Vancouver Chamber Choir sings of the cycles of life in TIME BENDS
Concert features world premiere of composer Peter Hannan’s Runs Deep, Bends Time, with electronic tracks and theme of mortality
Vancouver Chamber Choir.
Vancouver Chamber Choir presents TIME BENDS at St. James Community Square on October 14 at 7:30 pm
VANCOUVER COMPOSER PETER Hannan has been thinking about death a lot lately. Five years ago, his parents and in-laws were still around; now, they’re not. He’s not shy about revealing his age; at 70, many of his friends have “dropped off the map”. And loss of life is unavoidable anytime current events are being consumed. With decades of experience writing commissioned acoustic and electric scores, including works for opera and musical theatre, Hannan has translated his musings on mortality into Runs Deep, Bends Time. The piece will have its world premiere when Vancouver Chamber Choir presents TIME BENDS.
Lest you have the impression that the composition is dark and heavy, however, think again. A place of sadness or despair is not at all where the seasoned artist is coming from.
“The idea behind it [Time Bends] is that death is part of life,” Hannan tells Stir in a phone interview. “What I’m describing is death as one aspect of life.
“For choir pieces, I write my own texts and tend to be kind of philosophical,” he adds. “This piece follows one I wrote for musica intima called Rethink Forever, which was about love and sex. What’s next? Death.”
Peter Hannan.
Made up of nine distinct sections, Time Bends explores the cycle of life—and the way that that cycle can be abruptly interrupted. Among the work’s influences are Russia’s war against Ukraine and pandemics–the Black Death of 1348 and “our” global crisis (“We learned to bake on screens…/We danced in the kitchen on our screens…/We sang into our devices. Good luck with that”). There are also solos and spoken material performed by members of the choir. One section features responses of choirists when they were asked to say something about someobdy they lost (“My grandmother had 4 husbands. The last one was the only one she chose”); another consists of singers’ answers when asked to imagine a message from someone they have lost (“The music is endless here”).
Hannan’s work also quotes Renaissance composer Tomás Luis de Victoria’s Requiem, which is the program’s companion piece.
“The thing about death is it’s a universal topic,” Hannan says. “Everybody dies, and everybody has thoughts about it. This is my personal take on things that I find interesting to think about.”
The use of electronics in Runs Deep, Bends Time allows Hannan to create a kind of updated version of a cantata. The style opens up new possibilities for chamber choir and, he says, quashes stereotypes of such an ensemble—an entity perhaps associated by some with something “old and religious and churchy”, Hannan says, adding that electronic music “takes it out of that mode”.
Performing with electronic tracks isn’t new to Vancouver Chamber Choir under the guidance of artistic director Kari Turunen, but it’s certainly an approach that shifts the performance dynamics in many ways. For one, most of the pieces the ensemble performs are for voices only, without instruments.
“But much more relevantly, the electronics are a collaborative force that differs from instruments in the sense that they are pre-set, that is, worked out before the performance and not created on site,” Turunen tells Stir. “We have to adhere to the tracks and fit the live music-making to be in sync with them. There’s a fair degree of predestination, if you understand my meaning.
“A very concrete sign of this is that I will be hearing a click in my headphones to help us keep in precise tempo,” he adds. “This is a central change, as normally much of the shaping of the music is done through fluctuation of tempo, be it minute or major. So we have to phrase and shape both the music and the expression through other means. It’s challenging, but really interesting and even fun at the same time.”
Then there is the process of setting up the technology and striking the right balance between all the elements.
“It’s definitely outside all our usual comfort zones, but that’s how art does and should challenge us,” Turunen says. “Because the tracks have been molded over a long time by Peter, they include an incredible amount of material, be it complex rhythms, reworked speech, otherworldly harmonies, or references to many musical styles that the sound world could never be produced here and now without the aid of the digital world.
“Maybe you could think of it a little like the Lord of the Rings films,” he says, “where human beings act in digital environments that just could not be created as a real set.”
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