TorQ Percussion Quartet in the Array Music Concert Hall, 20 November, 2013.
L. to R. Adam Campbell, Jamie Drake, Daniel Morphy, Richard Burrows. Cell phone photo courtesy Frank Morphy.
TorQ struck again, pun intended, this time with a concert of music for Prepared Piano by John Cage, all arranged for traditional percussion instruments by members of TorQ.
I last heard TorQ in the Toronto Dance Theatre, playing works which were choreographed for existing music, as I reported on this site in TorQ Ensemble: Morphy, Rolfe, Reich and Cage, 28 June, 2013. That concert was an unforgettable experience. Consequently, I was prepared for this one to be at best, less memorable.
This TorQ program began with Bacchanale (1938-40), a vivacious complexity of rhythms and tempi written for dance and the first work by Cage for Prepared Piano. Of the 20 movements in Cage’s Sonatas and Interlues, (1946-48),TorQ members arranged and played 11: 8 Sonatas and 3 Interludes. The first half ended with an exquisite arrangement by Jamie Drake of the mezmorizing In A Landscape (1948), the only unprepared piano work on the program and ended with an arrangement of a John Cage oil painting titled Chess Pieces (1944). The program was appropriately titled Sonatas and Interludes.
Western percussion ensembles and the Prepared Piano are commonly thought to have been invented by John Cage: the percussion ensemble to provide him with solutions to compositional issues and later, the Prepared Piano to provide him with a percussion orchestra free from extra players, their accoutrements and expenses. However, there were important antecedents to both the western percussion ensemble and the Prepared Piano and Cage himself affirmed this during a phone conversation. When I asked him if he had invented them Cage said, “No, they were in the air”. His exploitation of both genres popularized them and they became indelibly associated with his name. The Prepared Piano proved to be an instrument that offered fresh insights into the aesthetics of sound and influenced generations of performers and composers.
The piano is a percussion instrument. When its strings are affixed with nuts, bolts, erasers and other knicknacks, its sounds are altered dramatically, and it sounds even more percussive. Thus, Cage’s Prepared Piano music was written on a percussion instrument altered to sound like other percussion instruments. Somehow, TorQ‘s arrangements for quartet and multi percussion had closed an historic circle in music history. Or have they opened a new one?
I was seated with my wife and the very fine percussionist Alison Bent who has recently become part of TorQ‘s management team. Some of the Toronto notables in attendance were John Miller the music impresario of the Stratford Summer Music Festival [1.] and Ray Dillard, percussionist, recording engineer and President of the Toronto Musician’s Association. Also in the audience was Toronto pianist Henry Kucharzyk, whose fine recording of the Sonatas and Interludes (1990) provided inspiration forTorQ arrangers.
Toronto percussionist and composer Rick Sacks made his first appearance of the night playing his Kat, an electronic instrument programed for Prepared Piano. Cage never embraced electronic sounds. He did not like recorded music and donated all gifts of recordings to libraries. The Kat’s ersatz Prepared Piano sounds were at variance with the otherwise all acoustic sounds made by TorQ. The Kat simply rang false and yet, its sounds were appealing on their own.
Rick is the artistic director of Array Music and is the force behind its new music hall and administrative offices. He is an indefatigable worker. The new hall is splendid. Seating at most 50 people, it is an acoustical gem. The sound is not distorted by excessive dryness or resonance. Small dance and music ensembles not yet aware of its comforts need to check it out.
Cage was studying chess under the tutelage of Marcel Duchamp and made a painting titled Chess Pieces for an exhibit by Duchamp and other New York based visual artists. Cage painted a chess board and filled each square with snippets of music. These snippets define the form and structure of the work. American pianist Margaret Leng Tan arranged these squares of music into a piano solo. Thus, Bryan Nozny’s arrangement of Chess Pieces, is an arrangement of an arrangement of an oil painting and sounding within the purview of Cage’s aesthetic.
The Sonatas and Interludes concert was a garden of delights, always unexpected, always satisfying. I have grown accustomed to TorQ‘s artistry. They move in unison while remaining flexible. What excites me most about TorQ, is their desire to search out new ideas and realize them, time after time, in musically satisfying ways.
Note:
[1.] It was announced that John Miller has named TorQ the Stratford Summer Music Festival Artists in Residence for the summer of 2014.
Robin Engelman 
Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan
If one ignores the fact that over half their players are new to the group, one could say the Evergreen Club has been around for 30 years. Blair Mackay the Club’s director since 1993, acted as host for the 2nd of 2 concerts held at Array Space on 22 June, 2014.
For some reason Blair chose to program music written for the club in the early 1990s. This decision was not explained and I thought it a bit odd that none of the music written for them in the last decade or more had been programmed. Only four of the10 performers could be considered Club old timers, Blair Mackay, Andrew Timar, Mark Duggan and Bill Parsons. Perhaps some of them had played these works 20 years ago. Perhaps that, or lack of rehearsal time could explain the vintage repertoire.
The two opening works were by Andrew Timar, the Club’s resident Suling (flute) player and one of its founding members. Then followed works by the late Nic Gotham, Henry Kucharzyk, the late John Wyre and finally the club founder in 1983, John Siddall.
All the works were engaging if sometimes too long. With the exception of Andrew Timar’s The Quality of Mercy, all were well played. The Quality of Mercy opens with a number of conducted single strokes, none of which were together. I mentioned this to a friend of mine who told me the effect was intended. Sorry, I apologize.
There was some brilliant xylophone playing by Mark Duggan on what sounded to me like simple wooden slats. Michelle Colton played steel pan in John Wyre’s Island of Silence (1994). There were no program notes, an ommission I found inexcusable for older works and especially for an anniversary concert. I believe Island of Silence was written for Paul Ormandy and if memory serves, the premier was in the Glenn Gould theater. Michelle’s performance on steel pan was fluid and well-balanced. Her steel pan notes end with a “twang” and that was more than a bit disturbing. At any rate, to my ears the steel pan simply did not fit into the ensemble’s sound.
Henry Kucharzyk’s 1992 Toy Garage was for me the best work on the program with Palace (1993) by Jon Siddall a close 2nd.
It used to bother me that everything the Club played was in the same key. The thought again crossed my mind, but this evening it was not off putting. The club has good players and their control of complex rhythms and dynamics is remarkably good.
All the more reason to wonder how a group that commissioned composers such as Lou Harrison, John Cage, Gilles Tremblay, Jim Tenney and more, has survived 30 years in Toronto and today, is unable to attract an audience larger than about 25 people. I was told attendance at the first concert of these two was similar. That is pitiable. Was the lack of attendance due to World Cup soccer, lack of promotion, or a lack of interest?
The reasons for poor attendence are often difficult to determine, but one must wonder how the group’s development is being handled. Blair welcomed the new members to “the Evergreen family”, Ryan Scott, Dan Morphy, Michelle Colton, Rick Sacks, Etienne Levesque and Adam Campbell. They are some of Toronto’s best and busiest musicians.
Are they now members of the Club, or was Blair’s reference to family a bit disingenuous? If allowed input, they’d surely elevate audience size and much more. I’m very interested to find out if the new blood has some effect on the Club’s future.
Posted by robinengelman on June 24, 2014 in Articles, Commentaries & Critiques, Composers, Contemporary Music
Tags: Array Space, Blair Mackay, Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan, Henry Kucharzyk, Jim Tenney, John Cage, John Wyre, Jon Siddall, Lou Harrison