CVS is pleased to feature a new work for viola and percussion, The Letter, by Ottawa-area composer and percussionist, Brian Pantekoek. This work offers violists the unusual opportunity to perform through spoken word and musical improvisation.
The Letter was composed at this writer's invitation for six performances of "Ritual - New Music for Viola and Percussion" at the 1998 Ottawa Fringe Festival from June 20 to 27 at Ottawa's Arts Court. In The Letter, Brian Pantekoek explores surrealism, that European artistic movement which flourished between the two world wars. He was particularly attracted to the juxtaposition of randomly chosen words, as found in the poetry of André Breton, Paul Éluard and Pierre Reverdy.
The idea of surrealism, represented primarily in literature and painting, was to unite the conscious and unconscious minds in order to experience the fantastic alongside reality - as André Breton wrote, an "absolute reality, a surreality." In addition to musical improvisation in The Letter, Brian Pantekoek uses randomly chosen and sometimes startling combinations of words, which are narrated by both players. The composer asks the audience and the performers to linger over the meanings of these phrases and not to discard them immediately, as we usually do when forming logical thought. The result is an intriguing, semi-theatrical improvisation of words and music with a random element.
Composers often take inspiration from other arts, but it is fairly uncommon for a composer to express his or her ideas concurrently in another artistic discipline such as visual art or poetry. For Brian Pantekoek, however, this is not unusual. In 1990, he studied visual art in Red Deer, Alberta, for a year to "explore art as a private endeavour," he says. "Visual art is not like music, which is a very public display. The experience helped open my eyes to what the creative process is. It also gave me time to explore philosophy and to see how the artist's mind works - how it seems to be actually on the canvass, like a snapshot of a moment in time."
A visual component of The Letter is a pen and ink drawing that Mr. Pantekoek rendered in 1991 in Victoria, British Columbia. This drawing, which is part of The Letter's score, is viewed only by the performers and is used to inspire an improvised section near the end of the piece. The players can follow the drawing's lines to suggest pitch or gesture, take the general impression of the drawing to communicate a musical atmosphere, or do anything else they want using the drawing as a guide.
Born in Saskatoon in 1969, Mr. Pantekoek's musical influences started with piano lessons as a child. He also performed in rock bands when he was a teenager. Soon after he heard The Rite of Spring, he enrolled in the music program at the University of Ottawa. Improvisation has always been a large part of his approach to composition.
"I believe music should be interactive," he says. "I want a piece to evolve with every performance. If you let elements of chance emerge, you can involve your listeners differently. In a way, I don't write the music at all - the listeners walk away with their own version of what happened. It's very subjective."
He continues: "Lately, I've been reading Busoni, who talks about the impossibility of program music. I think he's right - it's impossible to convey a specific musical idea completely. You have to have faith that your listeners will bring something of themselves to the experience."
Brian Pantekoek asks for a fair amount of improvisation in The Letter. The piece begins with the violist stating: "I begin my correspondence with..." before playing notated musical ideas. Then follows a semi-improvised section in which the violist and percussionist play a series of musical "cells," in any clef the players choose and in any order, while both players narrate simultaneously.
To create narration material that had a random element, the composer constructed several sentence models in which he identified the order of nouns, verbs, adverbs, prepositions and other linguistic elements. He then made lists of words in each category, wrote each word on a card, randomly selected cards from each category, and inserted each word into a sentence model. The result is text that has normal English syntax but with randomly juxtaposed words. Here is a sample of the narration used in The Letter's première:
Spoken first by percussionist; then spoken by violist: I appeal to your study like a reflection. It lives pointedly in Dante with my philosophy. Yet it thoughtfully asks who presents mythic ventilation instead of glad opinion in its aggravating, antique speed.
Spoken first by violist; then spoken by percussionist: Commemoration of new froth seems geometrically followed by finger. Passenger, placate fact. Movement, invention both seem unevenly zig-zag; assumption and hatred overcome historically posted precognition.
Brian Pantekoek is now composing several companion pieces to The Letter that are similarly derived. His idea is to have these pieces performed simultaneously - a vivid, intense experience for performers and listeners alike.
Another work by Brian Pantekoek of interest to violists is If We Remain Healthy (1994) for viola, piano and percussion. This piece has three movements: "Bald Man Sitting Here" (solo viola), "Trash Heap Birds" (viola and piano) and "The Subject of People and Time" (viola, piano, two percussion and tape). The movements can be performed alone or together, and poetry by the composer accompanies each movement. Other works by Brian Pantekoek include Cog has a Very Short Life (1995) for two percussion, tuba and recorded sound; Songs of Love and Death for soprano, flute, piano and two percussion; and Brevity I, for soprano, flute and piano, which was commissioned and broadcast by CBC radio in 1998.
In addition to composing, Brian Pantekoek has been active as a player with the Ottawa Symphony Orchestra and several other groups, including the Heisenberg Ensemble, a new-music group devoted to music for percussion and electronics. He is presently undertaking M.Mus. studies in percussion at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is also developing his teaching skills to, as he puts it, "pass along the language and to give the tools to express."
Also on the program in performances of "Ritual" at the Ottawa Fringe Festival were Ottawa composer Jan Jarvlepp's Encounter (1991) for viola and conga drums; U.S. composer Janice Giteck's Tapasya (1987) for viola and percussion; Brian Pantekoek's Under the White Sheets (1998) for solo percussion; Michael Spassov (Fantasy, 1997) and Hull-area composer Sylvie Rocheleau (Élugubration, 1998). Excerpts from a performance of The Letter were featured in a broadcast of CBC television's The National on 26 June 1998.
- KJ