All-female festivELLE devotes event to late Jocelyn Morlock and her advocacy for mental health
Allegra Chamber Orchestra and Astrolabe Musik Theatre revisit the composer’s moving work, and perform pieces including one by her mentee Mari Alice Conrad
Jocelyn Morlock
Mari Alice Conrad
Heather Pawsey
Janna Sailor
The Allegra Chamber Orchestra and Astrolabe Musik Theatre present festivELLE at the Vancouver Playhouse on June 29 and 30
AS A WOMEN-LED organization with the explicit mandate of supporting female and minority artists, the Allegra Chamber Orchestra’s programming leans heavily, if not exclusively, on that portion of the population blessed with two X chromosomes. But for the 2023 edition of its biennial festivELLE, a summertime celebration of contemporary music, Allegra is focusing on something that affects everyone: mental health.
More specifically, the company will present art that examines different aspects of mental illness, along with a pair of professionally guided mental-health workshops and several free screenings of the short film Left Opened, a look at everyday anxiety and how to cope with it. For Allegra artistic director Janna Sailor, festivELLE’s theme is at once an artistic opportunity, a public service, and a sad necessity.
Like many, many others, Sailor is still grieving the sudden death of the luminously gifted and universally beloved composer Jocelyn Morlock, who died in March; she had both spoken about her own struggles with mental illness publicly and long advocated for others. Realizing that this loss needed to be commemorated, and given that festivELLE’s theme was already in place, the Allegra team quickly decided to open the festival with a celebration of Morlock’s work.
A Beautiful Mind will be a welcome opportunity for those of us who knew Morlock to revisit her music, and a superbly curated way for others to acquaint themselves with it. Featured will be a selection of the late composer’s finest compositions, from pieces for solo piano (Jack Pine, as performed by Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa) to ones for chamber orchestra (My Name Is Amanda Todd, played by Allegra itself). Also heard will be Morlock’s gorgeous Exaudi, written for and here reprised by musica intima, and the Vancouver debut of Allegra’s in-house string quartet, Allegra SQ, performing Vermillion. A portion of ticket sales will be donated to the Amanda Todd Legacy Society, which provides mental-health resources to youth affected by bullying.
Morlock’s influence will continue into festivELLE’s second concert, a collaboration with Astrolabe Musik Theatre. Although Hearing Voices is built around the English composer Jocelyn Pook’s work for soprano, tape, and orchestra of the same name, it will also feature three compositions that have come out of Allegra’s Composer Incubator initiative, in which emerging composers Sasha Kow, Holly Winter, and Mari Alice Conrad were paired with more established artists. Morlock mentored both Kow and Conrad, an experience that the latter says was essential in the development of her piece The Peculiar Dances of Shifting Minds, and in her own personal growth.
“I had studied a lot of Jocelyn’s scores and knew a lot of her music well, and I was very excited to be partnered with her for this project,” Conrad explains. “She was really very gracious in terms of respecting my process—which really taught me a lot about mentoring in general. I’ve had some opportunities to do some mentoring since then, and I think of that a lot. She would give me space to come up with some ideas and have me explain them and talk them through. I find that sometimes it helps to talk things out with another creative person; it helps solidify what ideas you think are good and develop them further. She was just a very good listener that way, and she nurtured a lot of confidence in myself. I don’t think that was the intended outcome, but it was certainly a byproduct of interacting with her.
“She knew the right time to step in and question things and make me dig a little bit deeper into what I was going for,” the pianist and educator continues. “And she helped me think outside the box, but she never steered me away from my initial concept. She knew that that was what I wanted to do, and she helped me find the best ways to say what I wanted to say. And for technical things she was really patient in explaining how to orchestrate certain things, or how to create different sounds that I was looking for—how to strengthen those ideas and put more power behind them.”
Conrad’s The Peculiar Dances of Shifting Minds concerns her own first-hand encounters with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, as manifested in both of her grandmothers and other loved ones. And she’s hit on a brilliant way to illustrate the everyday strangeness of those conditions, by incorporating family memorabilia into her sonic textures. “For example,” she explains, “some objects that became musical tools were ukuleles, a table, canning jars, and also the canning-jar rings. I created a wind chime out of these very delicate, discarded canning-jar rings, and it made for a beautiful, beautiful sound. And in the second movement, specifically, I created a kind of aggregate drum set with these objects, so it certainly has an upbeat, interesting, quirky groove to it.
“It was very exciting to take these objects that had memory-substance and just kind of explore them as musical objects,” she adds. “That was one way that I was able to integrate memories of moments that I’d had, chatting with my grandmothers.”
Hearing Voices also integrates the past in moving ways, although in her piece Pook has chosen to give voice to five women—including her own mother and great aunt—who might otherwise have gone unheard due to their incarceration in mental-health facilities. Working with archival recordings and diary entries, she’s created a multimedia exploration of madness that is fully human, often enlightening, and not without comic relief. In its North American debut—up until now, it has only been performed by Pook’s own ensemble, and that rarely—it will be voiced by soprano and Astrolabe artistic director Heather Pawsey, who clearly considers it a masterpiece.
“It’s really pretty extraordinary,” she says. “It’s moving and powerful and intimate and funny and sad, and all kinds of things.”
Despite its relative accessibility, Pawsey adds, “there are sections where the orchestra is quite disjointed and chaotic and reflective of real pain. Pook does a brilliant job of balancing that accessibility with really intense, more discordant places where you really get a glimpse [of her subjects’ interior lives]—and not necessarily with words, because words can only take us so far. I’m a singer and words are my life, but there are times when they’re just inadequate, and I love that this piece makes space for both of those.”
The soprano admits that she will have to work hard to keep her sorrow over Morlock’s death out of her performance. As she notes, “I won’t be able to sing if I’m crying.” But this recent tragedy has only brought home how important it is for art and artists to address the issues that are at the heart of festivELLE.
“Mental illness touches all of us,” Pawsey says. “Even the people who think that they don’t have this in their lives, they do. It’s a family member, it’s a friend, it’s a colleague, it’s somebody they interact with on a daily basis. Mental health issues affect everybody, and so this piece really rings a chord. And I think the reason it does, too, is that there’s still so much fear about it. We talk about it more now than we used to, but there’s a lot of fear—and this piece never shies away from the really painful reality of what it’s like. But there’s also so much humour in it, and there’s hope. Not in a false, schmaltzy, sentimental way, but real hope.”
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