Sound(e)scape: the music of Debussy

In February, I started producing an concert series called Sound(e)scape, featuring multidisciplinary collaborations between musicians and artists of other forms. The first concert was a success, featuring Harped Harlots, a project with live music burlesque. The band was made up of Juno-award winning Ben Brown (drums), Britt MacLeod (voice), Ben Whipple (bass) and myself (harp). We were joined by the most lovely dancers Dahlia Embers and Nite Mare to create a haunting, sexy show.  It was so much fun!  It was well received, so we did a reprise a few weeks later at the Kalama Collective’s Celebration of Life: Vaudevillian Vox event.

The next Sound(e)scape event was held in May at One Thousand Rivers Gallery on May 31st, 2013. The whole night was curated to include music by, or inspired by, my very most favourite composer of all time –  Claude Debussy. My vision was to create a multi-sensory experience to really take the audience on a journey with the music. I know that a lot of people (and young people in particular) sometimes have a hard time connecting with instrumental/classical music, because it is a language we are less familiar with in this day and age. I don’t think our ability to understand this language has been lost – but I do think that in order for classical music to continue to fully engage audiences, it must evolve. Our world is so visually stimulated, and I believe that the musical experience could really benefit from becoming a visual and kinetic experience as well. That’s the whole idea behind Sound(e)scape! So for this show, I wanted to have a huge visual component using projections to create very integrated atmosphere.

This show was A LOT of work to organize –  it was in an unconventional space with many performers, and had a huge technical aspect that my very non-tech-savvy self was quite overwhelmed by. Fortunately, I had the help from the very talented VJs from Ineo Studios to run the show! They set up the visuals to project onto all four walls  and used the music to hand pick the art that was projected for all three acts of the show.

The night began with Debussy’s one and only string quartet performed by the very talented Four Strings Attached (Meredith Bates, Shin-jung Nam, Sarah Kwok and Zuzana Uskovitsova). I wish I could say I got to enjoy it as much as I would have liked to but I was still dancing around a little bit like a chicken with it’s head cut off trying to run the show! From what I heard from these outstanding musicians, it was absolutely beautiful. Next up was my project Gentle Party (I’m joined by Meredith Bates on violin and Shanto Acharia on cello). We did an experimental set of improv music using electronic effects and motivs and themes from some of Debussy music, with 3 improv dancers taking the stage (Jennifer Aoki, Jenn Dunford, and Myola Paulter). It was quite a ride!

And lastly, the Luminara Duo (myself and Heather Beaty) performed a very unusual, interesting piece called Bilitis: Six Epigraphes Antiques. I came across this piece kind of by chance as I was ordering Heather and I a bunch of flute/harp music, and as I started to take a look at it I realized it was incredibly different than most of Debussy’s popular music. It is angular, disjunct, and atonal at times, yet still recalls Debussy’s classic use of texture and modes.  As soon as I heard the piece, I knew I wanted to perform it with dancers – and when I approached dancer Diane Cronmiller about it, we discovered a very interesting history of the piece that ended up being a basis of the choreography. Debussy wrote the piece as a setting of 6 erotic poems by Pierre Louys from Les Chansons de Bilitis. After further research, we learned that Louys claimed these poems were found in an ancient tomb in Cypress and were written by a woman named Bilitis – although it was later discovered that the poems were written by Louys himself. Diane Cronmiller was joined by Monica Gutierrez in a dance that explored the sensual, female energy of these poems.

It was quite a marathon to produce AND perform in this show – but it was totally worth it! It was exhilarating and exciting to create such a multi-sensory  soundscape. I was absolutely thrilled to be in the hands of such a talented tech team from Ineo Studios, and can’t wait for the next Sound(e)scape!