Montreal Serai

Notations 21 by Theresa Sauer is a collection of musical scores, beautifully written, drawn, painted, etched, computer generated, and so on by composers using non-traditional techniques for musical notation. Not long ago a friend was telling me about how his grandfather used to “read” musical scores at bedtime, engaged in the distraction as one might enjoy reading a short story before slumber. Another friend (with perfect pitch) describes how musical keys that contain a lot of sharps generally sound “brighter” to her. In his chapter on musical synesthesia (Ref 1), Oliver Sacks explains that for the general population the relationship between colour and music is metaphorical, but for the musical synesthete it is quite literal. What does all this have to do with Theresa Sauer’s 2009 collection of works (explorations) of musical notations? I swear there is a connection….give me a few paragraphs to figure it out with you.

Notations 21 encompasses Sauer’s research on musical notation and how the commonality “of notation comes from its purpose for the creation of music, a phenomenon that can allow for spectacular variations of musical scores” (p. 10). She solicited composers for samples of compositions with the option of including a statement or description. Some composers were also commissioned to write essays relating somehow to “notation, contemporary music, graphic scores, or the compositional process” (p. 8). The resulting 300-odd page book comprises an astounding collection of notations for musical compositions, essays on related topics, and inspirational and visual fodder for musicians and non-musicians alike. It is an exploration of the modes and media of contemporary music. The contributing composers hail from over 50 countries and diverge immensely in the style, intent, and essence of their musical notations; however they have one common thread, non of them use what we know as standard Western musical notation – although many do co-opt, distort, and subvert such notation in their own way.

The book is directly inspired by John Cage’s similar collection of the late sixties called Notations (Ref 2). In fact, it is in essence a continuation into the 21^st century of the archiving process that Cage undertook to preserve 20th century notational forms. His book (co-edited with Alison Knowles) was partially conceived to benefit the Foundation of Contemporary Performance Arts and he solicited hundreds of composers, visual artists, and writers to contribute to the book (Ref 3). The selections used in the book and further manuscripts spanning the years 1884-1990 are part of the John Cage Collection in the Northwestern University Music Library (Ref 4).

I was previously unfamiliar with this endeavour of John Cage. I know of him (admittedly quite naively) as the person who influenced Yoko Ono in music and performance art, who in turn influenced John Lennon, who ultimately influenced all of contemporary pop music (and beyond). The recent exhibit at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Imagine: The Peace Ballad of John and Yoko, had numerous examples of Ono and Lennon’s use of differing media apart from sound to express musical ideas. In fact Cage’s Notations book and collection include contributions from the Beatles’ canon.

The first thing I did upon opening Notations 21 was to go to Theresa Sauer’s own piece in the collection called Parthenogenesis.

Excerpt from Parthenogenesis (2009) by Theresa Sauer. For da’uli da’uli and an unspecified number of female voices.

The title refers to the Komodo dragon’s ability to reproduce without the aid of males. The piece is intended for da’uli da’uli (an instrument that is struck) and female vocalists singing in Bugis (a language of Komodo Island). Sauer chooses to give a fairly detailed description of the inspiration for the piece, and some rudimentary instructions on how to interpret the score for improvisation.

Although no piece in the collection is “typical” of the others, Sauer’s piece, like many of the others, has an inherent visual beauty independent of its function as a guide to the performing musicians. Someone seeing (not hearing) the work on its own, with no explanation, would be at pains to decipher its pragmatic role. Sauer’s instructions and description serve as a guideline of her intent (e.g. “the vertical lines should intuitively guide the strikes of the da’uli da’uli”), but no one “reading” her score can predict how the music will sound. Granted that this is partly due to the improvisational nature of the piece, but herein lies a major difference from the notations used in the anthology and a more standardized form of notation. Remember my friend’s grandfather who read scores? He could hear an orchestra playing in his mind’s ear. I am a musician, but I don’t read music (or I don’t read it very well anyways). Apparently learning to sight read music is not so difficult a skill to learn – and even those that don’t have the skill can imagine what it is like. If you are having trouble imagining it – watch this animation of John Coltrane’s Giant Steps:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kotK9FNEYU

But many of the scores in Notations 21 rely on an intuitive rather than literal translation from the notation to the music.

1. Excerpt from Versus (1997) by Kerry John Andrews. For solo voice and piano. Andrews is a visual artist whose scores explore, amongst other things, linear time and stasis. The excerpt above is the vocal part while the piano part is in traditional notation.

2. Excerpt from Museik No. 9 (1979) by Henrik Colding-Jorgensen. For any instrumentation. The word “Museik” is a combination of the Danish words for “museum” and “music”. This series was originally conceived for very young instrumentalists.

3. Excerpt from Das Licht im Dunkel der Wolke (2006) by Peter Hölscher.

4. Excerpt from Paprika King (1996) by Joe Pignato. For any number of improvisers.

5. Excerpt from Picnic (2006) by Cilla McQueen. For violins, oboe, and bass guitar. A poem beginning “Two violins, the first smelling of roses, the second holding a sword” guides the piece.

6. Excerpt from “mapping space in sound” itself from Pavilion Scores 1-5 (2005-2006) by Steve Roden. For children’s glockenspiel. Created as a site-specific work for the Serpentine Gallery’s Summer Pavilion – mirroring the architectural construction of the space. In this case the colours guide the set notes but timing etc. is up to the performers.

This intuitive process of interpretation might be akin to the musical synesthete seeing music, except in reverse, and thus hearing pictures. Perhaps my friend would play more sharps during the brighter parts of some of these notations. It is more likely that each musician, when left to interpret such a visual notation uses personal metaphors to translate the score.

Many other composers decided to subvert more familiar notational forms playing with either the visual aesthetic of such notation or the semantic notions.

1. Excerpt from Lunar Cascade in Serial Time (2009) by Dennis Báthory-Kitsz. For tenor guitar. In the essay accompanying the piece the composer writes “Music notation engenders disagreement and passion because it is so tightly bound to legibility, meaning, and especially physicality”.

2. Excerpt from “DreamFrame” itself from Five Terrestrial Projections for Guitar and Other Instruments (1989) by Joe Catalano. For guitar alone. The graphic content is a reworking of celestial diagrams by Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Kepler.

3. Excerpt from Zones of Coherence (2003) by David Rosenboom. For trumpet virtuoso. In the detailed essay accompanying the piece the composer writes “The title refers to how zones of musical meaning emerge from a form in which the parts are modular….”

4. Excerpt from Val Comonica: animali (2002) by David Young. For solo violin. In the detailed instruction to the violinist the composer writes “While by its very nature this notation has many freedoms, every attempt should be made to realize the graphics’ contours and shapes as carefully as possible”

Other composers have chosen to make the medium a game where musicians can improvise in a playful manner.

1. Excerpt from Ink Bops (2000/2007) by Ellen Burr. To be played alone or in a group, Ink Bops are musical improvisation cards presented on a poker-deck size of 56 customized cards.

2. Excerpt from Hexagonie (2007) by Gaël Navard. A musical game for 2, 3, 4, or 6 players. The composer writes “the score itself is…mobile because it evolves in real-time with the game.”

Still others have chosen a more technical interpretation when creating a score.

1. Excerpt from “Graphic Score Number 9″ itself from 21 Graphic Scores (2001) by Mike Langford. For tape and computer. The methodology of creating the scores originally begun in a technical drawing class this excerpt is based on a tape of birds singing and a Fibonacci spiral.

2. Excerpt from Grid (2002) by Vagn E. Olsson. For variable instrumentation. The composer states “Every section/square in the compositions can be rearranged and played in any order whatsoever.”

Obviously with the enormous range of composers and works included in this book it is impossible to give more than a meagre taste of the wide range of notations included within. Interestingly, many of the composers cite John Cage as an influence in their work and a piece of his own is included in the collection. Sauer is also respectful of Cage’s original method, for example revealing the composers in alphabetical order rather than by any particular theme. The presentation of the scores is also true to the spirit of Alison Knowles montage-type presentation in the original Cage collection, but it is definitely more stylized in 2009. The book is well indexed including composer biographies listed at the end.  

Although the collection was apparently put together in a matter of months I feel it would take me much, much longer to fully reflect upon and absorb the works within….I have yet to attempt performing any of the pieces. But to leisurely wander through these scores is a pleasure – picking up on themes and ideas by chance with a random flip of the page. Incorporating chance into art was a constant theme in John Cage’s work, and it is probably appropriate to end with a quotation from the preface of his original anthology. Although he is talking about the way in which pieces of text accompanying the notations were truncated by chance – I think it also applies to the mind-frame when exploring these scores:

A precedent for the absence of information which characterizes this book is the contemporary aquarium (no longer a dark hallway with each species in its own illuminated tank separated from the others and named in Latin): a large glass house with all the fish in it swimming as in an ocean (Ref 2).

More information (and more complete images!):

http://www.notations21.net/

p.s. For a similar exploration of notation and composition that is local – check out Hearing/Visions/Sonores – an exhibit of contemporary Quebec music composers who incorporate notation and improvisation into their work.

http://www.improvcommunity.ca/hvs/home_eng.html

References

1. Sacks, Oliver. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. Revised and expanded. Toronto: Random House of Canada, 2008.

2. Cage, John and Knowles, Alison, Notations. New York: Something Else Press, 1969.

3. John Cage (1912-1992) Collection. Series II. Notations Project p. 1. <http://www.library.northwestern.edu/music/archival-collections/Cage-Series2-Notations.pdf>. Accessed August 2009.

4. John Cage Collection Northwestern University Music Library <http://www.library.northwestern.edu/music/archival-collections/cage.html>.

 Yves Engler’s The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy

When long-time Liberal “busboy” and former “rat-packer” Don Boudria was briefly minister for International cooperation and the Francophonie, he invited me to lunch during “Development Month” in 1997 to get some exposure in La Presse about his new portfolio and plans.

“Canada is received with open arms in Africa, you know. That’s because we come without the colonial baggage of the French and the Brits”, said he, a History graduate.

I could not let that delusional mantra go unchallenged. “That’s not true”, I said, “Canada is the very model of successful colonialism, or we’d be speaking Cree, Ojibwe or Inuktitut, instead of English and French”.

“Vous avez un point là”, he conceded after some thought, translating literally from the English: “You’ve got a point there”.

Yves Engler’s The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy is chockfull of such “points”, that demolish, as he writes in his Introduction, “Canadians’ self-appraisal of their country’s foreign policy (as) more positive that (that of) any other country”.

Consider the following hidden gems highlighted by Engler and his editors, Fernwood and Red Publishing, in promoting the book’s launch in the Spring:

• After World War I, Canada asked Britain for its Caribbean colonies;
• Washington did not press Ottawa to break relations with post-revolutionary Cuba because it wanted Canada to spy on the island;
• Canadian companies were heavily invested in apartheid South Africa;
• Canada helped overthrow Patrice Lumumba, the first elected Prime Minister of the Congo (Kinshasa), who was then murdered;
• Canadian “aid” has often been used to rewrite mining codes to benefit Canadian mining companies;
• Days after the September 11, 1973 overthrow of elected Chilean President Salvador Allende, Canada’s ambassador in Santiago called the victims of the military coup “the riffraff of the Latin American Left”;
• Canada has been the 5^th or 6^th largest contributor to the US war against Iraq;
• On many occasions since 1915, Canadian gunboats have been deployed in the Caribbean and around Central America’
• Canada had between 250 and 450 nuclear-armed fighter jets in Europe in the 1960s;
• Leftist US intellectual Noam Chomsky considers Peace Nobelist Lester Pearson, the icon of Canada’s “peacekeeping diplomacy”, a war criminal because of his support for the US war on Vietnam.

These are not State secrets anymore. They are facts available to any researcher.  But few are interested to go there. And that’s the beauty of Engler’s nearly 300-page book: it draws its contents from the public record, churning and sifting the material for gems that, strung together, present a shining mirror to Canada’s dark side, and the reality check is devastating.

It is a measure of Canada’s ambiguous role in world affairs – an appeasing discourse to go with its well-polished image of a peace-loving “middle power” ever-ready to mediate in conflicts, coupled with a dark record of its treatment of its First Nations and a loyalty to Britain going back to the Boer War, a loyalty then transferred to Uncle Sam with World War II, as befits this major offshoot of the British Empire – that its intellectual elite has not produced any comprehensive and sweeping History of its Foreign policy.

What exist in print are scattered and partial studies of specific issues, like Canada’s role in the two World Wars and in UN peacekeeping or its relations with Europe or Latin America, or more recently on its part in the eight-year Afghan War, written by career-driven academics or journalists in line with the official or at least the dominant view.

Engler, like many other Canadians, was amazed at the poverty of the existing literature and at the total lack of any critical analysis of Canadian foreign policy as a whole. But unlike them, he set out to fill that need, an endeavour perfectly in line with his political activism.

Engler, who is not yet 30, has a thick record of arrests and suspensions related to his militancy on topical issues as campaigns against the WTO and the FTAA, Canada’s 2004 intervention in Haïti to topple the elected government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and Palestinian rights.

He was suspended in 2002 from Concordia University for his role in  blocking an address by Benjamin Netenyahu. Other suspensions followed for “breaches” of the initial order. He was seen distributing leaflets on campus. He argues he was there not as a student but in his capacity as elected VP of the Student Union, an exemption granted by the court. All this led to a five-year suspension in 2004.

He also made headlines un 2005 by smearing Foreign Affairs minister Pierre Pettigrew with cranberry juice during a press conference and shouting: “Pettigrew lies, Haitians die”. He was again arrested later that year for heckling Prime Minister Paul Martin and shouting: “Paul Martin lies, Haitians die”.

These are the burning concerns that drove his research. He points out in his introduction that he is neither a foreign policy expert nor a veteran diplomat. And that’s a very good thing too. He delves into the material unfettered, informed by his basic commitments and thirsting for a critical grasp of Canada’s behavior on the world scene.

The result is fascinating. Engler tackles his subject as a conscientious student and, even better, as a probing journalist. He uses classic tools of investigative journalism and presents his material through quotes from media articles, journals, books and electronic interviews and statements, injecting himself editorially to the strictest minimum.

Individual chapters deal with the Caribbean, the Middle East, Latin America, East Asia, Central and South Asia, Africa, and Canada’s international alliances. Each chapter comprises essays on individual countries, alliances and topics, and concludes with a discussion where the author sums up his insights, and a long list of footnotes giving the sources of quotations used.

But Yves Engler remains first and foremost a political activist. His Black Book is obviously not intended to adorn library shelves. It is meant as a tool for reflection, discussion and action. The penultimate chapter is in fact entitled: “Why our foreign policy is the way it is and how to change it”. The book closes with an 18-page bibliography.

Yves kindly invited me to say a few words at the Montreal launch of his book. I said it was the best gift I could have hoped for as I retired after 35 years as a foreign affairs journalist with La Presse. I tried over the years to bring a Southern sensibility to the readers of La Presse in trying to understand current affairs, way and beyond the simplistic dominant media and official discourse of Canada and its wealthy partners as “good guys” and the rest of the world as “evil, bad, unpredictable and all incompetent”.

I also said that a vote of thanks should go to Concordia University for giving Yves Engler the time and further motivation to write this book, following Playing Left Wing: From Rink Rat to Student Radical, and Canada in Haïti: Waging War on the Poor Majority (with Anthony Fenton). To be fair, he has earned his degree.

 Truth and Treason by Rahul Varma, Directed by Ariana Bardesono, September 8-19, 2009, Studio Hydro Quebec, Monument National, Montreal.

Christine Khalifa and Abdel Ghafour Elaazir

There is no denying that Truth and Treason is politically compelling. The shooting of a ten year old Iraqi-Canadian girl at the start of the play is an echo of the horrible recent bombing of the two oil tankers in Afghanistan. The set design is perfect for the content and the direction of the ten compelling performers is very good. It is also very important to reconfirm outrage at the making of war for profit and to be horrified by the on-going corruption that is the war in Iraq. The play is a very cinematic work; moving rapidly from short scene to short scene to movement and then more very short scenes.

I am one of the converted. I read the international news and keep my outrage fresh Therein lies the problem. Unlike Rahul Varma’s Bhopal, this play had no emotional focus. It was really impossible to identify with or even sympathies with any of the characters. I understand that we are accomplices in this and any war fought in our name.

Yet theatre has its own internal rules. There could have been a great emotional moment when Ahmed the Iraqi finally decides to go to Canada, after a great deal of begging on the part of his wife and the U.N. soldier. After his monumental announcement, the others in this scene just walk off and it never gets the emotional punch it merits, or rather, the emotional catharsis for which the audience was holding its collective breath.

There was an opportunity for some kind of feeling in the scene between husband and wife, after all he had been imprisoned for eighteen months and they had just lost a child. It was very hard to buy a love story between the uber- capitalist organizer of a conference of international investors and the relatively sympathetic American captain who actually made some effort to save the child. We were expected to buy a complex relationship without any foundation. The captain is the one character in the play who has integrity and honour, yet his part was so underdeveloped that Alex Ivanovici, whom I usually love in performance had only two notes, intense and quiet or loud and over the top. David Francis, one of our best actors, an actual national treasure, played the Commander in a virtual monotone. His character was written more as a caricature than a persona. Sarah Garton Stanley was more varied in her role as a reporter, but she should have known as a director herself that the script was underdeveloped.

Christine Aubin Khalifah, showed promise but was not given a chance to act. The idea of a lost child is enough to make most people emote. Her performance was so reserved; one did not feel for her at all. Abdeighafour Eleaaziz was not only too understated, he was sometimes barely comprehensible. Ivan Smith was performing in presentational mode as the sheik and the Prime Minister, while the other actors were seemingly in a method acting representational style. I would like to see Warona Setshwaelo perform in something more manageable. She has a terrific presence and is always interesting to watch. Her dialogue seemed awfully repetitive and her persona one- dimensional.

It was apparent in the performance that some of the actors were struggling with their lines. In the program there was an accent consultant, well, in pronunciation accent is not nearly as important as tone rhythm and stress.

Brecht wrote about the alienation technique, but no one is unmoved by Mother Courage and her fate. The scenes in Truth and Treason are so short, that they become very similar and it is harder and harder to follow the story. There were many scenes which merited longer beats. Very often the tone of the sentences was so flat that one was guessing at the meaning. It requires a particular ear to understand the import of certain dialogue, especially when the dialogue is minimal.

There is a great play here; I believe that Rahul has a plot that can work and a number of fascinating sub-plots. What he needs is a lot more dramaturgy. It is difficult enough to arouse an audience that is not yet converted to a point of view as sharp and important as Rahul’s; exposition and exhortation are not enough to accomplish this. Instead of giving us a huge beautiful canvass, one felt that here was graffiti being sprayed on and erased as we watched. I only hope that this play gets the next draft that it so clearly deserves and that it will be re-mounted soon.