Short Stories

Saturday, May 12, 2012
Music Gallery

“A film is – or should be – more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what’s behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.” – Stanley Kubrick

Contact explores the symbiotic relationship between sound and vision in which the two connect in a synesthetic sense, from narrative to abstract and all parts in between. Every pitch tells a story.

 

Program:

Dreams of the Blind* for ensemble, soundtrack and video text

Music and video by Yannis Kyriakides

(arranged for Contact by the composer)

 

Light Is Calling* for violin, soundtrack and film

Music by Michael Gordon

Film by Bill Morrison

 

New Work** for ensemble, electronics and video

Music by Christien Ledroit

Video by Jean Detheux

 

* Canadian premiere ** World premiere

 

Notes:

Dreams of the Blind

Dreams of the Blind is a suite of 5 pieces for ensemble, electronics and video. The dreams accounts of blind people seemed a suitable starting point, partly because it’s often describing sensations and images that language has limitations in describing. It’s the clumsiness by which we use language, its rationality, which sets up an interesting relation with how music functions, which is itself a language of sorts, but one that offers ambiguities and has direct access to certain emotional responses in us. The metaphor of the blind dreamer has also a strange relation to the fact that we a reading accounts of dreams that do not have to do with processing images memories but often sensations of hearing. Also, just as we are forming images in our minds when we read the dream texts, we also hear our mind’s voices reading the text to the music, a way of putting the voice of the audience at the centre, instead of hearing it sung or spoken by a performer.

 

Light Is Calling

Written days after the events of September 11, 2001, composer Michael Gordon sought to create something beautiful after witnessing something so ugly and tragic. Filmmaker Bill Morrison created the accompanying film by reprinting and re-editing a scene from the black-and-white 1926 movie, The Bells.

 

New Work

A new work that explores Ledroit’s musical sensibilities combining influences from contemporary classical/concert to rock and punk and many points in between while drawing on Contact’s hybrid chamber ensemble/rock band instrumentation. Detheux is a filmmaker, performer/vj and regular collaborator with musicians and composers, mixing real-time video manipulation with improvisation and fixed media.