11/11/2020 "Trans gured Light" -- spine-tingling Vancou er Obser er

"T a dL " -- -
A a a d b A a' c a a a d Ha

Lincoln Ka e Oct 3rd, 2018

Transfiguration can challenge performers and audiences, alike. Image: Peter-Paul Reubens

In the run-up to Halloween, Vancouver s avant garde Arkora and Redshift Music ensembles
have shivered our timbers et again with round two of their seasonal benchmark
Transfigured Light soir es.

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11/11/2020 "Trans gured Light" -- spine-tingling Vancou er Obser er

What made the recital so haunting was not just its grave ard venue: Mountain View
Cemeter s brutalist, acousticall perfect Celebration Hall. Even more spine tingling was the
concert s menu of 10 pieces seven of them world premieres all ver different in tone, te t
and inspiration, but sharing in common a penchant for microtonalities.

These are interstitial semi-tones between the customar notes of the well-tempered scale,
for a total of 31 tones to the octave rather than the conventional 12. To the untutored ear the
result can seem a bit chilling downright Halloweenish, in fact. But once ou acclimate, the
e panded range brings out unsuspected nuances in the music.

Still, microtones take some getting used to, not just for audiences but also for the ensemble s
16 top-flight musicians, recruited from all across North America. No mean feat for Arkora co-
founder and conductor Kathleen Allan to meld the group into a cohesive whole with just a
couple of da s of full-ensemble rehearsals and such a challenging repertoire in the unfamiliar
microtonal idiom.

For vocalists, drummers, cellists and violinists, at least, the challenges are more conceptual
than technical; the can elide tones at will once the shed the strictures of classical training.
But the 12-tone scale is built right into the structure of a fretted guitar, sa , or a piano
ke board. And, when it comes to idiophones, Arkora/Redshift co-director Benton Roark, Allan s
creative and conjugal partner, had to invent a whole new instrument, the lumiphone, to
accommodate the e tra tones.

It s more than twice the si e of a normal vibe set about as big as a putting green and
entirel made of glass. Jonathan Allen, who spent most of the evening frisking up and down
the macro-marimba, reports it s virtuall invisible when ou re standing over it. I pla it
mostl b muscle memor .

No instruments embellished the concert s opening piece. To break us in eas to the 31-tone
octave, the eight Arkora vocalists led with an a capella rendering of a four-part organum from
the 13th centur , back when semitones still flourished in Western music. The piece, b P rotin
The Great, is built around a drawn out plainsong drone in the bass register, which the
upper three registers elaboratel ornamented with microtonal melismas.

Still in relativel subdued mode, programme segues into a homophonic rendering of a

medieval courtl love poem, l Amour de Mo ( within a tender garden ). The three female
voices braid the voluptuous (but chastel allegorical) l ric so languidl that ou d think we
were still in the world of ornamented medieval plainsong.

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11/11/2020 "Trans gured Light" -- spine-tingling Vancou er Obser er

But in fact this is a brand new, world-premiere piece b McGill professor Jonathan Wild. Its
cutting-edge contemporaneit clicks into focus when Allen and fellow-percussionist Daniel
Morph chime in with a scintillating, understated lumiphone accompaniment.

Alongside his original music, Wild nurtures a research interest in pre-modern antecedents of
microtonalit , with a special concentration on the 16th centur composer/theoretician Nicola
Vicentino. We re ne t treated to a snippet of a four-part Vicentino madrigal as challenging to
audiences in his own time, according to contemporar accounts, as much of microtonal music
can be to uninitiates toda .

Which brings us to the more overtl challenging mid-section of the concert, starting with the
world premiere of Tova Kardonne s Temper, Temper. The title s a pla on words. It alludes to
Kardonne s conscious disruption of the artificiall even temper of the canonical 12-tone scale.
But it also admonishes an out-of-the blue temper tantrum; the suppressed rage unleashed
against us when we ve borne the brunt of angers not of [our own] making an e perience
all-too-familiar to us lib-tards nowada s.

R ad M :

L c Ka ' MORE FROM LINCOLN KAYE

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