I had a wonderful evening listening to UBC piano and clarinet performers at “Premieres: Music by UBC Composers.” The performance took place on Friday March 8, 2019, at the Barnett Hall at UBC. The evening was like nothing that I had ever attended before; certainly, I’ve attended plenty of concerts and I’ve heard lots of classical music growing up as a young pianist and vocalist. However, each piece this evening was performed by a combination of pianos and clarinets. I had never heard these instruments played together and was very curious to ear the combination. Not only that, but I’m not incredibly familiar with the clarinet, so I didn’t know much about its expressive qualities. I was pleasantly surprised to hear that the clarinet is a beautifully emotional instrument! Based on how it’s played, it can sound like a saxophone or trumpet, as well as mimic piano sounds, so it’s quite a versatile instrument. Pieces were (mostly) composed as duets between piano and clarinet, and as such typically most pieces went one of two ways. For example, in the piece beauty after all composed by Jackson Bell and performed beautifully by Astrid Hawkes and Emily Picard, the piano and clarinet worked in tandem, as though the piece were written for one voice and the instruments split them in half so that everyone could get a chance to play; this kind of piece was very cohesive. On the other hand, it was also possible to listen to songs that sounded so vastly different that it was hard to tell they were of the same piece, yet somehow, they showed signs of cohesion in things like keys and chord progressions – this was illustrated in songs like Underneath composed by Alex Tosh and performed by Miranda Wheeler and Matthew Leung. The song was very unique in that the two melodic lines didn’t fit perfectly, yet certainly complemented each other.
One of the most interesting things about “Premieres” was that all music was written by UBC students, and in addition, performed by UBC students. The pieces were all so unique and so experimental in their own senses (I have never heard music like this before!) – and because they were so impressive, it was hard for me to believe that each piece was written by a composer-in-training, and that the music that I was listening to was not being performed by working professionals. However, realizing this opened my eyes to the amount of great and fantastic talent at the UBC School of Music, and made me proud to be a UBC student.
One piece that really stood out to me was “Flowers on the Train,” composed by Roan Shankaruk and played not just by a clarinet and piano, but by a student on viola as well. This was the only piece of the evening to feature an instrument other than a piano and a clarinet, and it worked absolutely beautifully in the scope of the song. The piece was set up like an argument between two people (between the viola and the clarinet), and the piano in the background acted as a mediator. This song was my favourite because it had characteristics of both types of songs that evening; there were parts where viola and the clarinet were finishing each other’s musical phrases, or “sentences” so to speak, and there were parts where everyone was moving in an entirely different direction.
Overall, I was so grateful to have the opportunity to listen to the songs of UBC composers as performed by UBC students, and I’m certainly going to seek out more opportunities to watch concerts like this again.