Modulus Festival shows the way forward through music
Mexican-Canadian composer Alfredo Santa Ana is one of several diverse artists bringing fresh sounds to the Music on Main event
Mexican-Canadian composer Alfredo Santa Ana’s Ye Elves has its world premiere at the 2021 Modulus Festival. Photo by Aaron Aubrey
Music on Main presents the 10th Modulus Festival from November 5 to 10 at the Roundhouse, the Annex, and the Post at 750.
IN A FAMOUS soliloquy from the final act Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Prospero relinquishes his magic, vowing to throw his book of spells deeper into the sea than any anchor ever sank. He forgives his enemies, and, in asking for applause to carry him home, he seeks forgiveness himself. The moment is widely seen as one that speaks to mercy and reconciliation, but Vancouver musicians Alfredo Santa Ana and David Pay are exploring the passage in a new light. The speech has given rise to a new work by Santa Ana, complete with a recorded reading of the text by hip-hop artist Prevail of the Swollen Members, which will have its world premiere at Music on Main’s 2021 Modulus Festival.
Santa Ana’s Ye Elves is a commission that will be part of a larger forthcoming work by Pay, an immersive full-length production called the Tempest Project that Music on Main will present in 2024. As dreams are made, Music on Main’s performance by a single artist for a single audience members, forms the project’s first section. (As dreams are made runs throughout the festival at the Annex.)
Santa Ana and Pay were moved to make music based on Prospero’s act of abandoning his “rough magic” because of what’s beneath the surface of the ruler’s words.
“In speaking with Dave, he and I chose the speech because it is a little bit of duplicitous speech that has continued to be open for conversation as far the interpretation goes,” Santa Ana shares with Stir in a phone interview. “A lot of people see it as a culminating moment in The Tempest but I agreed with him that it is about a lot of hubris and bravado, and really it’s just kind of cocky. Prospero is seen as this benevolent king, but nowadays we have different lenses and we can go back to The Tempest and see it through the lens of colonialism; we can see it through the lens of a master manipulator, a person who basically plays a game of chess and has a winning had at every turn. He really is a power-driven person. Even though he is giving up his magic, he is saying ‘if I can’t have it then nobody can.’ By the end of the speech he’s saying ‘I’m going to bury magic book of power so that no one do what I can do.’ So it’s still very much open to interpretation. That speech gave us a lot to work with.”
Ye Elves will have its premiere as part of a mixed program that will bring the 10th edition of Modulus Festival to a close, the densely diverse concert reflecting the fest’s overall breadth and daring.
Performed by the Tempest Project Company, Ye Elves features vocalist Julia Ulehla, Paolo Bortolussi on flute; electric guitarist Aram Bajakian; Saina Khaledi on santour; zheng player Dailin Hsieh; percussionist Julia Chien; cellist Jonathan Lo; pianist Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa, and conductor/trumpeter John Korsrud.
The 10th Modulus Festival Closing Night will also pay tribute to Louis Andriessen and Fredric Rzewski, revered composers who both recently passed. In composing Ye Elves, Santa Ana—who hails from Mexico City and moved to Vancouver to study at UBC, where he earned his Master’s and PhD degrees in music—was inspired by their creativity and their contributions to the world of music.
“They were really maverick composers for the way they approached not just music-making, but their political reasoning behind some of their music-making is really powerful,” says Santa Ana, who was the inaugural composer in residence for the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at UBC and an associate composer with the Canadian Music Centre. “In the music-making spirit of the ’60s and ’70s, there’s to me a lot of parallels to what is happening right now. There’s a lot of politicization of health orders, there’s politicization of choices that we make every day, and I feel like piece itself, even though it’s not a radical political act, I did this piece to have a bit of an impact.”
Consider the way Santa Ana plays with rhythm, using two distinct approaches within the same piece not necessarily to signify juxtaposing ideas but to “create a bit of a third idea in the room”. “Part of the ensemble is going in one direction playing a beat of four, and the other part of the ensemble is playing in three, so we are going to get a composite rhythm of four against three,” he says.
With its vast array of sounds, in addition to the disembodied voice of Prevail, Ye Elves opened up so many avenues of experimentation and exploration for Santa Ana and the artists. “We are so lucky on the West Coast to have such a great range of instruments from around the world,” he says. “I’ve never worked with zheng, I’ve never worked with a santour all together like this before, and the combination of voice and electric guitar paired with cello and flute is something we can be very orchestrational about and very technical and academic or we can just get together and play loud music and have a lot of fun. I think I went down that direction.”
Music on Main founder David Pay.
Having fun has been as much a core element of Music on Main’s ethos as creating and sharing new music ever since day one. So has building community.
“We have at Music on Main a value around hosting people and making them feel comfortable,” Pay says in a phone interview with Stir. “We work at creating welcoming environments so that people can be permeable--that let us be open to new artistic experiences, open to conversation with the person next to us, where you’re comfortable saying why I loved it or didn’t love it or am glad I heard it. We take a stance of trying to create an environment where people themselves can build a community, where we’re interconnected. When we establish those connections, we care more about our neighbours and about our neighbours’ neighbours. Music opens us up to these experiences that let us understand or care for each other a bit better, where we care more about each other’s outcomes, about equality, justice, kindness, and peace. Music that brings us together is our mission.”
On the note of making people feel comfortable, Pay notes that despite the current public health orders allowing venues to operate at full capacity, Music on Main has decided to cap performances at 50 percent for everyone’s health and safety.
If the term “new music” makes anyone feel intimidated or unsure, Pay, who is also a fan of classical chamber music, points out that, whether a piece is hundreds of years old or brand new, at the heart is human emotion. “Our specific situation might change, but our real feelings and responses to music don’t change,” Pay says. “So much of what sounds familiar now—say Beethoven chord progressions—at the time was sound crashing down on people. Composers have always shown us new way forward. This is what I love about contemporary music, when a composer shows us a way forward—this is how sound works, how our feelings work, how brains work. Whether it’s a new idea or riffing on an old idea, they show that music is still a relevant part of our lives today.”
In programming the 10th iteration of Modulus Festival, Pay wanted to look back at some of the works Music on Main has done in the past and look forward with a selection of new pieces. Among the highlights is Doubt is a Way of Knowing, where Takeshi McGregor brings together four composers and lighting design by Adrian Muir. The program features the world premiere of Keiko Devaux’s “Hōrai”, with video, smoke, and ancient spirits. Nicole Lizée’s “Tarantino Études” plays with damaged film and audio to reveal hidden rhythms and a sword fight between flute player and Uma Thurman (rated 18A), while James O’Callaghan’s “Doubt is a way of knowing” explores simultaneous emotional reactions that we all experience by processing the sounds of the live flute through a second flute that acts as a speaker.
Takeshi McGregor will also perform Santa Ana’s Notgnirrac, a piece for solo flute inspired by the visual and literary art of Leonora Carrington, a Mexican-British artist who left Lancashire in her youth for in Mexico City. (Takeshi McGregor commissioned Notgnirrac for his Lutalica recording project, with a video filmed on location at the Museo Leonora Carrington in San Luis Potosí, Mexico.)
Santa Ana—who has composed for film, recently released an album of electronic music called Nightscape, and plays guitar in an avant-prog rock band—says he has long been fascinated with Carrington’s work, particularly due to the fact that, although she mingled with great Surrealist artists, she remained a singular, original voice. He was especially intrigued by her wild works of short fiction, by turns grotesque and beautiful.
“She had a complex personal geography, psychologically speaking, she was an immigrant from England to Mexico; I’m an immigrant in Canada” Santa Ana says. “My piece is based on a lot of her short stories. These stories are as bizarre as they come—there’s sausages in an aquarium, horses that speak, cabbage having sword fights… They are just so colourful. The piece is going in one direction then all of a sudden, it’s going in very different direction. It takes very sharp turns. I can tell you some theory behind it but honestly, I was just emotionally driven.”
For more information about Modulus Festival, see Music on Main.
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