Recording: Jean-Pierre Drouet

Artist: Jean-Pierre Drouet

Song: Toucher [composer: Vinko Globokar]

Recorded at Elizabeth Beeton Auditorium, Toronto Reference Library ("New Music 101"), March 3, 2014.

Jean-Pierre Drouet - Toucher

Once again, many of the city's New Music organizations are banding together for some outreach and edutainment under the banner of "New Music 101", a free series Monday nights at the Reference Library. Each instalment sees two groups take some time to give some insight into how they're making music, usually accompanied by a stripped-down performance. There's one more left on March 17th, as well as a bonus remounting of this week's interactive presentation from Soundstreams and Spectrum (on May 28th at Fort York Library Branch).

The first night in this year's series saw junctQín keyboard collective talking about taking their music beyond the piano as well as New Music Concerts presenting avant-garde percussionist and composer Jean-Pierre Drouet. A practitioner of "instrumental theatre" (mixing music with a theatrical flair that featured hints of slight-of-hand trickery) Drouet also showed how fingers playing percussion could evoke the sounds of the human voice in this piece adapted from Brecht's Life of Galileo, with different instrumental sounds slowly taking over for various phonemes.