This year’s New Voices concert from Soundstreams, curated by Haotian Yu, played at Hugh’s Room on Monday evening.  It set out to explore some of the issues around human migration through three works by diasporic Canadian composers.  It also explored the use of technology in the creation and performance of musical works.  Sio pretty ambitious.

Corie Rose Soumah’s Limpidités VI (a Canadian premiere) used saxophonists Bea Labikova and Jeffrey Leung to explore distance and exchange.  The musicians were at the opposite edges of the stage separated by various “containers” of cowrie shells which were wired and lit in some way.  There was a lot of extended technique and some swapping of types of sax, supplemented by electronics, creating a kind of unstable collection of ideas about distance and communication perhaps mediated by trade or exchange as suggested by the shells; once currency in many places.

Antony Tan’s Horizontal and Vertical Forces was a purely electronic piece I think intended to explore the way technology helps shape world/societal systems.  Being purely electronic there were no visuals and I think it’s really hard to express non-musical ideas purely through abstract sounds; or, at least, I find it hard to read.

Kotoka Suzuki’s Delicate Anticipation played with how what we see influences what we hear.  Percussionist Michael Murphy played in the dark behind a white scrim on which light played in different ways illuminating part of what was happening.  Do we hear what we can see differently from what is not revealed?  Do we subconsciously fill in the visual gaps; a sort of Plato’s musical cave perhaps?  I’d have to experience the piece more than once to even begin to answer those questions.

It was quite a short, 45 minutes or so concert, which asked a lot of questions only a handful of which could be addressed in the short Q&A that followed.  I guess the big one is how much does it matter how and why a composer created a particular piece when all the audience has is what is seen and heard during a performance?

Photo credits: Jesse Sarkis