A UVic 50th Anniversary SIGNATURE EVENT

FeaturingEve Egoyan

disklavier & piano

Saturday, October 13, 2012 at 8:00 p.m.Phillip T. Young Recital Hall

MacLaurin Building, University of VictoriaAdmission: $25

Proceeds will benefit a scholarship for UVic Fine Arts students.

Y E A R S

P r o g r a m

Surface Tension David Rokeby/Eve Egoyan

I n t e r m i s s i o n (Beverages and snacks available at the

concession located in the lounge)

For Cornelius (1981-1994) Alvin Curran (b.1938)

Pièces Froides. Danses de travers Erik Satie(Colds pieces. Crooked Dances) (1897) (1866-1925) I. En y regardant a deux fois. Se le dire. À plat. Blanc. Toujours (Considering carefully in advance. Tell yourself. Flat. White. Still. In the same manner.) II. Passer. Pareillement. Du coin de la main. Être visible un moment. Se raccorder. Un peu cuit (Pass. Similarly. With the corner of the hand. Alone. Be visible a moment. Fit together. Somewhat cooked.) III. Encore. Mieux. Encore. Très bien. Merveilleusement. Parfait. N’allez pas plus haut. Sans bruit. Très loin (Again. Better. Again. Very good. Marvellous. Perfect. Don’t go any higher. Without noise. Very distant.)

Turn (1973) Per Nørgård(b.1932)

The University of Victoria would like to thank Tom Lee Music for their generous sponsorship!

Program Notes

Surface Tension

Surface Tension is a collaborative interdisciplinary work for disklavier piano and interac-tive video created by pianist Eve Egoyan and artist David Rokeby. Commissioned by the Open Ears Festival with a grant from the Canada Council, it was premiered at Open Ears in Kitchener in May, 2009.

In Surface Tension, Eve’s performance at the keyboard of a disklavier (an acoustic piano with a computer interface) is transformed and interpreted by a computer into live visual images projected onto a screen rising from the body of the piano. The visuals respond to a variety of performance parameters including dynamics, pitch, the harmonic relation between pitches, the use of the sustain pedal, and the duration of individual notes. This extends the piano into a visual instrument as well as a musical one.

Much of the visual material is based on simulations of natural processes such as the swarming behaviours of insects, the trajectories of planets or the rippling of water when a pebble hits the surface. Eve’s performance triggers and modulates aspects of these simula-tions; the visual representations respond to Eve, but also have a sort of life of their own, becoming in a sense a partner in the performance. In one movement, each note played on the piano contributes to the construction of a three-dimensional tower. In another, Eve draws out the trajectories of falling snowflakes, manipulating the live processing of a pre-recorded video. Yet another charts the harmonic relationships between the notes that Eve is playing.

The performance itself is a loosely structured audio-visual improvisation in five move-ments. The improvisation is shaped partly by Eve’s response to the system’s visual response to her playing. Except for the change of software programs between movements, all visual activity on the screen is directly responsive to Eve. The result is an extraordinary integra-tion of sound and image in which neither of these elements dominate the other.

Alvin Curran - For Cornelius

For Cornelius was written in December 1981 just after my hearing the news of the accidental and tragic death of the English composer Cornelius Cardew. Cornelius was a visionary and his humane, prophetic powers affected everyone around him. Since my first meeting with him in Rome in 1965 and later through the many collaborations of MEV (Musica Elettronica Viva) and Cardew’s AMM group, his subtle influence has remained with me. For Cornelius is structured simply in three sections—a song, a thundering study on slowly changing harmonies, and a chorale. Though not intentionally made so, this piece may be seen as a tribute to Cardew’s own utopian dreams of making ‘elitist’ music popular.This performance of For Cornelius is of the 1992–94 revised version.

- Alvin Curran

Erik Satie - Danses de travers

Danses de travers is an early example of minimalism in which all three slow, quiet dances share the same rhythm, texture and melodic shapes, and are difficult to tell apart. Possibly Satie had the arpeggiated textures of Schumann or Fauré in mind here, and one would never imagine that their construction was in any way complex. But Satie wrote eleven numbered segments and a host of unclassified ideas for the first dance alone, before set-tling on the five he wanted to use.

- Professor Robert Orledge

Per Nørgärd - Turn

Turn, originally composed for that soft brittle baroque instrument, the clavichord, and one of several preliminary studies for his great Third Symphony for choir and orchestra, marks yet another new beginning in Nørgård’s production. Turn marks the start of Nørgård’s so-called “infinity-rows”, and these together with the natural network of overtones form the basis of arpeggios in which the separate notes are accentuated in turn to form constantly new rhythmic pulsations. The chords vibrate like strings when struck, and together they form a magic echo room, which closes in on itself, as it were, without any appreciable intervention on the part of the composer. The piece is a declaration of love for the universal order and the wealth of regular form in the infinity rows–a piece of “formed” Nature set in resounding motion.

- Karl Aage Rasmussen

Biographies

Eve Egoyan

Eve Egoyan is a pianist, an artist whose medium is the piano. Her ongoing performance interests encompass extremely contrasting sensibilities: from Alvin Curran’s five-hour long Inner Cities to Erik Satie’s miniatures; from minimalist Simple Lines of Enquiry by Ann Southam to maximalist new complexity works by Michael Finnissy; from the barely audible to roaring overtone-filled resonances; from the rigorous interpretation of a score to free improvisation. Egoyan also explores other art forms and technologies in relation to the piano. She has recorded eight solo CDs of contemporary music. Her last two discs, both of works by Ann Southam, were selected by Elissa Poole, of The Globe and Mail, as her top pick of the Year’s Best Music (2011) and one of “Top Ten” classical discs by Alex Ross, The New Yorker magazine (2009).

Eve was born in Victoria and is a graduate of the University of Victoria. While in Victoria, she studied at the Victoria Conservatory first with Anne Brayshaw and then Winifred Wood. While at UVic, she studied piano with Eva Solar-Kinderman and was introduced to contemporary music by Michael Longton. Through much support from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Eve received four years of full scholarship (Hochschule der Künste in West Berlin, DAAD scholarship, and the Royal Academy of Music in London, England, Commonwealth Scholarship) following her graduation from UVic. Throughout her formal training as a pianist, she never studied contemporary music. When she moved back to Canada after studying in Europe, she enrolled at the University of Toronto while a resident of Massey College. Toronto had become the home to many composers Eve had met at the University of Victoria. She began her career in contemporary music playing the music of her Victoria peers and their primary composition teachers, Rudolf Komorous and Michael Longton. Inspired by the creative relationships she developed playing their music, Eve is a now concert pianist who specializes in the performance of new works.

Eve has appeared as a solo recitalist in Canada, England, France, Germany, Portugal, Japan, and the U.S. including performances at the Huddersfield Contemporary Festival, (Huddersfield, U.K.), the Other Minds Festival (San Francisco), the Vancouver New Music Festival, the Kobe International Modern Music Festival (Kobe, Japan), and the Sound Symposium (St. Johns). In 2001 she made her debut with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, playing the world première of Figures by Ann Southam for the Massey Hall New Music Festival (CBC commission). Honours include numerous commissions and awards from the Canada Council, Ontario and Toronto Arts Councils, FACTOR, a University of Victoria Distinguished Alumna Award, a K.M. Hunter Award, and a Chalmers Award. Recently she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC) and was one of fifty Canadian performers and conductors given and designation of “CMC Ambassador” by the Canadian Music Centre.

David Rokeby

Born in Tillsonburg, Ontario in 1960, David Rokeby has been creating interactive sound and video installations with computers since 1982. His early work Very Nervous System (1982-1991) is acknowledged as a pioneering work of interactive art, translating physi-cal gestures into real-time interactive sound environments. Very Nervous System was presented at the Venice Biennale in 1986.

Several of his works have addressed issues of digital surveillance, including Watch (1995), Taken (2002), and Sorting Daemon (2003). Other works engage in a critical examination of the differences between human and artificial intelligence. The Giver of Names (1991-) and n-cha(n)t (2001) are artificial subjective entities, provoked by objects or spoken words in their immediate environment to formulate sentences and speak them aloud.

David Rokeby’s installations have been exhibited extensively in the Americas, Europe and Asia. He has received a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts, the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica for Interactive Art, and a BAFTA award (the British equivalent of an Oscar). His 400 foot long, 72-foot high sculpture entitled long wave which was one of the hits at the Luminato Festival in Toronto (2009). This past year, he completed major new commissioned works for Le Fresnoy studio national des arts in France and the new Ryerson Image Centre at Ryerson University in Toronto.

Alvin Curran

Democratic, irreverent and traditionally experimental, Curran travels in a computerized covered wagon between the Golden Gate and the Tiber River, and makes music for every occasion with any sounding phenomena–a volatile mix of lyricism and chaos, structure and indeterminacy, fog horns, fiddles and fiddle heads. He is dedicated to the restoration of dignity to the profession of making non-commercial music as part of a personal search for future social, political and spiritual forms.

Curran’s music-making embraces all the contradictions (composed/improvised, tonal/atonal, maximal/minimal...) in a serene dialectical encounter. His more than 150 works feature taped/sampled natural sounds, piano, synthesizers, computers, violin, percussion, shofar, ship horns, accordion and chorus. Whether in the intimate form of his well-known solo performances, or pure chamber music, experimental radio works or large-scale site-specific sound environments and installations, all forge a very personal language from all the languages through dedicated research and recombinant invention.

Erik Satie

Erik Satie (1866-1925) remains one of the most bizarre and fascinating composers in the history of modern music. Indeed, he did much to shape its course through his influence on the composers of Les Six, and later John Cage, who declared in 1958: “It’s not just a question of Satie’s relevance. He’s indispensable.” Like Fauré, Satie’s music shows constant renewal within an apparently limited textural range, and he also refined his musical expression to its bare essentials in later life by giving it greater contrapuntal strength. But there the similarity ends, because Satie remained a left-wing iconoclast throughout. He entirely rejected the nineteenth-century concepts of Romantic expressiveness and the-matic development, being the first to repudiate Wagner’s consuming influence on French music. He by-passed “impressionism” and the beguiling orchestral sonorities of Debussy and Ravel, and his art derived more from painters (especially the Cubists) than from other composers.

First and foremost, Satie was a man of ideas, a precursor of total chromaticism (virtually serialism) and minimalism (in Vexations of 1893), the prepared piano (in Le Piège de Mé-duse in 1913), neo-classicism (in his Sonatine bureaucratique of 1917), and even muzak (in his Musique d’ameublement of 1917-23). Simultaneously he pursued his uncompromising inner path towards simplicity, restraint, brevity and clarity in a way that was essentially French, or, in Satie’s case, Parisian. He remained true to the compositional aesthetic that he notated in 1917, and in essence his art, like Debussy’s, derived from melody, though in Satie’s case this had to remain in direct contact with its popular roots. “Do not forget”, he advised, “that the melody is the Idea, the outline; as much as it is the form and the subject matter of a work. The harmony is an illumination, an exhibition of the object, its reflec-tion... One cannot criticise the craft of an artist as if it constituted a system. If there is form and a new style of writing, there is a new craft.” And in his piano works, mostly assembled from series of motifs (“Ideas”) in jigsaw-puzzle fashion, Satie demonstrated how this could be achieved.

- Professor Robert Orledge

Per Nørgård

Nørgård was born in Gentofte, Denmark. He studied with Vagn Holmboe at the Royal Dan-ish Academy of Music in Copenhagen, and subsequently with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. To begin with, he was strongly influenced by the Nordic styles of Jean Sibelius, Carl Nielsen and Vagn Holmboe. In the 1960s, Nørgård began exploring the modernist techniques of central Europe, eventually developing a serial compositional system based on the “infinity series” (Nørgård 1975), which he used in his Voyage into the Golden Screen, the Second and Third Symphonies, I Ching, and other works of the late 1960s and 70s (Mortensen [n.d.]). Later he became interested in the Swiss artist Adolf Wölfli, who inspired many of Nørgård’s works (Anon [n.d.]), including the 4th symphony, the opera Det Guddommelige Tivoli and Papalagi for solo guitar.

Nørgård has composed works in all major genres: six operas, two ballets, eight sympho-nies and other pieces for orchestra, several concertos, choral and vocal works, a very large number of chamber works (among them ten string quartets) and several solo instrumen-tal works. These include a number of works for the guitar, mostly written for the Danish guitarist Erling Møldrup: In Memory Of... (1978), Papalagi (1981), a series of suites called Tales from a Hand (1985–2001), Early Morn (1997–98) and Rondino Amorino (1999). One of his most important works for percussion solo is I Ching (1982) for the Danish percussion-ist Gert Mortensen. He has also composed music for several films, including The Red Cloak (1966), Babette’s Feast (1987), and Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (1993).

His eighth symphony was premiered on 19 September 2012 in the Helsinki Music Centre, Finland, by the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by John Storgårds. Heikki Valska from the Finnish radio described the symphony as “very bright and lyrical” and “approach-able”. It was well received by the audience at the premiere. Nørgård is also a prolific writer. He has written many articles dealing with music not only from a technical but also a philosophical viewpoint.

www.uvic.ca/anniversary | September 2012-June 2013

Celebrate with us!You’re invited to join in the University of Victoria’s 50th anniversary celebration, which runs from September 2012 to June 2013. Over the next 9 months, UVic is hosting a fascinating range of concerts, lectures and activities to mark 50 years of excellence.

A complete list of events may be found on our website: www.uvic.ca/anniversary. The Deans’ Lecture Series offers a particularly engaging view of UVic’s diverse teaching and research. The lectures are scheduled on October 19 and 24, November 2, 9, 21, 23 and 30, and December 5 and 7.

50th Anniversary Honorary CabinetThroughout our 50th anniversary celebrations, we are privileged to have the support of our Honorary Cabinet – a group of 17 distinguished individuals whose contributions to Canada and the world have been exemplary and reflect the values that have shaped UVic’s success.

John MackayLorna Marsden, CM, OORobert PearceSheridan ScottLauren Woolstencroft

Eve EgoyanJohn deC. EvansPeter GustavsonGrand Chief Edward John Akile Ch’ohRon Lou-Poy, QC, CM

Co-Chairs: Murray Farmer, UVic Chancellor Julie Payette, OC, CQ

Members: David Anderson, PC, OCTom Brzustowski, OCEliza C. H. Chan, JP, BBSSteve CloutierDon Drummond

50th Anniversary EventsUVic Celebrates its 50th Anniversary

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