In the run-up to Halloween, Vancouver’s avant garde Arkora and Redshift Music ensembles have shivered our timbers yet again with round two of their seasonal benchmark “Transfigured Light” soirées.
What made the recital so haunting was not just its graveyard venue: Mountain View Cemetery’s brutalist, acoustically perfect Celebration Hall. Even more spine tingling was the concert’s menu of 10 pieces – seven of them world premieres – all very different in tone, text and inspiration, but sharing in common a penchant for “microtonalities.”
These are interstitial semi-tones between the customary notes of the “well-tempered” scale, for a total of 31 tones to the octave rather than the conventional 12. To the untutored ear the result can seem a bit chilling – downright Halloweenish, in fact. But once you acclimate, the expanded range brings out unsuspected nuances in the music.
Still, microtones take some getting used to, not just for audiences but also for the ensemble’s 16 top-flight musicians, recruited from all across North America. No mean feat for Arkora co-founder and conductor Kathleen Allan to meld the group into a cohesive whole with just a couple of days of full-ensemble rehearsals and such a challenging repertoire in the unfamiliar microtonal idiom.
For vocalists, drummers, cellists and violinists, at least, the challenges are more conceptual than technical; they can elide tones at will once they shed the strictures of classical training. But the 12-tone scale is built right into the structure of a fretted guitar, say, or a piano keyboard. And, when it comes to idiophones, Arkora/Redshift co-director Benton Roark, Allan’s creative and conjugal partner, had to invent a whole new instrument, the “lumiphone,” to accommodate the extra tones.
It’s more than twice the size of a normal vibe set – about as big as a putting green – and entirely made of glass. Jonathan Allen, who spent most of the evening frisking up and down the macro-marimba, reports “it’s virtually invisible when you’re standing over it. I play it mostly by muscle memory.”
No instruments embellished the concert’s opening piece. To break us in easy to the 31-tone octave, the eight Arkora vocalists led with an a capella rendering of a four-part organum from the 13th century, back when semitones still flourished in Western music. The piece, by Pérotin “The Great,” is built around a drawn out plainsong “drone” in the bass register, which the upper three registers elaborately ornamented with microtonal melismas.
Still in relatively subdued mode, programme segues into a homophonic rendering of a medieval courtly love poem, l’Amour de Moy (“within a tender garden”). The three female voices braid the voluptuous (but chastely allegorical) lyric so languidly that you’d think we were still in the world of ornamented medieval plainsong.
But in fact this is a brand new, world-premiere piece by McGill professor Jonathan Wild. Its cutting-edge contemporaneity clicks into focus when Allen and fellow-percussionist Daniel Morphy chime in with a scintillating, understated lumiphone accompaniment.
Alongside his original music, Wild nurtures a research interest in pre-modern antecedents of microtonality, with a special concentration on the 16th century composer/theoretician Nicola Vicentino. We’re next treated to a snippet of a four-part Vicentino madrigal – as challenging to audiences in his own time, according to contemporary accounts, as much of microtonal music can be to uninitiates today.
Which brings us to the more overtly challenging mid-section of the concert, starting with the world premiere of Tova Kardonne’s Temper, Temper. The title’s a play on words. It alludes to Kardonne’s conscious disruption of the artificially even temper of the canonical 12-tone scale. But it also admonishes an out-of-the blue temper tantrum; the suppressed rage unleashed against us when we’ve “borne the brunt of angers not of [our own] making” – an experience all-too-familiar to us lib-tards nowadays.
To a driving ensemble score comprising “violin, cello, electric guitar with pitch-shifter and ebow, snare with brushes, sticks, thundersticks and cloths, and… lumiphone,” Kardonne sets her own original choral libretto. It’s a heavily metered text, all trochees and dactyls, addressed as a direct riposte to a presumptive accuser.
Roark, too, builds around his own original lyric in A Thousand Faceless Moons, the first of two works he world-premieres this evening. It’s a “passacaglia of sorts,” he writes, with the tenor voices carrying a measured through-line, offset by more urgent highlight bursts from the guitar, violin, cello, piano and lumiphone.
Lumiphone deployed. Image: Redshift
Sopranos, altos and basses join in for choral “subheads” of the libretto. Even after the chorus runs out of text, the instrumentalists carry on for eight more measures of tentative, diminuendo “ellipsis.”
Roark’s poem is idiosyncratically ruminative, vaguely reminiscent of the proto-surrealist tropes of 19th century symbolist Arthur Rimbaud. To underscore the kinship, the first half of the recital ends with a pair of Rimbaud’s own texts, After the Flood and Départ, scored by UCLA jazz-master Noah Meites. The pieces combine intricate choral polyphony with relatively spare – but jaggedly, defiantly microtonal – instrumentation for percussion, vibes, lumiphone and strings.
Then comes the only modern (i.e. 1996) item on the programme that is neither explicitly micro-tonal nor expressly composed for “Transfigured Light” – Proverb, by minimalist music pioneer Steve Reich. Without overtly embracing the 31-tone octave, the piece consciously hearkens back to the medieval master Pérotin whose a capella organum opened tonight’s “Transfigured Light” recital.
Reich, too, adopts an organum format – a stately melodic line with a filigree of melismas – except here the tonal values are reversed from Pérotin, with sopranos (reinforced by keyboard organs) stating the bedrock chant and tenors supplying the ornamentation. Vibraphones chime in early on to further drive the pelting rhythm – 5/8 time, to begin with, shifting between two- and three-beat metrical feet.
It’s a long piece – 651 measures, 14+ minutes – with a palindromic architecture. Its descending melodic line inverts about midway to then rise from B minor to E-flat minor before subsiding in a soprano canon back to B minor and, at last, a soprano solo coda. All this built around a much reiterated 10-word epigram (or “Proverb”), a kind of minimalist cri de coeur, by the 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: “How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life.”
Hard act to follow, but China-born New York-based composer/vocalist Fay Wang rises to the occasion with her original, genre-bending, microtonal composition Hypnotist. She unfolds her themes in four-part choral homophony with rich orchestration; trembly strings, driving percussion and jazzy guitar riffs by her husband, Brendon Randall-Myers. But it’s Wang’s own breathy, bluesy torch-singing vocalisation that propels the piece, despite the enigmatic opacity of her self-written text.
Still, it’s a relief to conclude the concert with the stolid faith of an anonymous 18th century hymn, Where Endless Ages Roll a clear-eyed intimation of mortality in forthright ¾ time and blunt, three-line rhyming stanzas of iambs and spondees. Stepping back from microtonality, Roark turns this text into a rollicking canon that goes on for 400 measures.
It’s like passing from Halloween into All Saints’ Day; a resoundingly affirmative riposte to Roark’s tentative ellipsis at the end of A Thousand Faceless Moons in the first half of the programme. Together, Roark promises, the two pieces will form part of a longer cycle – maybe something to look forward to in the next iteration of “Transfigured Light?”