Hamilton Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra with Miriam Khalil

 I attended a Hamilton Philharmonic concert Sat. April 9. Maestro Jamie Sommerville conducted a chamber ensemble of about 18 first desk players in a very satisfying and adventurous program featuring soprano Miriam Khalil. She seems to be headed for the "big career" possessing a beautiful (already) full lyric soprano voice, acting and interpretative ability, musicianship and physical presence. She sang Cleopatra in Handel's Giulio Cesare at Glyneboure and performed Mimi in Opera Hamilton's La Bohème (Musetta in Edmonton).
They opened with a lovely reading of Wagner's Siegfried Idyll which included some nice passages by Concertmaster Lance Elbeck.
Omar Daniel's Neruda Canciones followed. Dr. Omar is the director of the Composition, Electroacoustic Research and Performance Facility at the University of Western Ontario. He writes, as one would expect, "academic new music," and I liked the piece rather more than I had expected. Basing my opinion only on this piece, he is a fine composer, imaginative, working with facility and in great detail. The textures are varied and not unrelievedly contrapuntal. However, less sophisticated listeners, unfamiliar with the style, will always find this sort of music difficult.
Miriam Khalil brought the piece to life. I don't know how much new music she has performed but she certainly had no difficulty with this work. The vocal part is demanding covering spoken text, melodic passages and declamation (also tambourine playing!). She vocalized equally adeptly in all the registers of her voice and with evenness of colour. Dr. Daniel wrote long passages that demand dramatic singing and Khalil sang them with controlled intensity.
I had expected more of the same kind of music from Osvaldo Gollijov in the piece which followed the intermission, ZZ's Dream. I was pleasantly surprised. The work, based on a scene from on old Chinese epic, was reminiscent of French music of the early 20th. C. It was sensuous and sonorous, full of delicate colours evoking the "fairy tale" nature of its program.
They closed with an arrangement of Mahler's Rückert-Lieder. I'd forgotten how intimate are many of Mahler's songs. They lend themselves to this treatment as the piano often plays independent lines in counterpoint to the voice. Khalil acted the songs with her voice and expression, as one must do in interpreting art song. In the last song, Mitternacht, she sang out the final heroic stanzas, hinting at what her voice might become over time.

Electronics and Live Performance

     I attended another  concert in the Sundays at Three Lenten series at Central Presbyterian Sunday afternoon. The performers were flautist Sara Traficante and 'cellist Kirk Starkey. They began with Guillaume de Machaut (14th C., as you will remember your 1st year music history survey), included some Baroque and Romantic era pieces, Villa Lobos (this one from about 1950) and some New Music including one of Kirk's own compositions. The performances were very adept and the Hamilton audience rewarded the performers with a Standing O. That's not what this posting is about, however.

     Kirk played a movement from his piece "Four Quartets". It is for solo 'cello and live electronics. There's a contact mike on the 'cello and the sound is run through a computer which has been programmed to process the sound and then amplify it through a sound system. The sounds that you hear are either the sound of the live 'cello or those same sounds simultaneously modified by the technology. I am fascinated by all of this and really enjoyed the piece. 

     Innovative pieces like Kirk's aren't the only way that live performance and electronics are combined though. Here are some questions to think about. They certainly challenge me.

     Where, exactly, do we draw the line between legitimate artist endeavour and expediency? Indeed, is it necessary to draw such a line at all?

     I've long puzzled over the relationship between electronic media (in whatever form) and acoustic performers. What, for example, do you make of performances of Broadway shows to a prerecorded band? If you pay money to see such a thing (and were expecting live accompaniment), are you being cheated? The composer certainly intended that the people singing on stage would be accompanied by a live band. I don't even like to hear school choirs sing with prerecorded CDs (although the result can be hysterically entertaining when the choir can't hear the accompaniment.)

     For a time in the last century Musique concrète was in vogue. Composers recorded real sounds and then chopped up the tape and manipulated the sounds to make their pieces. The most famous example is Hugh LeCaine's Dripsody.  How is what they did then different from what anyone can do now using a keyboard to trigger digital samples and bussing them out to an array of effects?

     For a long time, legitimate composers prepared electronic tapes with which live musicians performed. Now this material is recorded to CDs and the performers "play along." How is this different from Music Minus One?

     

     Artistic intent, originality and competence are the obvious answers. Composers have always striven to incorporate current technology in their pieces and to achieve new musical effects. Sampling passages of somebody else's piece and incorporating them into yours is merely expediency and borders on plagiarism. If, however, the composer is trying to achieve sounds and effect hitherto unheard, let him go for it, and hope the public is engaged. 

New Music in Recital Programs

I attended, yesterday afternoon, a program in the Sundays at Three Series at Central Presbyterian Church in Hamilton. Flautist David Gerry was accompanied by the church's Music Director Paul Grimwood in a short but diverse program. This series has been ongoing during the Lenten Season for at least 25 years and offers audiences the opportunity to hear a variety of music, most of it for a Free Will Offering. (as an aside, the choir and orchestra are performing Howard Goodall's Eternal Light on Good Friday, April 22, at 8:00 P.M.)
They played a Quantz sonata and three Fauré Mélodies transcribed for flute. The other two pieces, Eve Beglarian's I will not be sad in this world and Sonny Chua's Menagerie, were both written within the last 11 years. I applaud Mr. Gerry for devoting half of his program to contemporary music. He is, and has been for years, one of this region's most prolific performers of New Music both as a soloist and collaborative musician.
One of the standard techniques in assembling a recital is to choose music representing various stylistic periods. One frequently attends recitals (Graduation Recitals being a perfect example) in which the most recent music was written sometime before the Second World War.  Surely performers ought to be making  an effort to program newer music than that and, as Mr. Gerry so skillfully demonstrated, it doesn't have to stretch the audience's listening skills to the point where they aren't engaged by the performance.
The Beglarian piece Mr. Gerry played on bass flute, accompanied by electronics (records of Ms. Beglarian herself singing and chanting). It's source material is an Armenian folksong. It is a quiet and atmospheric soundscape and provided an interesting contrast to the Fauré songs.
Sonny Chua's Menagerie, a suite of short pieces for flute and piano is, by any measure, conventional music: tonal and melodic. The pieces are charming, if a little similar one to the other, and utterly unlike the work which preceded them. It is, however, New Music, in the sense that it was recently composed.
I encourage performers to include new pieces in their recital programs, especially when these pieces stretch their abilities to include sounds and ideas that are outside their usual musical world. As for Graduation Recitals, it is as much the responsibility of the recitalist's teacher as that of the student her/himself to ensure that the student is learning and performing music which is composed by contemporary composers and important ones from the recent past.

Symphony Hamilton and the Live Music Conundrum

Sunday afternoon I heard Symphony Hamilton: Symphony on the Bay play an all Beethoven program under their conductor James McKay, recently retired Head of Performance at my Alma Mater, the University of Western Ontario. The orchestra played the Leonora Overture #3 and the 3rd Symphony, and Leslie Kinton joined them for the 5th Piano Concerto  Mr. Kinton played with accuracy and enthusiasm.
Whatever the calibre of the orchestra's performance, the auditorium of the Royal Botanical Gardens has rather poor acoustics and I was stunned recently that the Bach-Elgar Choir is performing there as well.

This orchestra has ended up there ("there" being Burlington, Aldershot actually) because:
 -it has been unable to find an affordable and appropriate venue in Hamilton
 -the new Burlington Arts Centre is to open in the fall of 2011 and they hope to perform there

The orchestra had previously played in churches in Hamilton and, for a while, in the Studio Theatre of Hamilton Place. Hamilton Place is so expensive to rent that even Opera Hamilton has abandoned it and will perform next season in the 1200 seat Theatre Aquarius.

In any event, the orchestra is in dire financial straits, and declared as much in a message from their Acting President in the program. They point out that only about 30% of their costs are achieved through ticket sales (the RBG auditorium was packed, and has been for every concert I've ever attended there.)
They need government or corporate support or donations from their patrons who are already paying $28 to hear a mostly amateur orchestra.

The Bach-Elgar Choir underwent a similar crisis some years ago and has never completely recovered.
What is to be done?

I must confess that I have not a clue. For years even professional musicians have subsidized the arts organizations for whom they perform by accepting scandalously low payment for high quality work. I remember being asked (and agreeing through my union) to be paid about $15 per show for radio broadcasts of performances which were played on the CBC and, ultimately, on public radio stations around the world all as a means of promoting the arts organization for whom I was working.

The place of live performance (and recordings) in the world has changed, and is changing. It's a sad commentary that the public, who by and large don't attend live performances, may end up with nothing of value to listen to.

Other Solo Songs with Piano

• A Daughter of Eve: 2004: Soprano (Mezzo) and Piano: Christina Rossetti: 10 min.
• Three Swinburne Songs: 1998: Soprano and Piano: C.A. Swinburne: 8 min.
• Five Ceremonies for Christmas: 1995-1997: Soprano (Tenor) and Piano, Robert Herrick, 10 min. 30 sec.
• Three Nocturnes: Soprano and Piano: 1994: Shelley, Drayton, Tennyson: 6 min.

I should say, to begin, that all of the songs in this posting were premiered by my wife and muse, Elise Bédard, whose counsel and support in all things have been invaluable to me. 


A Daughter of Eve follows the Swinburne songs and is, in part a reaction to them. The Three Swinburne Songs are big, romantic and dramatic in response to Swinburne's virtuosic poetry. He was an iconoclast of the first order, shocking the Victorian world with the subject matter of some of his poems. Three Swinburne Songs require of the singer sustained dramatic singing and theatrical lyricism.  
A Daughter of Eve, on the other hand, is written on an intimate scale although it ends with the ecstatic Birthday. Christina Rossetti's poetry is heartbreaking but strangely reserved, hardly surprising when one remembers her story. She was the sister of poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. She fell in love, was jilted, then lived out the rest of her as a kind of nun. The five songs of A Daughter of Eve would be perfect recital material for an accomplished young soprano or mezzo.

It is difficult to find repertoire to sing as a soloist in the Holiday Season, especially with piano. Five Ceremonies for Christmas were written to fill this need. Two of the Five Ceremonies for Christmas are religious. The other three are Herrick's remarkable poetic descriptions of ancient English Christmas traditions (the yule log, the pea and the bean, taking down decorations etc.) The songs are sometimes humorous and sometimes pious. I wrote Oh, Little Child as a stand alone song and it was so well received that I found the texts for four other songs to make a set. 

When I first resolved to begin composing "in a serious way" there was no doubt in my mind that Art Song would be my initial medium. I had numerous false starts that found their way into the trash. I finally got a handle on what I was doing and The Three Nocturnes are the result. I chose these three out of several that I was working on to make a set for Elise to sing at McMaster. She asked me to chose the best ones, and these were them. The rest I discarded.  I think, even now, that they are lovely little songs. Of Sweet and Low I am still particularly fond and it will make its way into a suite which I am arranging for orchestra.

All these songs are available, most in high and medium keys. Please contact me at at this address.

Recent Solo Songs with Piano

• Six Zen Lyrics: 2009: Soprano (Mezzo) and Piano: texts adapted by the composer: 8 min. 30 sec.
• Invictus:  Five Henley Songs: 2006-2008: Voice and Piano: texts by William Ernest Henley: 13 min. 30 sec.
• Five Snow Songs: 2007: Voice and Piano: texts by Archibald Lampman: 14 min.

Six Zen Lyrics will be premiered in March by soprano Lucy Bledig (for whom they were written) with Erika Reiman, piano. I adapted the texts from translations of Chinese and Japanese Zen poets. The original form of these poems was lost in the translation, translators begin more concerned with rendering the sense of the poems. I worked with them, substituting words and turning them about, until I had words that I could set to music. They're short, the shortest about 75 secs. I have already transposed them for mezzo soprano. There's no reason a man couldn't sing them, though. 

Henley was a modern poet writing in Victorian times when most English poetry still sounded thoroughly Jacobean. Invictus is rightly famous and the other poems set here stand up to it. As always, I strove through varied musical styles to portray the moods of the poems.  Madame Life has echos of the music hall. The Wind and the Rain and Between the Dusk comment in different ways upon the human condition with very different musical means. I am the Reaper is a towering declaration of Divine power. Somebody with a dramatic bent could bring down the house with these songs. 

Five Snow Songs have been recorded by a baritone, Reid Spencer, were written for and premiered by a tenor, David Holler and have been performed by a mezzo, Petra Pacaric. Again, I have endeavored to portray the five different moods and evocations of the Canadian woodland winter that Lampman loved. They range from introspection to joyous declaration, engaging singer, pianist and public.

Al of these songs are available in high and medium keys. Please contact me at at this address.

Music for Treble Voices (Children's Choir)

Keep Positive: 2006: Children's Choir, mostly unison (two parts never sing at the same time): 2 Min.
And There Were in the Same Country: 2005: Treble voices, unison, then a 3 pt. canon: 3min. 30 sec.

Keep Positive is on a text I adapted from a famous Gandhi quote. We performed it a couple of dozen times with my school choir. It's inspirational and a crowd pleaser. I conducted it at a massed choir at a Martin Luther King Day show at Hamilton Place 3 years ago.

Performing Keep Positive at Hamilton Place

And There Were in the Same Country is Luke 2, 8-14 in the Revised Standard Edition. It is introduced by a metrically ambiguous piano figuration which continues once the voices enter and, eventually, supports the melody. The vocal line is a kind of unison accompanied recitative. When you first look at it, it's hard to imagine that younger choristers (8 or 9 year olds) could possibly learn it but I've taught it to my choir 3 times and they do learn it and, once they have it, they love singing it. At "Glory to God in the Highest" it breaks up into a 3 part canon and ends with the choristers chanting the text in close harmony. This piece could be also be effectively performed by a Women's Choir.