TALEA Ensemble

Talea Ensemble (US)

Saturday, March 11, 2017 • 8PM
Free pre-show chat at 7:15PM
The Annex • 823 Seymour Street [Map]

Program:
Stefan Maier: territories III (2017)*
Fausto Romitelli: Trash TV Trance (2002)
Olga Neuwirth: spazio elastico (2005)
Pierluigi Billone: Ebe und anders (2014)

With:
Oren Fader, electric guitar
Jeffrey Means, conductor

* World Premiere, commissioned by Vancouver New Music with the assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts.

Last week we were with EMUSE, Aboriginal Electronic Music Festival, with the mastery of dialogue, electronic soundscapes and knowledge transference, which beyond the apparent austerity of the term, is purely based on generous acts of sharing, curiosity and conciliation. And here we prefer to omit the suffix “re-“ as we believe this process to be just a beginning and not yet a repetition.

Tonight with TALEA we encounter the mastery of deeply committed musicianship and curiosity together with an exceptional level of musical talent. TALEA’s selection of works offers anything but formalist composers and stems from a place of inquiry and provocation where sound, beyond pitch organization, become relationship, a visceral and phenomenal non-discursive place where both playing and listening are acts of seeking a singular and enigmatic presence. From the unknown of what Pierluigi Billone calls “communion” (the very act of cum-ponere), to the virtuosic beauty of both composition and de-composition in Olga Neuwirth: also a reminder of the (yet unknown) resonant erosions of Stefan Maier’s Territories III. On the other end Fausto Romitelli’s impetus, cut short by a premature passing, reveals the forging power of a brilliant and visionary sonic imagination. Psychedelic expansions and hybridizations flow and combine in his works in networks of sonic relations as poetic metaphors of profound artistic transformations.

What all this might just be about is that sound (and music) here and again, is not “a thing” but an event, a special kind of occurrence. Maybe a place, a relationship, a poietic gesture in which both musical activities and compositional practices are driven not by a need of objectifying acoustic phenomena in rigid and normalized apparatuses for assertive and sentimental definitions of sound (and music) as material, but by the “veridical perspectival content”[1] of perception and hearing: a constant and complex negotiation in between the perceived object and the perceiving subject.

The in between

The contingency of a temporal and cultural framework (medium)

Embodied forms of relationships

No one here really claims to have a distinct, “real”, and privileged understanding of the world. Though the musicians become the real makers of the world, and they seem to know well that this is not time for heroic stances that only lead to catastrophic consequences and ideological fallacies. Modern masters themselves TALEA’s musicians and their (de-) composers are here not celebrated heroic figures of a distant Olympus; the muses left us long time ago. We remain here listening to mousike and cultures deeply intertwined in the lives of many people who hear and understand the mutual inspiration and influence growing in open and dialogical forms, in the poetry and beauty of our imagination. Revolution might just be a kind form of revelation, an awakening in a recursive loop of infinite and circular erosions.

[1] Sounds – A Philosophical Theory, Casey O’Callaghan (2017)

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