SweetWater Music Festival 

SweetWater Music Festival has been a significant champion of Canadian composers and their compositions over the seven years since the event’s inception: Andrew Ager, Walter Buczynski, Michael Colgrass, Phil Dwyer, Srul Irving Glick, Richard Mascall, John Rea, Bramwell Tovey and Luna Pearl Woolf. Some of the individuals just mentioned were recipients of SweetWater commissions and others were represented by previously composed work.

 

This year Canadian works already in the repertoire figure largely and their composers are, like most of the individuals mentioned in the first paragraph above, established practitioners of their trade: Marcus Goddard, Allan Gilliland and Elizabeth Raum.

 

I find Allan Gilliland in the lobby of the Ramada Select on Jarvis Street on a sunny day at the end of June. He has just attended a meeting in Toronto of the Canadian Music Association; and he sits serenely and somewhat avuncularly, ready nonetheless to greet me with a genial smile when recognition is secured. A fine professional trumpet player for ten years, he has largely laid the instrument aside (except for a weekly big band session, to keep his hand in) in favour of composing, for which he has received his share of recognition, honors and awards. One such award – the Violet Archer Graduate Award in Composition – interested me particularly because, as a child, I once played a simple piece, also composed by Archer. As well, Allan is a much sought after arranger and composer for everything from pops concerts to film scores – a residency with the Edmonton Symphony being a particularly creative period in terms of standard classical output. Closer to home, he has graced residencies at the Festival of the Sound in Parry Sound and the Colors of Music Festival in Barrie.

 

He laughs when I ask the inevitable question about all the experimentation that occurred in the musical world during the twentieth century – what he calls “necessary exploration,” which is what has given composers of our day “a pallet of possibilities on which to draw.” Although it was fashionable back then to “push everything to the edge,” we now can favor melody, harmony and rhythm again unashamedly.” He would still bristle if someone referred to him as “the jazz guy who writes concert music,” but he confesses to not really caring anymore “what people call me.”

 

We began at last year’s SweetWater to explore the world of jazz related music. Gilliland, like Phil Dwyer last year, is fascinated by the possibility that there may be music capable of being composed that “reconciles both worlds” and includes in addition to a strong harmonic presence and vigorous rhythms, a penchant for “improvisation.” In fact, his series entitled Dreaming of the Masters was written specifically with great improvisers in mind – James Campbell for example -- to whom one of the compositions in this “Dreaming” has been dedicated. Gilliland claims that late romantic harmony (that of Debussy being one instance) has hugely influenced concert music of our time as well.

 

Gilliland’s contribution to SweetWater this year is a piece called Suite from the Sound, which he is at some pains to point out has very little to do with landscape, although the title might tease the unwary into assuming so. Indeed the Suite was composed well before the composer visited Parry Sound! It has everything to do with good, and in fact fairly traditional, compositional practice.

 

The first movement is called, puckishly enough, “Parry’s Ground” and constitutes a harking back as far as the seventeenth century when what we would call classical musicians played by deciphering numbers scratched under the score, this notation being called “ground [or figured] bass” – from which they drew enough information to create chords and embellishments not unlike the improvisation of a modern jazz performer. The second movement is a waltz entitled “Waltz for Mr. Evans” after the legendary Gil Evans, an associate of Miles Davis. It contains all the hallmark finesse of the latter, by the way! “Flying Fingers,” the last movement, has a real Spanish flavor; and is best performed by a “true jazz string quartet …capable of bringing the improvisation sections to heights” even the composer might not have imagined. As an aside, although there would be many who would disagree, there is a comparison to be made between improvisation and the more traditional “cadenza’ familiar to classical concert-goers.

 

Allan sums up his musical goal as “writing what I want to hear without thinking very much about whether it is borrowed, old, new, or whatever.” He further qualifies by adding, “I want to create a piece that I enjoyed writing, that the players enjoyed playing and I want to engage everyone, including the audience, who takes part in this process.” As a final judgment of sorts he points out that even Strauss got experimentation out of his system with works like Salome and Elektra and then fled to the more hospitable music he composed for Der Rosenkavalier. Good classical composers like Beethoven knew you had to connect with your audience, which is something that the “burp and fart” music of the twentieth century ignored to its peril. It would be like Margaret Atwood’s writing a novel totally in Sanskrit – to impress – forgetting that most readers might not be able to follow her.

 

            Elizabeth Raum and I hop in my car and head for the neighboring Tin Rooster on Broadview, one of the hundreds of specialty coffee houses that are springing up all over Toronto. It is two days after my rendezvous with Allan Gilliland and the sun and good weather persist. Elizabeth is here to help look after her daughter Erica’s new babies – triplets in fact! – and this lively grandmother with the lovely residual Bostonian accent, along with her husband, has just recently relocated in Toronto, having spent many years in Regina.

 

Loosely taking Darius Milhaud’s Le Boeuf sur le toit as her inspiration, Elizabeth responded to a call for submission of new work and was one of five individuals chosen to supply new repertoire for the St. Lawrence String Quartet with her composition entitled Table at the Bushwakker. The Bushwakker, incidentally, is, like Le Boeuf sur le toit, a real pub.

 

It is interesting that Raum refers to Milhaud, who is emerging as one of the major influences of modern music. James Campbell, a guest artistic director this year at SweetWater, refers to Milhaud as being hugely influencial; and, in fact, SweetWater patrons will get a chance to hear Milhaud’s Creation du Monde as part of the weekend’s program. As Alex Ross has observed, that composer “became a link in a long chain, connecting centuries of tradition with new popular forms.” It is not at all surprising, then, that a whole generation of composers, Elizabeth Raum included, have taken Milhaud’s achievement as a jumping off point.

 

Milhaud himself, after returning from a life-changing sojourn in Rio refers in his autobiography (My Happy Life) to the “rhythms of popular music… with their syncopation, a careless catch in the breath and “a slight hiatus” the composer found “difficult to grasp.” The Harlem of New York City that Milhaud later visited also convinced the composer that the music he was hearing for the first time was “absolutely different from anything I had ever heard before.” Although beyond the purview of this article, readers will find a reading of this wonderful book a treasure-trove of dogs named “Satie,” monkeys that “dance” and lions that have to be replaced in performance at the last minute by birds! In other words, the birth of mainstream jazz!

 

In any case, what Table at the Bushwakker comes down to is a theme and variations of sorts that begins with a tone row (the composer claims she cheated in the use of!), based on a “program” (she writes well for the theatre, with three operas and music for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet under her belt, because, as she says, she has to be able to visualize something before she can write about it). Each “table” at the pub contains a different group of characters: professors from the university, students, women on a girls night out and so forth. Each “table” takes on a certain cast; for example, the student table is written in the form of a fugato because “students think they are so profound.” When listening to the music for the professors’ table, you can hear a tweeting sound – a sly reference on the part of the composer to that fact that one of the professor’s names is Robin. And so on.

 

Like the other composers described in this article, she tends to favor romanticism, which for her means melody and tradition, rather than modernism which, according to Raum, often involves doing things “just to be different.” She herself has been known to play the oboe for a soundscape that included machine-gun fire in the background; but there was a very good reason for doing that. In that instance, such a potentially disagreeable musical creation is used to achieve a certain effect. But for the most part, music, for Raum, comes from “within” her, and in order for it to be retained, has to be “meaningful” for the composer. If you’re doing something like that “just because you can’t write a melody,” she is strongly opposed to the practice. It would be her hope that, when people listen to her music, they are aware of her conviction; and, almost in the same breath, alludes to the profound effect – in this regard – her playing of Mendelssohn and Bach (the Musical Offering for example) have on her daily personal life and sense of well-being.

 

In a very literate essay, she has written, “Since I have become a composer, I’ve felt a degree of pressure to write music which is not tuneful. If you write tunes, you aren’t a serious classical composer and of course I wanted to be taken seriously as a composer so I struggled to be untuneful. But I couldn’t help myself. I just kept slipping back to melodies.” She tells the story of working at ScotiaFest with Pierre Boulez and not ultimately liking all the modern “isms” she was being exposed to (as she had hoped she might) – dramatized by the playing of a Beethoven string quartet in the midst of what turned out to be for her a barren environment of musical experimentation. In her concluding remarks near the end of the essay, she notes: “people weren’t getting their cravings satisified by intellectual contemporary composers. They want to hear music like Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, but they [also] want something new.”

 

            Marcus Goddard, the third composer being considered here, echoes these sentiments in a telephone conversation I had with him within a few days of talking to the other two. “Rehearsing every week and working with the Vancouver Symphony,” he says, “what I hear each week has a huge influence on me; and part of the reason I feel grounded in tradition is that I’m surrounded by tradition every week.” In addition to being a big fan of Arvo Part, Bela Bartok, John Adams and Igor Stravinsky, he admits the similarity between his approach and that of Bach in his composition that will be played at SweetWater Music Festival (Allaqi, originally commissioned by Chamber Music Kelowna, along with the CBC, to “commemorate the 20^th anniversary of the St. Lawrence String Quartet”). Certainly this composition would justify the commentary from one source that praised his compositions for their juxtaposing of “exciting rhythmic layering with sensuous lyrical melodies,” with the overall result often being “shimmering, translucent and beautiful.” Having listened to a recording of the work and priding myself on the use of language, I can really think of no better description of what will unquestionably be a SweetWater winner.

 

Like some of the other works under discussion, Allaqi is based on traditional musical behaviours that are being put to modern use – in this case the inherited musical habits of the Inuit (the katajjaq style of Inuit throat singing). Two women respond to each other antiphonally and the string quartet echoes and responds to this dialogue. The musical setting is often stormy and agitated, with motifs repeated and obsessed over and angular rhythms picking up the pace as needed. Ironically and to the point we’ve just been discussing, the music’s central section constitutes a kind of chorale, Bach-like in its serenity and simplicity, which also harks to the title of the composition – allaqi (an opening in the clouds). As in the case of Raum’s composition, the piece has been chosen to enter the repertoire of the St. Lawrence String Quartet – not surprising since Goddard, although he writes larger works well, is nonetheless intrigued by the power of the string quartet to achieve the “most amazing contrasts.”

 

Goddard feels he is a “traditionalist who experiments with textures and sounds in such a way that people are affected emotionally” because his “biggest goal is to reach people.” He believes that “music speaks to the hunger in people’s souls and that people need to be touched and thereby changed by their musical experience.” And it is his conviction that “new music in a lot of circles is going in that direction.” He dramatizes his stand by pointing to the fact that even world composers who were writing experimental music in the sixties and seventies are now ultra-romantic in their styles.”

 

By happenstance, I came upon the following statement the other day: “melody can be descriptive and dramatic and can sit in this century really well.” Guess where I found the comment? Spoken by the soprano who sings the role of the prima donna in the Manchester production of the opera Prima Donna by Rufus Wainwrignt – mounted for four performances during the spring 2010 Luminato Festival in Toronto (from the soundtrack of the DVD entitled Rufus Wainwright PRIMA DONNA the story of an opera).

Music really gets around these days!