Gig: Emergents Series IV

Emergents Series IV (feat. Katelyn Clark & Patrick Dupuis / GREX)

The Music Gallery. Thursday, May 12, 2011.

Goodness knows how hard it is for any sort of musician to garner some attention in the sea of chatter that we're all generating and consuming. I can only imagine that must go double for musicians working well outside of the broader pop-rock continuum. And for those working in the classical/"new music" spectrum, there's a whole infrastructure for the better-known names but not so much for the younger players. This is the gap that the Music Gallery's "Emergents" series is trying to address.

For me, this sort of thing amounts to a very affordable let's-take-a-chance sort of night, where I can immerse myself in realms that I'm arguably rather out of my depth on. That's a fine idea by me, but this is a bit of a hard sell to the public at large. I wasn't surprised to see a small-ish crowd out for this — and without a fancy lighting setup in the sanctuary, the whole show had a pleasingly casual feel to it.

First up was the rather unusual pairing of Katelyn Clark's harpsichord with Patrick Dupuis' five-string electric bass, fusing not only different musical eras, but rather different temperaments as well. Old and new rubbed elbows throughout the set, which led off with the pair's new adaptation of François Couperin's "La reine des coeurs" — a piece written in 1730. Dupuis was more tugboat than ball-hog here, playing with a sense of spaciousness and relying on sustaining near-drones to underpin Clark's melodic work. This was a surprisingly enjoyable admixture — if they exercised some further audacity, this could veer into an "environmental", near-ambient vibe if it were slowed down a little more and re-centred on that drone-y bass element.

As if confirming my musings, the next selection (Christian Wolff's 1970 composition "Snowdrop"¹) had a minimal, spacious sensibility to it. It's hard — at least for me anyways — to hear the harpsicord's particular tone colour and not just think in terms of baroque music, so it's intriguing to hear it being played with that vibe completely absent, and instead adjust to the slightly twinkly tones making nudging little advances against the bass. Kinda fascinating.

GREX would be a great sort of heavy metal name — they should so totally produce some long-sleeved black shirts with their name in a heavy Old Germanic font.² Unsurprisingly, it's a good old churchy Latin word for a herd or flock, perhaps an apt handle for the eight performers assembling on stage.

Flocks have shepherds, and here the crew was guided by Alex Samaras, who I recognized from some of his incursions in the local pop scene. But this was a different thing altogether. In most music I know, noting someone is a "good singer" is a more subjective sort of thing, but Samaras is obviously pretty advanced in a whole technical regimen that I don't know much about. Similarly, I'd be out of my depth in having much to say about the set's music, but first selection "Braid 2" (by American composer Meredith Monk) brought to mind nothing so much as Tallis-esque motet singing.

"Hocket", which followed, was also by Monk, but it had a very different flavour. Almost like an analog version of Simon, Samaras and a partner passed a melodic phrase back and forth, with the string of wordless syllables being stretched out.³

I note that just there, I fell into a trap that I was trying to avoid. We're so conditioned to thinking of music as a technological artifact that something this elemental seems striking. Whenever I see a performance like this, my first instinct is to envision it as a manual version of a technical feat — like a loop pedal, but done by people! — rather than the obverse.

But there's just so many ways you could use the voice — so much potential, like the bell-tones of R. Murray Schafer's "Gamelan", or the kinda goofy "Geographical Fugue", which mostly made me think about Krusty opining on the comedic value of funny place names.

Those seemed like pleasant exercises next to the purely beautiful "Memento" (by Arvo Pärt) and a couple sublime Georgian folk songs to close things out. Just a really lovely set overall, and a totally engaging night.⁴

---

¹ Wolff's name might ring a bell for some as one of the composeres that Sonic Youth tackled on their Goodbye 20th Century album.

² I won't lie to you — I spent a few Panic Manual-ish minutes in MS Paint, working on a prototype of that t-shirt.

³ You can see a different performance of it here, where it also looks like the performers were at some risk of cracking each other up.

⁴ On that note, I should mention that the second instalment in this season's Emergents Series, featuring Ina Henning (Accordion) and Marc-Olivier Lamontagne (guitar) is tomorrow night (Friday, March 7, 2012) and is, once again, a mere five bucks for Music Gallery members. Go! Experiment! Try something new — it just might be beautiful.