Banff Musicians in Residence Open Concert: INTERACTIVITY

Justin Wright, Dana Sipos and Lina Andonovska at Banff Centre, 2019

Justin Wright, cello; Dana Sipos, guitar/vocals; and Lina Andonovska, flute; at Banff Centre, 2019.

Faculty mentor pianist+multimedia performing artist Megumi Masaki and exciting musicians from the Banff Musicians in Residence program push boundaries of interactivity between sound, image, text and movement to explore new expressive potentials.

Masaki's work is connected deeply to community and how human rights and environmental issues can be communicated through performances to create narratives and tools for change. Listeners will be drawn into the beauty of an inspired sonic and visual journey that will motivate dialogue and action in us all.

 

Program Curation and Repertoire

View House Program

Artist biographies are included in the House program. 

1. MAYSUN’s (Etienne Mason) work explores the relationship between the temporality and spatiality of sound. This project is based around the use of sounds from real life environment and transforming them into musical tones to be used in the creation of soundscapes. The sounds sampled are transformed using tape cassettes, physical spaces, modular synthesis, feedback and effect pedals. This allows the sound to be altered in pitch spliced and stretched, adding imperfections and artifacts along the way. The compositions are created as if they were soundtracks to life events. This process aims to add depth to the listening experience by giving a sense of time and space throughout the music.

2. Rockey’s Duo Untitled – gloria is an excerpt from the large-scale project we (Luciane Cardassi & Katelyn Clark) are creating for piano, harpsichord, and electronic processes, based on the Messe de Nostre Dame (c.1365). Written by French poet-musician Guillaume de Machaut (c.1300–1377), the original performance circumstances for the Messe remain largely unknown. We have re-imagined his music through intabulation (a historical practice for playing vocal pieces on instruments), improvisation, and sampling. The accompanying visual is a rendering of angels turning the universe, taken from the 14th-century French Breviari d’Amor (Harley MS 4940). We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

3. Alexis Normand performs excerpts from her bilingual show, French Enough, that shines a light on Francophone life in Saskatchewan.  

Sing Me Home: a song filled with prairie nostalgia and the comforting feeling of coming home. 
Sans mots: a song about intergenerational transmission of language. 

4. Pei-Chen Chen “Life is like a jigsaw puzzle." This performance explores the composer  Cecilia Livingston's Memories for Piano that resonant with my own narrative, the dancers’ bodies, and perhaps, your stories. Over the Hill and Far Away describes a walk into the woods. What do you see and hear? Is it a dream, or is it real? Through The Glass expresses how we see things differently as adults from when we were children, even for those things that seem the same.

5. Hannah Epperson's live performance will be half structured and half improvised, a dialectical balance she strives to achieve in all pursuits of serious play. She’ll be using loop station, various effects pedals, violin, synth and vocals to bring her compositions to life.

6. And bleak blew the easterly wind for piano, live electronics and video by Ollie Hawker, Katie Muir and Megumi Masaki (2022)
Martin Daigle, percussion
Benjamin Portzen, live electronics

And bleak blew the easterly wind was written for Megumi Masaki’s HEARING ICE large-scale project that examines the impacts of changes to ice on communities.

And bleak blew the easterly wind is a eulogy for the Sphinx, Scotland's longest-lasting snow patch. Located on Braeriach in the Cairngorms, the Sphinx only melted away completely three times in the 20th century, but has disappeared five times in the last 20 years. As a visual spectacle, the patch itself is small and humble, but as a symbol of the effects of the current climate emergency, it is powerful and saddening.

A lot of environmental music takes the acoustic instruments as natural forces to be disrupted by electronic elements. We want to challenge this metaphor by having the electronic element consist of pure, untouched sine tones which are gradually disrupted and overtaken by the piano. The piano material is a torn up, mutilated version of the Scottish traditional tune The Road to Dundee. In framing the tune and the piano as the disruptive force, the piece challenges ideas of the assumed naturalness of folk music.

The video was inspired by Celtic funeral tradition. First the ice melts, then the fog comes and envelopes the landscape, before it is visited by its old friends: the unpredictable wind, the dramatic rain, the stoic sun and finally the mournful moon.

Ollie Hawker is a Glasgow-based composer and improviser primarily interested in ideas of digital nostalgia. He was awarded the 2020 Kimie Composition Prize and was selected to participate in the Banff Centre’s Evolution: Classical 2022 program.
Katie Muir is a Glasgow based multidisciplinary videographer, graphic designer and visual artist. Her practice centres around the climate anxiety felt by so many as we globally sit at the knife’s edge of the climate crisis.

We gratefully acknowledge Creative Scotland and Iain Cameron for his research on the Sphinx.

Sing Me Home is a song filled with prairie nostalgia and the comforting feeling of coming home. 
Sans mots is a song about intergenerational transmission of language. 

7. Rum Ragged (Mark Manning & Aaron Collis)
The Thing About Fish describes the significance of the fishing industry to the cultural fabric of the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. Doucet’s is a set of reels consisting of a traditional tune and two locally composed tunes from the island of Newfoundland.