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Tim Hecker

The New Music Festival puts on a wonderful display of the limits of the intellectual musician and his/her ability to read musical notation.

On the other hand, if I had closed my eyes during sections of some of the pieces featured in the first half of the WSO’s second night of its 21st New Music Festival, I wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference between an intellectual musician and an out-of-practice seven year old with a fiddle. Therein lies the fascination of ‘new music.’

That isn’t to say that I didn’t appreciate the art. There was a certain emotional energy that went with the tense waves of dissonance in Kaija Saariaho’s Spins & Spells (performed by Yuri Hooker) and Tocar (performed by Gwen Hoebig and David Moroz), as well as Vincent Ho’s Stigmata (performed by Minna Rose Chung), despite the fact they sounded very similar. Oleg Pokhanovski’s performance of Juurian Andriessen’s Reflections-Presto played like a fragmented, backwards Flight of the Bumblebee (for lack of a better-educated comparison).

Valgeir Sigurdsson’s four movement Nebraska and Sophie Carmen Eckhardt-Gramatte's Tune for a Child were the evening'’s most conventionally palatable pieces due to the inclusion of what closest resembled melodies, chord progressions and percussion.

Tim Hecker’s Ravedeath for Organ, on the other hand, was an entirely different experience. It was a spectacle. The lights at Westminster United Church were turned down, save for a couple of slowly rotating blue lights shining across the church’s beautiful, gigantic organ. The otherworldly sound waves that came out of the speakers sounded something like what music would be if it were written by whales, or the monster from Cloverfield. The entire church rumbled and shook with a dark bass-y boom and faint, washed-out organ chords wobbled in and out of earshot. I felt as if I was embarking on an acid-induced discovery of Atlantis, all while accompanied by an appropriately crafted soundtrack.

This performance alone ‑ which may have been better suited to the send +receive festival ‑ made the evening worthwhile. I’m sure the tens of people who stood up and left would disagree.

It’s funny what liberal ‘new Music’ listeners will choose to endure.