Infamy Too! brings play and precision to percussion at Music on Main's Listening. Together. fest
Aural adventures await, as Aaron Graham and Julia Chien join energized forces on everything from pop cans to woodblocks and gongs
Aaron Graham and Julia Chien at a recent Modulus festival. Photo by Jan Gates
Music on Main presents Listening.Together. for free online from May 14 to 18.
THE PURPOSE behind Listening.Together., Music on Main’s upcoming free series of concerts and conversations, is to provide some of the intimacy that artists and audiences alike have lost, thanks to more than a year of not being able to safely be in the same room at the same time.
So when it came time to choose artists who embody that spirit of close collaboration, it seemed natural to pick percussionists Julia Chien and Aaron Graham, who met as students at UBC some years ago and have worked together ever since.
As Infamy Too!, Chien and Graham are advancing the cause of percussion duos worldwide: trawling the Internet for material deserving greater recognition, commissioning and debuting new pieces from local peers, and—in the case of Graham, at least—writing some of it themselves.
“When we were at school we just continually sought out each other to work on stuff,” Graham reveals, in a conference call with Chien. “It just made sense to continue doing that, and it’s still like that. We had a long rehearsal process preparing for this festival, and it was just all fun.”
It’s obvious from the pieces that they’ve chosen to perform that their rehearsals also involved a major amount of hard work. Infamy Too! doesn’t shy away from intricacy, technical challenges, or fast-paced switch-ups. But Graham and Chien are also dedicated to the notion that new music doesn’t necessarily mean heavy lifting. A sense of play pervades their performance of Alyssa Weinberg’s Tabletalk, for which the two add pop cans, small gongs, and woodblocks to their shared vibraphone, while both Ivan Trevino’s Driven and Lenard Gao’s Passage owe as much to post- and progressive rock as to the European concert tradition.
Those two pieces are also decidedly tonal, and while not exactly easy listening, both allow that sensual pleasure should not be excluded from serious music.
“Personally, I like to be accessible,” Chien says. “Reaching a wider audience is important to me.”
“But I don’t think that was intentional, at least not on my part,” Graham adds, noting that accessibility “wasn’t an intentional choice”.
“I think that was just us being drawn to the kind of music that we enjoy, the kind of music that we’re interested in,” he continues. “Not to say that doesn’t include ‘overly cerebral’, kind of avant-garde music. I’ve been a fan of that and I know Julia has. It’s fun to play, but I think these pieces just kind of stuck out to us, and maybe we’re both drawn a little bit more to that style. We’ve both played in rock bands, we both are big pop music fans, and these pieces will be all the more successful if we enjoy playing them. If we’re drawn to the music, I think the audience will be, too.”
“Everything that Aaron said!” Chien adds, chuckling. “If it’s accessible to the audience, then when we add in the cerebral stuff, then it’s more likely to be received in a more open way, I guess….It’s a nice balance for us.”
Both Infamy Too! percussionists have an ongoing relationship with Listening.Together. producers Music on Main, having separately been chosen to take part in the organization’s Emerge on Main mentorship program, Chien in 2019 and Graham in 2020. And as far as artistic director David Pay is concerned, the two are now part of MoM’s creative family.
“They were actually the first people we booked for this festival,” he says in a separate telephone interview. “They’re both amazing artists, and although they’re not outwardly gregarious personalities, they’re really warm. They can be quiet in public situations, but when they get on-stage they both have just a totally there-for-the-audience-and-for-the-music energy.”
Music on Main’s David Pay
That just might be the through-line for the festival as a whole, which will encompass everything from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D minor, as played by violinist Chloe Kim, to free improvisation on the electric guitar, courtesy of Western Front music curator Aram Bajakian. (Also appearing are singer Julia Uhlela, both solo and with Bajakian in their Moravian-folk-melody-inspired Dálava collaboration; Iranian-Canadian electronic explorer Kimia Koochakzadi-Yazdi and relentlessly inventive flutist Mark Takeshi McGregor; pianist Erika Switzer and baritone Tyler Duncan; stellar pianist Rachel Iwaasa; composer and santour virtuoso Saina Khaledi on santour; and cellist Jonathan Lo.)
Pay must be given credit for assembling a wonderfully diverse selection of masterful performers, but he modestly denies having much involvement in deciding what they’ll present.
“It’s just the music that they love,” he says. “With this festival, that’s kind of at the core of it. ‘What do you want to share right now? What do you think people need to hear? What do you need to be playing?’ They came with this repertoire, and I think there’s something very revealing about people’s personalities in what they’ve chosen to play this spring.”
Related Articles
