Semaine du Neuf | Loving and Cosmic Conclusion

La Semaine du Neuf, presented for the third in a row year by Groupe Le Vivier, came to a close on Sunday at the Music Media Room (MMR) of McGill University’s Schulich School of Music. On the program: propulsion towards love and the cosmos!

An opera for one voice, nothing else. An opera soliloquizing, sung, said, whispered, growled, whispered, shouted and more. Love unbridled, tender, protective, lost, found, passionate, mature, stable, serene, you name it. A hundred languages. Melodic, diatonic, chromatic, atonal, noisy and textural discourses. The main themes of Ana Sokolović’s work are introduced by movements symbolically embodied by doves singing declarations of love expressed in 100 languages, except for the theme of loss.

In short, all the angles, all the facets, all the states of love are reviewed here by the composer and performed before an audience by mezzo-soprano Kristin Hoff. The latter has been working on the work for a dozen years, and needless to say, she has mastered its most minute details, communicating the experience with consummate skill.

An authentic performance, a physical feat lasting 40 minutes! The demands of the work are high for this performer alone with herself, who must also exude a theatricality of love while meeting the work’s technical challenges.

The second part of the program was from New York: Star Maker Fragments, composed in 2021. American Taylor Brook composes for instrumental and/or electronic music, as well as for robotics, generative music, video, theater and dance. A devotee of the microtonal approach, he strives to integrate all the sound tools and practices representative of our times.

New York-based ensemble TAK has been working with Taylor Brook since the early days of his career, at the turn of the last decade. The work Star Maker Fragments, which closed La Semaine du Neuf, is based on the novel Star Maker by British writer Olaf Stapledon, now considered a classic of science fiction. The novel’s narrator is “transported” out of his body and finds himself exploring interstellar space. His mind merges with those of beings from other worlds, traveling across galaxies. In this way, a collective mind is formed, and eventually meets the Star Maker, a supreme being who created the universe. The narrator realizes that his universe is just one of many, that it is not the greatest of all, and that every universe is a work of art.

As such, this work attempts to embody suspension in infinite space. The instrumental parts (flute, bass clarinet, violin, percussion) remain relatively simple, fluid and continuous, with no high demands on articulation. Soprano Charlotte Mundy provides the vocals and narration, and we’re in space for an hour of microvariations and complementary electroacoustic effects produced by the composer and triggered by percussionist Ellery Trafford. Understandably, the individual real-time interventions are perhaps less important than their interstellar alloy. Hovering, cosmic, definitely in the air (and space) of time. This concludes the 3rd Semaine du Neuf.