Fuzzy Logic
Co-Artistic Director Jennifer Waring expounds on Continuum’s first concert of the season
Fuzzy Logic, the opening concert of Continuum’s season, presents a palate of colours, textures and styles - a set of works that we feel complement each other. In another dimension the works on Fuzzy Logic are bundled as having an animal theme (“mammalian finds”, to quote our brochure), and a greeting quality, with the added linking element of theatricality.
Toronto-based Alex Eddington is a guy with a lot to say, as playwright, actor, writer, and composer. The first tenet of his production company, Acky-Made, is: “Acky-Made aims to find new ways of intersecting music and theatre in which both are equals, with the eventual (idealistic) goal of erasing the distinctions between them.” This quality is found in his new work for Continuum’s ensemble, with the composer narrating. Fuzzy Logic explores thoughts on sheep stored up from his time working in a hotel on a remote island in the Inner Hebrides. But in the execution, the piece became as much or more about process. Alex writes, “Lately I’ve been trying to find ways to compose that are more instinctive, impulsive, quick, that take me out of my head, so I don’t think, then plan, then write, then edit. I’m trying to compose improvisationally. I find that if I outsource the nitty-gritty work, like choosing what note follows what note, to my computer, or to some formula, I can take a step back and just think about gesture, about sound.” This too relates to animals, and sheep. They don’t get stuck in their heads – they simply act.
Fox bride, by Massachusetts-based Canadian Sabrina Schroeder, is a work from Continuum’s 2010 Call for Scores. Employing tactile sounds and gestural language, Schroeder’s work finds much of its underlying impulses in the grain of daily events, exploring patterns and synergies. Of Fox bride she writes, “I think of the piece a bit like a short film — one in which the camera creates a choppy, shifting perspective amongst different figures in a room. While the field of view moves quickly, it gathers fragments of activity from within a fundamentally unchanging place. Here a sense of different characteristics inhabiting and activating the same space is like another kind of topography to me. The real shift unfolds when the lens follows one of the figures out of the room. Suddenly there’s momentum, we move forward in time/space.” Schroeder has studied at the University of Victoria, Wesleyan University and Harvard. She is a performing member of the Anthony Braxton 12+1tet, and is finishing a PhD.
Anna Höstman’s compositions engage with sound as itself, with language, sensory memory, photography, and the architectures of variation; they explore her deep love for the spiritual and natural worlds. In ghosts of swallows, “There is a special relationship [with] Feldman’s Swallows of Salangan. Both share the same opening chord…[though] whereas Feldman’s piece builds into a reverberant shifting sound mass, ghosts explores the shadow world of these sounds until finally it reaches the warmth of a slow and gentle pulse.” A former Composer-in-residence with the Victoria Symphony whose works have been performed across Canada, and in Italy, the U.S., England, Mexico, China and Russia, Anna is currently in the doctoral program at the University of Toronto.
Spanish composer Alberto Hortigüela also came to Continuum’s notice through the latest Call for Scores. Now living in Germany, he is winner of a number of competitions and awards, including “ad libitum”, and has been commissioned by leading European ensembles. Lied des Unbenannten (Song of the Unnamed) reflects on passages in also sprach Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche, and for its temporal/structural proportions uses place names that remain hidden, unnamed.
Claude Vivier wrote of Greeting Music (1978), “It is indeed a very sad piece. It should be entirely performed with no expression in the face … and the body should just do the movements it needs to perform … the five performers should look more like zombies. The piece is somehow related to a hopeless world where nothing is to be done or felt.” Musically and extra musically theatrical, Greeting Music offers a bleak and beautiful welcome.
I will now reveal a worry I have about programming - the marketing element, the packaging and selling of a concert. How well does the advertised animal connection hold up? In Ghosts of Swallows Anna Hostman is not referring consciously to birds, real or transubstantiated, but to a work by Morton Feldman. Alberto Hortiguela’s work really doesn’t refer to animals, though there are effects that bring cows to mind. And Fox bride? The title is as far as it goes. But these titles, aural associations, and in the case of Alex Eddington’s work, an actual sheep theme, were triggers that led to considering these works, from among the many possibilities, for grouping together. Once imagined as a concert (thanks to these extraneous elements), the felicitous development these pieces represented, from intense focus on the microscopic grain in sound to variation and gesture, proved that they would work together. But try marketing sound grain. Animals are cuter, and stranger, with humans being the strangest of them all. And if the logic is fuzzy, so be it.
