The 21C Music Competition is a celebration of latest music, together with a live performance of premiering works from composers Ian Cusson and Stewart Goodyear. The live performance takes place on Sunday, January 22 at 3:00 p.m.
We caught up with each composers for a couple of questions in regards to the works they’ve created for the live performance.
Stewart Goodyear
As a pianist, he’s maybe finest recognized for his immaculate interpretations of Beethoven and different classical composers, together with his Toronto efficiency of all 32 of Beethoven’s piano sonatas in in the future. Even throughout the classical custom, nonetheless, Goodyear added his personal touches that fell outdoors the strains of recent conventions, like his improvised cadenzas.
As a composer, his influences are broader, together with the Caribbean music of his mom’s aspect of the household, and the basic rock albums his late father left him. Goodyear’s piece Specifically Combined consists of seven actions with differing instrumentation, some for solo piano and others in an ensemble that features Goodyear on piano, Michael Occhipinti on guitar, Pleasure Lapps-Lewis on metal pan, Roberto Occhipinti on bass, and Larnell Lewis on drums.
The brand new piece you’re premiering clearly incorporates parts of jazz in addition to classical music. I do know you additionally incorporate improvisation, a jazz important, into a few of your efficiency. Is a sort of fusion of the 2 genres a path you’ll proceed to discover?
This new piece incorporates rock, calypso, classical, improvisation. In each certainly one of my compositions, these parts have impressed all that I’ve written to date. That is the primary classical composition that entails devices that haven’t normally been in classical genres.
Are you able to inform us in regards to the musicians you’ll be performing with? How did you select them?
Pleasure, Larnell, Roberto and Michael are musicians who I had the honour of working with 4 years in the past once I introduced an all-Goodyear program as a part of the 21C Music Competition. After I was invited to return to the competition, I needed to work with this group once more, and discover the wedding of musical kinds and backgrounds. Each certainly one of these wonderful artists brings a way of openness, journey and creation.
This efficiency and premiere come throughout your time as composer-in-residence on the RCM. Has that chance affected your work — maybe permitting you to experiment in several instructions?
The RCM has been supportive of each path I wish to make in music, and subsequently encourages the liberty to be myself artistically with none limitations.
As somebody who’s well-known on your interpretations of conventional classical repertoire in addition to extra experimental items just like the one which shall be premiering, how do you see the stability of previous and new creating within the classical music world? i.e. plainly increasingly more new music is discovering its manner into live performance programming — do you are feeling like there’s stability between the 2 now, or is there a solution to go?
There’s all the time a solution to go…and, to me, that’s the great thing about the world of music. I feel music is in a continuing state of reincarnation, and the thrill of what artists create will all the time hold music related and alive in everybody’s coronary heart and thoughts.
Ian Cusson
Métis/French Canadian composer Ian Cusson’s works have been carried out by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, amongst others. His physique of works comprises operas and artwork track in addition to orchestral items.
Cusson’s items on this system include three works impressed by the enduring work of medieval artist Hieronymus Bosch, particularly, The Haywain Triptych, painted in 1516. The Backyard of Earthly Delights and the Sonata for Oboe and Piano — The Haywain have already been carried out in Toronto and Ottawa, whereas The Remedy of Insanity will obtain its world premiere. Performers embrace the Duo Concertante (Nancy Dahn on violin and Timothy Steeves on piano), oboist Charles Hamann and pianist Frédéric Lacroix for the Sonata, and Trio Arkel — Marie Bérard, violin, Rémi Pelletier, viola, and Winona Zelenka, cello.
You’re presenting three items based mostly on work by Hieronymus Bosch. How did that come to be an inspiration? Is he a favorite painter of yours?
I discover inspiration in lots of locations — novels, works of non-fiction, portray, and thru different inventive disciplines. I’ve all the time been fascinated by the unusual and delightful visible world of Hieronymus Bosch whose works are allegorical, fantastical, and otherworldly. I first noticed The Backyard of Earthly Delights as a teenager. It made an enormous impression on me. It was visually overwhelming, and I bear in mind feeling deeply disturbed by its scary and great photos. What stunned me most was {that a} portray revamped 500 years in the past might nonetheless create such a robust, visceral impression.
How does the music replicate the work, and Bosch’s imaginative and prescient in them?
The Bosch work are emotional jumping-off factors for the musical works. I don’t a lot attempt to seize a musical narrative of the work, however as an alternative create supply materials from the feelings that the pictures evoke in me. In different phrases, I attempt to translate the feelings I really feel when experiencing the work into music.
How do you see the work of the fifteenth/sixteenth centuries as related immediately — or, how do you make the connection between the time durations artistically?
The fantastic thing about inventive lineages is that there are by strains working between inventive creations whatever the tradition, time interval, or medium by which the works are made. Whereas human beings in several eras and from totally different cultures all have distinctive experiences, on the finish of the day, all of us confront the identical fundamental questions. We’re all born, and all of us die. We’re all grappling with what it means to be alive and to be human.
The 21C Music Competition has been going robust for greater than a decade — do you are feeling that up to date music and dwelling composers are making actual inroads in the case of live performance and competition programming?
Modern music will get a nasty rap. Many audiences are creatures of behavior and search out the acquainted. I could be the identical manner. Modern music and festivals like 21C remind us that artwork remains to be being created. By platforming new and traditionally under-represented voices, the competition opens the door to new understandings of what music could be and what music can say in a various and globally related world.
Get tickets for the efficiency and different live shows within the 21C Music Competition right here.
#LUDWIGVAN
Get the day by day arts information straight to your inbox.
Join the Ludwig van Day by day — classical music and opera in 5 minutes or much less HERE.
Anya Wassenberg is a Senior Author and Digital Content material Editor at Ludwig Van. She is an skilled freelance author, blogger and writing teacher with OntarioLearn.
