat\u00f3"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

Voice of the performer<\/h3>\n

My own journey as a musician has been through many migrations itself, and at times has all but gone extinct. Following my formal music education (University of Toronto, Banff Centre for the Arts, etc.), and a two-year stint with the Prince George Symphony, I became a regular extra freelancing with the Vancouver Symphony. After my near misses auditioning for the elusive orchestra job, I found that I\u2019d basically sculpted myself into the sort of a player who might win an orchestral audition, but little else. In other words, I was left feeling more like a service provider than a performing artist. A long silence followed.<\/p>\n

Voice of the t\u00e1rogat\u00f3<\/h3>\n

Then, following a fateful encounter with a certain t\u00e1rogat\u00f3, the flame was relit. When a Hungarian cellist-friend in Kelowna called to ask if I\u2019d \u201clearn his t\u00e1rogat\u00f3\u201d to as to play it at the Okanagan Hungarian Centre, I didn\u2019t expect to fall in love with the instrument so fast. I soon found a maker in Budapest to build me an instrument I could call my own.<\/p>\n

In 2017 when I produced the concert Refuge<\/em>, I sought to tell the story of the contribution made to Vancouver by the arrival of 200 Hungarian university student and faculty refugees following the failed 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Their contributions notably impacted BC forests practices and their presence is still felt today both at UBC and throughout the province. The concert drew large numbers from the Hungarian community as well as the general public interested in learning about this unusual BC refugee community.<\/p>\n

“On behalf of the University of British Columbia, I am writing with warm congratulations on the completion and upcoming performance of Refuge. This legacy is something that UBC is very proud of and one that we cherish and celebrate.\u201d
\n\u2014 Santa J Ono, President and Vice-Chancellor, UBC<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Voice of the woodland caribou<\/h3>\n

There\u2019s a larger community in British Columbia that I believe the t\u00e1rogat\u00f3 can touch. A while back, I ran into composer Glenn Sutherland at a Vancouver Symphony concert and after various pleasantries, he described his work as a field biologist tasked with finding out why British Columbia\u2019s woodland caribou were making their way onto the endangered species list. It\u2019s so easy to feel helpless when confronted with such environmental catastrophes, but even so, I wondered what I (what we) could do to help let people know of this unfolding disaster.<\/p>\n

Then I remembered a comment of Jeffrey Ryan\u2019s at a rehearsal for the t\u00e1rogat\u00f3 piece he\u2019d written a couple of years before: \u201cThere\u2019s something wild about the t\u00e1rogat\u00f3\u2026\u201d and I thought perhaps there was something we could do. As the idea of a composition developed, it became less a didactic message about the caribou, and more about giving a voice to the animal itself\u2014as much as possible to tell the story from the perspective of the caribou. Thus was born the longer-range project, Caribou Crossing<\/em>. But before that, I have decided that I need to develop and extend my own techniques on the t\u00e1rogat\u00f3 itself, thus the short-range development project\u2014Finding a New Voice for the T\u00e1rogat\u00f3.<\/em><\/p>\n

Finding that voice<\/h3>\n

The t\u00e1rogat\u00f3’s capabilities have been only lightly documented. When I went searching for a fingering chart, for example, I invariably found something appropriate to a novice player (one fingering per note).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

My work on the t\u00e1rogato showed much richer possibilities with\u00a0 multiple fingerings that could be used both for colouristic effects and to facilitate difficult passages. Here’s an example from the t\u00e1rogat\u00f3 I developed while learning Jeffrey Ryan’s challenging\u00a0Arbutus\u00a0<\/em>for t\u00e1rogat\u00f3 and piano.
\n\"\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Voice of the performer My own journey as a musician has been through many migrations itself, and at times has all but gone extinct. Following my formal music education (University of Toronto, Banff Centre for the Arts, etc.), and a two-year stint with the Prince George Symphony, I became a regular extra freelancing with the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[59,41],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29838"}],"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=29838"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29838\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29850,"href":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29838\/revisions\/29850"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}