Additional Information
Regarded as “one of the most prominent ensembles in the United States practicing truly experimental music” (I Care If You Listen), the New York-based TAK Ensemble will stop in Montreal on Sunday, March 16 to close the third edition of La Semaine du Neuf. The musicians of TAK will share the stage with mezzo-soprano Kristin Hoff who will perform Ana Sokolovic’s Love Songs before performing the Canadian premiere of Taylor Brook work, Star Maker Fragments. Inspired by Olaf Stapledon’s 1937 novel Star Maker, this imaginative mixed electroacoustic work promises to be a musical and philosophical journey through space and sounds. Alexandre Villemaire of PAN M 360 had the chance to ask a few questions to Laura Cocks, executive director and flutist of TAK ensemble about this upcoming performance.
PAN M 360 What sparked this collaboration between Taylor Brook and TAK Ensemble on Star Maker Fragments?
Laura Cocks: TAK has been working with Brook from the very beginning. Having collaborated on a performance of his work Ecstatic Music for our first concert ever in 2013, we’ve been so thankful to continue and deepen our working relationship with Taylor in the past 12 years. He’s an immensely thoughtful person and musician, and the opportunity to create music with them is profoundly curious and expressive, while being simultaneously precise and clear—it’s the ultimate combination. After our first collaboration in 2013, we went on to work on several other works with Taylor, resulting in a portrait album of his work in 2016 (Ecstatic Music), the performance of several iterations of a theater work with TELE-violet, and in 2019 we began the work on Star Maker Fragments. Taylor had a new idea for a piece, and when Taylor has an idea, we all listen. We find their considerate creation of entire worlds to be absolutely irresistible, and this finely tuned expressive power has become a core part of TAK’s musical language and identity in the past 12 years. We were immediately struck by Taylor’s ways of spinning worlds of sound and structure, and are so thrilled to share this collaboration with y’all soon.
PAN M 360: The work is based on Olaf Stapledon’s 1937 science-fiction novel Star Maker. What are the underlying themes of the novel, and how are they expressed in the music?
Laura Cocks: The novel focuses on a human narrator that is transported out of their body to become a disembodied viewpoint that travels through space and time. Brook evocatively renders Stapledon’s descriptions of imaginary societies with his sweeping and transcendentally detailed microtonal lines. Implicitly critiquing the rise of global authoritarianism in both music and text, Brook relishes in Stapledon’s empathetic and thoughtfully pacifistic lens. The text of the work continues to be timely, though written almost one hundred years ago. As the narrator encounters other beings and describes their societies, we hear many echoes of tacit consent, and the sublimation into fascism that we are faced with today.
PAN M 360: Were you familiar with the work of Stapledon before creating the piece? What stroked you in his writing?
Laura Cocks : I personally was not, though others in the group were. It was a joy to encounter this work musically and textually simultaneously. There’s an almost anthropological scent to the way Stapledon describes various societies’ practices and modalities of relations.
PAN M 360: Experimentation plays a fundamental role in the identity and artistic practice of TAK Ensemble. I surmise it was also the case with Star Maker Fragments. What kind of experimentation comes into play to craft the final product and how does it work in conjunction with the ideas of the composer?
Laura Cocks : When Taylor first began work on Star Maker Fragments, they shared multiple sound files with us from various sources—sounds of lasers, from NASA, etc.—and we experimented on each of our instruments how to best recreate these sounds, to find parallels, and sounds in conversations that Taylor would weave into the work, both in its notated composition and the electronic track. The work is designed as a quasi-impossible piece, and much experimentation was performed to create the electronics with which the ensemble plays in performance. There are several versions of each member of TAK in the electronics part and each time I hear it I’m hearing a new way of looking into the world, and outside of it, as invited through Taylor’s absolutely brilliant imagination and patient orchestration.
PAN M 360: After your stop in Montreal for La Semaine du Neuf, what are your upcoming concerts and projects?
Laura Cocks : TAK is working with many student composers this season, premiering almost 40 student works. Upon returning from Montreal, we’ll be in residence at the Peabody Institute, New York University, and The Graduate Center, as well as wrapping up our season with a concert of works for TAK by Christian Quiñones, Aliayta Foon-Dancoes, Jessie Marino, and Bethany Younge. We’re looking forward to the second iteration of our festival, SWOONFEST in September (featuring Yarn/Wire, RAGE THORMBONES, Gushes, Nursalim Yadi Anugerah, Las Mariquitas, Qiujian Levi Lu, and Victoria Cheah), and the upcoming release of our next album with works by Eric Wubbels, Tyshawn Sorey, Bethany Younge, Lewis Nielson, and Golnaz Shariatzadeh. We’re currently in the workshopping stages for some commissions that we’re absolutely ecstatic about with Qiujiang Levi Lu, Victoria Cheah, Golnaz Shariatzadeh, Ann Cleare, and Hannah Kendall.
photo: Joanna (Asia) Mieleszko
