Two new works premiered at the concert: Winter is when snakes, for oboe, piano, cello and soprano by Michael
Matthews,, and Spring Ice, for soprano and violin by Richard Festinger.
Both works featured electro-acoustic manipulations of my
recordings of ice breakup. The texts were collaboratively
chosen by the composers and myself. Matthews set a poem
by poet Dennis Cooley who teaches at the University of Manitoba
and spoke at the concert. Festinger set poems by the 12th
Century Japanese poets Princess Shikishi and Saigyo Hoshi, and
by the American writer A. R. Ammons.
Winter is when snakes is a setting of a poem by Dennis Cooley. The
electroacoustic sounds have been created from field recordings
made by Brenda Brown. Both the texts and sounds evoked for me
particular, yet indefinable, aspects of winter landscapes.
Michael Matthews
My newest composition Spring Ice links
together a disparate group of nature poems to create a
narrative and parable of seasonal change. A woman neither
young nor old stands at water's edge watching the signs of the
coming winter. The flowing sound of a stream ebbs and
fades, replaced be the chill sound of the wind. Time
itself seems buried in the snow. Yet at last the winter wanes.
The first barely audible dripping sounds of melting ice hint at
seasonal change, grow to a trickle, then a rush, and at last a
cascading torrent as the river ice explodes in the tumultuous
awakening of spring. Brenda Brown's luminously detailed
field recordings of ice breaking up on Winnipeg's rivers are
woven into the sonic equivalent of time-lapse photography as a
backdrop for my miniaturized settings of five epigramatic poems
by the 12th Century Japanese poets Princess Shikishi and Saigyo
Hoshi, in exquisitely crafted translations by Hiroaki Sato.
The sixth final climactic poem is by the intensely
lyrical American writer A. R. Ammons (1926-2001).
Richard Festinger
