As I was exploring concert opportunities on campus, the one called UBC Composers’ Concerts came upon my attention. Being a non-music-major student, I had very little knowledge of what music students could create aside from learning music theory, history and technology, and practicing existing music works. Therefore, I went to the UBC Composers’ concert with no expectation of what I was going to see.
The concert was not only about one specific genre or instrument. It started with a small brass ensemble, then moved on to a guitar quartet, then female voice duets, violin duets, solo singing with piano accompaniment, and ended with John Stetch – a jazz pianist before he returned to school for his masters in composition – on piano with percussion accompaniment. I must say that the concert went absolutely beyond my imagination. It was mind-blowing for me to hear how those instruments that I thought I was familiar with could be played in a way that sounded completely new to me.
Even though the instruments used were different for each set of performances, I think all the compositions had one similar theme, which was about mystery, gloominess, madness, and absurdity. Almost all compositions were through-composed, and I could rarely find harmonic chords – most of the chords were inharmonic and somehow unpleasant to the ears, which created a sense of absurdity and gloominess. However, I could see that the composers were trying to be very novel rather than being conservative on their arrangements; for example, all four guitar players were playing not only at different rhythms, but also at different meters, which made my ears very busy trying to follow what each of them was doing.
One example of how an instrument sounded different from its traditional sound was the way a student played his guitar during the guitar quartet. He played his guitar with a lot of vibrato on his fingers, creating a sound very similar to how guzheng, a traditional Chinese instrument, would sound. This did not make him stand out from the other three guitarists but rather blended in well while creating surprises for the audiences.
The last song played by John Stetch was the most impressive one to me. It was an evolution of madness, a cluster of piano-percussion experiments, and an eager expression of feelings. Again, it was through-composed, and I doubt that it involved with a bit of improvisation as well, based on the complexity of each chord and how the percussionist hit different percussion instruments/items so randomly. As the intensity and the speed continued to grow and reached to a mad level towards the ending of the piece, Stetch even stood up and started to use his elbows to hit the piano keys, while the percussionist was literally trying to hit everything he could see. It reminded me of how Beethoven would also be ‘mad’ when he composed his symphonies, but I just could not imagine if Beethoven decided to elbow the piano in his piece and it somehow ended up being recorded on scores.
Having heard a completely new style of composition, I could not resist recalling what I learned in class about how the popularity of opera seria / French Operas had been taken over by the ‘intermezzis’ opera buffa / Italian Comic Operas and people (although mostly high-class people) were unhappy about this new form of opera at first. To be honest, I might not be able to appreciate through-composed pieces with the presence of so many inharmonic chords as much as I appreciate Bach’s structured fugues with intensive use of imitative polyphony. However, I know that without creativity, innovation, and courage to be different from what’s out there now, the history of music could never have been as majestic as it is now. It’s hard to say what kind of music is right and what is wrong, but music never gets enough of innovation.