Sandeep Bhagwati is the Montreal composer to whom the Société de musique contemporaine du Québec’s (SMCQ) prestigious Hommage Series is dedicated. In concert and in exhibition, Sandeep’s works and concepts kick off this Sunday, September 24, 3pm, Salle Pierre-Mercure.
The entrance hall announces “a rare opportunity to bring together two worlds of contemporary art: music and the visual arts”. Over the course of a week, Sandeep Bhagwati’s interactive creation concept allows us to explore the practice he calls comprovisation, a contraction of composition and improvisation.
In it, Sandeep Bhagwati proposes his vision of the division of roles between musicians and composer in a collaborative work. The interactive scores of this comprovisation aim to make exchanges between different musical practices from different cultures more fluid. Thus, 12 visual artists are invited to create in a comprovisation context and express in a pictorial language what the music inscribes in them.
SMCQ’s first major concert, Exercices d’étrangeté , is presented in collaboration with the Vietnamese Cultural Centre of Canada, with this idea as a backdrop: “listen: strange that / too close things deafen us… and yet, from afar, they resound so clearly…” This is a free adaptation of a text by the Vietnamese poet Nguyễn Duy, written when he was thinking of his compatriots abroad.
In this way, Sandeep Bhagwati’s work is inspired by notions of proximity and distance, closeness and remoteness, familiarity and strangeness. The work refers not only to sounds, needless to say, but also to words and images. Musicians from different backgrounds (Vietnam, Sweden, Canada, Quebec) “comprovising” with their respective backgrounds (pop, baroque, jazz, experimental, etc.) interact optimally and adhere to the composer’s instructions. More precisely, short sound segments are aligned and superimposed in this singular journey.
Sandeep Bhagwati was born in Bombay to a German mother and an Indian father. From the age of 5, he grew up in Germany, enrolled from 1984 to 1987 at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg, then studied composition at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater München in Munich, not to mention various master classes with Killmayer, Hans-Jürgen von Bose and Edison Denisov, among others. In addition, he has deepened his knowledge of computer music at IRCAM (Paris), worked on a number of projects in the field of computer music, and is a member of the IRCAM team (Paris), he has worked with Brian Ferneyhough and Tristan Murail, among others.
With Moritz Eggert, he co-founded the A*Devantgarde festival in 1991.From 1990 to 1992, he was co-artistic director of the “AmateurKomponistenWerkstatt” composers’ workshop at the Munich Biennale, where he premiered his own five-act opera and libretto, Ramanujan, based on the life of the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920).From 1995 to 1998, he worked at IRCAM, then as a guest composer at the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and at the “Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie” (Institute for Electronic Music and Acoustics) in Graz, not to mention his collaboration with the Beethoven Orchester Bonn.
From 2000 to 2003, he taught composition at the Musikhochschule Karlsruhe. Since 2006, Sandeep Bhagwati has held the Canada Research Chair in Inter-X Art Theory and Practice at Concordia University’s Faculty of Fine Arts in Montreal.PAN M 360 suggests an audiovisual interview with Sandeep Bhagwati, in advance of this Tribute Series.
MORE INFOS ON THESE PROGRAMS HERE :
“Comprovisations” for Sandeep Bhagwati, Salle Pierre-Mercure Hall, from Sept 24 to Sept 28,
Amitiés et étrangetés, Salle Pierre-Mercure, Sunday Sept 24 , 3 PM
