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Get cozy with some PuSh Festival artists! Interview with composer Rodney Sharman

Vancouver Is Awesome is a proud media partner of the 2012 PuSh Festival ! Throughout the festival the folks who run things will be bringing you intimate features from behind the scenes to the front lines.

Vancouver Is Awesome is a proud media partner of the 2012 PuSh Festival! Throughout the festival the folks who run things will be bringing you intimate features from behind the scenes to the front lines.

On Sunday, January 29, the Turning Point Ensemble premieres a brand new work at the 2012 PuSh Festival by acclaimed Vancouver composer Rodney Sharman in the program Colourful World.

We asked Rodney a bit about his writing, and about this new work. Here is what he had to say...

Photo of Rodney Sharman by Victor John Penner

Having been born in Saskatchewan and then living a number of other places before coming to Vancouver, what influence (if any) do you feel that Vancouver and the artistic scene here, has had on your creative output?

I have lived in Vancouver some 20 years. It is a place where I take pleasure writing music in a way that I have not done since I was a teenager, where I feel my artistic vision can stretch in all directions, where I am can shape culture as well as be shaped by it.

I am particularly proud of founding the Jean Coulthard Readings at the Vancouver Symphony when I was Composer-in-Residence and of the many commissions I was able to arrange for others, especially during the VS millennium season. I am also happy with the part I played in helping Ballet BC over the years a public speaker and volunteer.

I have grown as an artist through my relationships with many fine Vancouver musicians, among them the late Maestro Sergiu Comissiona, VS Music Director Bramwell Tovey, bassoonist Christopher Millard, harpist Rita Costanzi, violinist Mark Ferris, pianist Rachel Iwaasa and flutist Mark McGregor. Owen Underhill has been a marvellous supporter of my work, first with Vancouver New Music, especially the production of my opera, Elsewhereless, and now with Turning Point. I write cabaret songs with Vancouver writer Bill Richardson sometimes, too.

I love dance and visual art and my artistic life has been enriched by dance performances and galleries here. I only wish there were more of them!

What composers or compositions have most recently been inspiring or interesting to you?

I was very excited by the music of a young composer from London, Laura Bowler, whose work I heard in Banff when I was working on the Chamber Symphony in the Leighton Studios. At 25, she is already working on commissions from the London Philharmonic and BBC Symphony orchestras. She asked me for a composition lesson while I was there, and I was impressed by her work. The piece for the LPO is a concerto grosso  with clarinet, cello, harp and percussion soloists. I found her work personal and beautifully orchestrated, incorporating noise with harmony in very natural way. The sound world of this piece has just a touch of evil, too, rare in music.

How did you first become acquainted with the Turning Point Ensemble, and what interests you about writing for this specific instrumentation?

I have known about Turning Point since its inception. They first performed my work in a tribute concert for my former teacher, Murray Adaskin. Murray's work was featured alongside music by his former teacher, the great French composer Darius Milhaud. TPE's approach to programming is unique in my experience. The shaping of a concert to include a new work with its spiritual and artistic ancestors is a beautiful one.

The instrumentation of the ensemble is tricky, however. We refer to this kind of orchestra with one of each instrument as a sinfonietta. The composer has to write very, very carefully, lest the strings be overpowered by the winds.

The history of this kind of ensemble is fascinating musically. Arnold Schoenberg is known as the first to write for this combination in his two chamber symphonies, but it was Debussy's plan to write 6 sonatas, of which we have 3: for flute, viola and harp, violin and piano, cello and piano. There were to have been sonatas for clarinet, bassoon and trumpet, one for horn, oboe and harpsichord, and a final sonata for all the instruments together: flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, violin, viola, cello with piano, harpsichord and harp. This is very close to the TPE and the sinfonietta. It is a great pity he died before completing the project.

Can you tell us a bit about the new work you have written for TPE?

Chamber Symphony

What a pleasure after years as a Composer-in-Residence to be asked by Turning Point to write a longer abstract work! My chamber symphony is about form as an organic process, not a narrative. The first movement is both slow movement and first movement form simultaneously and (like traditional sonata form) concerns the interplay of two musical ideas and their variations. The second movement is a commentary on the traditional scherzo and finale without reference to dance forms. In these respects the work is in dialogue with Classical form, but the musical surface honours the sensitive orchestration of the accompanying works on the programme by Takemitsu, Debussy and my dear teacher, Morton Feldman.

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Click here to find out more about Turning Point Ensemble: Colourful World, Jan 29, 2012

Photo of Turning Point Ensemble by Chris Randle