Previous concerts from the Happenstancers have typically featured fairly conventional chamber music either arranged or combined in unusual ways; sometimes mixed with more modern/contemporary material.  Saturday night’s concert at Redeemer Lutheran was a bit different.  Titled Future Pastorale it was built around Claude Vivier’s 1968 work Ojikawa plus the text of Psalm 131 (also used, in French, by Vivier) and text from the “Introduction” to Blake’s Songs of Innocence; “Piping down the valleys wild.  Piping songs of pleasant glee” etc with lambs, shepherds and clouds.

Performing were Brad Cherwin on clarinet, Louis Pino on percussion and soprano Hilary Jean Young.  All three were also heavily involved with the plentiful electronics and the performance was significantly enhanced by Billy Wong’s imaginative lighting and there was some interesting stage business for some numbers.

It was definitely a concert in two halves.  In the first half an intro featuring the Blake text and a short concluding section bookended the Vivier.  It’s a five movement work.  It starts with a fairly loud and aggressive piece for soprano and percussion demanding a range of techniques from the singer.  This is followed by a very complex and loud passage for the percussionist playing a quartet of timpani.  Then comes a more meditative section for clarinet and a setting (in French of course) of Psalm 131; “Eternel! je n’ai ni un coeur qui s’enfle, ni des regards hautains”.  Then there is a concluding section “mobiles”.  It’s pretty typical Vivier I think.  It’s complex and full of surprises and packs a lot into about a quarter of an hour.

The second half of the programme was where the real experimentation came in.  It was a sort of exploration of different AI technologies in a musical setting.  So, at one point Young was declaiming Blake in a variety of styles while the speakers were playing a version that seemed to have gone through Google Translate, several times, almost to the point of unintelligibilty.  Something similar happened with ChatGPT riffing off Psalm 131 (in English) via Vocoder while the words were read/sung as written.  It’s really hard to describe what this felt like but it was thought provoking and sometimes very funny.  Finally the trio played us out with an electronic improv based on the mood of the Blake.

It was a really unusual evening which I thought showed a lot of imagination in conception and boldness and skill in execution.  More please.