Gradual Rise Music, a Toronto-based up to date classical live performance collection, has partnered with Charles Avenue Video and visitor curator Alexandra Fol for the multimedia showcase titled The place the Eye Meets the Ear.
There will likely be two performances on Might 23, obtainable in-person or as a stay stream from Charles Avenue Video.
Bulgarian-Canadian composer and organist Alexandra Fol is predicated in Montréal. She is a graduate of Boston College, the Eastman Faculty of Music, and McGill College. Her music has been carried out by Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, the Sofia Philharmonic, and the New Rating Chamber orchestra, amongst others, and her greater than 40 works embrace chamber, orchestral, and choral items.
Fol lives with a neurological situation referred to as pitch-colour synesthesia, which implies that she perceives sound visually, with colors linked to particular pitches. Her work MuSyn is designed to provide audiences a glimpse at her expertise of the world through a mix of chamber music, visible artwork, movie, and poetry.
Video turns into gentle, and sound turns into video. Visible artwork turns into music.
Alexandra has collaborated with a wide range of artist for this system, which mixes music for clarinet, trumpet, violin, and cello with digital sounds, spoken phrase, video, lighting results, and visible artwork works. Her collaborators embrace award-winning poet and visible artist Jessica Hiemstra, rising musicians Elias Doyle, Kailan Fournier, Joelle Crigger, and Emma Schmiedecke, and Canadian composers Matthew Lane, Saadi Daftari, Ana Paola Santillán Alcocer, and Tristan Zaba.
We requested Alexandra Fol about her artwork, and the multimedia present.
Alexandra Fol: Q&A
One other conductor instructed me that taking part in the organ — because it entails improvisation — typically acts as a form of gateway into composition. How did you come to determine you needed to develop into a composer?
At the moment’s Bulgaria being a majority-orthodox nation, I had not seen an organ from up shut till I used to be 18 years of age and already an skilled composer. Orthodox church buildings don’t enable devices in worship. Having transferred to Boston College from the Bulgarian State Academy of Music in January 2000 for a composition and piano diploma, I visited Tanglewood composition trainer, Dr Julian Wachner, at his office, Marsh Chapel, the place he was serving as titular organist. I instantly fell in love with the organ. Per week later I had modified to organ as my main instrument over piano.
After I was actually younger, I used to be training the primary motion of Mozart’s A-minor Sonata, the one one written initially for harpsichord. I used to be satisfied that the second chord ought to be a ii half-diminished 4/2.
Over dinner I used to be telling my dad and mom concerning the incorrect chord. My father then uttered the life-changing phrase, “Properly, why don’t you write the nice model your self?” and I had an epiphany.
My first work, in E-minor, A-A1 kind, includes two chords: the tonic, and the ii half-diminished 4/2. Destiny had spoken. I began composition classes at age 5 with Parashkef Hadzhiev.
How do you assume pitch-colour synesthesia impacts the way you compose music — or, maybe it doesn’t?
It does. My most popular sonorities, primarily based on {0, 1, 3} and {0, 1, 4} pitch-class units, enable for the thickness and the brightness of my colors to steadiness. Layering these sonorities in numerous permutations produces superimposed major-minor chords, which emerge because the referential sonorities in my music. The gradual harmonic growth, which underline the quick foreground, maps the soundscapes onto a slowly remodeling visible.
How would you describe your musical fashion? Are there any explicit composers which have influenced you?
I would not have a one-word description for my fashion, which includes a large number of influences, together with Bulgarian people music, neoclassical music, minimalism and others. Particular works have influenced me rather more than particular composers, notably Stravinsky’s The Ceremony of Spring, Chopin’s Noctunes, and Beethoven’s seventh Symphony.
What are you able to inform our readers about MuSyn?
The work could be very joyful, joyous and rather more virtuosic than its minimalist influences would suggest. I like taking my time to let a texture develop and permit folks to benefit from the pulsating sonorities. Every instrument has a soloistic second to shine. The work is accessible to all audiences.
What are you able to inform us about your collaboration with Louis Horvath? How did you develop the visible components to replicate your personal expertise of music?
Louis Horvath and I elaborated a fractal utilizing the obtainable technological sources. Subsequently I selected the color palette of every of the 5 photographs that accompany MuSyn. Within the phrases of the Fractal Basis: https://fractalfoundation.org/
“A fractal is a endless sample. Fractals are infinitely complicated patterns which can be self-similar throughout completely different scales. They’re created by repeating a easy course of again and again in an ongoing suggestions loop. Pushed by recursion, fractals are photographs of dynamic methods — the images of Chaos. Geometrically, they exist in between our acquainted dimensions. Fractal patterns are extraordinarily acquainted, since nature is stuffed with fractals. For example: timber, rivers, coastlines, mountains, clouds, seashells, hurricanes, and so forth. Summary fractals — such because the Mandelbrot Set — will be generated by a pc calculating a easy equation again and again.”
So, the patterns creates comparable, however not similar outcomes. Every tree leaf is completely different, clouds resemble each other, however are by no means the identical, et cetera. I discover that Horvath’s artwork greatest displays my method to a renewed minimalism: musical motifs are restated, however by no means repeated precisely as earlier than. We’re consistently on a musical journey, which I, the composer, can result in a sure end — however by no means an finish. Some colleagues have remarked that a few of my works appear to proceed an thought began in one other work, and they’re right. MuSyn opens a universe, however this universe could proceed in one other piece of music down the highway
- Discover extra particulars and tickets to the 2 performances on Might 23 [HERE].
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Anya Wassenberg is the Toronto Metropolis Editor at Ludwig Van. Beforehand, she was a contract author with a specialty in tradition and journey for 3 many years, and a artistic writing teacher for Ontariolearn.
