Concert Night Out

For the last week or so I’ve been using mscape to construct a soundscape of words collected from people using the Banff Centre at this particular moment in time.

Walking around the campus will generate random juxtapositions of these collected words and phrases, with the words and phrases being located in the space from which they were collected. No two walks will be the same.

Parts of the campus will be getting a slightly different treatment: the areas around the musicians’ rehearsal huts; the piano workshop; and a hill in some woodland. For these I’ve extended the collaborative process further, and have invited some of the musicians to provide instrumental phrases for re-combination.

A few chance happenings yesterday led me to catch some of the rehearsals for the weekly Friday concert, the second half of which was a performance of In C by Terry Riley. This was the first time I had come across this piece and it is my new favourite song music ever: resonating powerfully with themes in my recent practice.

The performance of In C at the concert was by turns long, repetitive …and hauntingly beautiful. One minute a part of you would be wondering when it would finish and the next everything would be swept away by a rising crescendo or an instrument’s voice standing out from the crowd. The varying shifts in focus were sublime …and nicely complemented by the glances and grins shared between the musicians as they intuited their way through the 53 phrases.

All Day Song from nikkipugh on Vimeo.

Whilst we were inside the recital hall for a few hours listening to people not playing the piano, clapping music, electronics and recorders, and weeks turning alongside more traditional pieces, Kinny “K” Blaze was out in the corridor playing an excerpt from his All Day Song. This too was powerful stuff and allowed to bleed into the main space at certain times.

Billed as “The concert reimagined. Guest curator David Pay rethinks the concert experience by restaging and recontextualising the works of our resident musicians”, right from the start the event had me thinking critically about performance and audience and expectations and endurance. There was a feeling of it being a happening rather than a concert and I’m sure I must have been grinning madly throughout most of it. Certainly for In C I was literally on the edge of my seat.