On March 18, I attended the UBC Composers’ Concert from the UBC School of Music. This particular concert was a composition of songs composed by the UBC music students as well as the professor. This was the first concert that I had attended for our music journals and I was so impressed with the performances- it also made me regret not attending any UBC performances before, but after seeing this I will without a doubt be attending more.
Each piece that was performed had a different story to it, some had been composed solely by students, others by students and teachers and a few were pieces that were variations of popular compositions. It was really interesting to see how these all beautifully came together as the students performed the pieces. In this particular concert/performance- there were 5 pieces that were performed. 29th Avenue, Second Beach, Night Piece, Chance Encounter and lastly Avidutt which was my favorite performance out of them all.
The first 2 pieces had been performed by saxophones and flutes and as we moved along into performances I noticed that there were more and more instruments being incorporated and eventually in the last piece we had a full accompaniment of instruments as well as a soprano. I was really impressed by the pieces that were performed, especially because the students that were performing seemed quite young but still they had such fantastic skills to be able to perform and conduct such an extraordinary ensemble. The first two pieces had a steady beat to it and a fixed meter, the rigidness of the piece was further enhanced because there was no other accompaniment with this piece and no words sung either. The second piece was a lot more melodic and less rigid, it reminded me a bit of jazz music. Night piece was performed by a guitarist, this piece seemed a bit obscure to me yet musically alluring, perhaps it is the obscurity that made it beautiful. The next piece that was performed was actually originally a Chinese poem but had been turned into a musical composition in a beautiful, accessible and stimulating way. The last piece, Avidutt, was certainly my favorite. I really didn’t know what to expect from this because all the pieces were so different from one another, and this one certainly did not differ. For this piece, everyone that had performed was out on the stage as well as a soprano singer. This was the largest ensemble of the concert! The singers produced sounds so interesting, even imitating the sound of laughter and incorporated whistling sounds. This sounded a bit like imitative polyphonic texture to me. The string players that accompanied the singers echoed the singer’s voices in an abstract way.
All in all, if you are someone who is into abstract music then I would certainly recommend this to you! It was amazing to see people so young producing music that is so unique and inspiring.