Volume 21 Issue 8 - May 2016

Kronos’ Creative Currency
The Royal Conservatory’s 21C Music Festival
WENDALYN BARTLEY
The 21C Music Festival, now in the third edition of its guaranteed
five-year run, was originally conceived as an opportunity to
celebrate creativity, collaboration and commissioning, all critical
elements in the coinage of new music in the 21st century. This
year’s edition of the festival will do just that. Over five days and seven
concerts featuring 28+ premieres, its audiences’ ears will be abuzz with
sounds that capture fresh creative ideas and directions. Among the seven,
three projects stood out in particular for me, all of them offering world
premieres and, viewed together, revealing the overall scope and intent of
the festival – almost as though they were a single 3-part invention titled
Throat Singing – Darkness – Koto & Sho.
Tanya Tagaq and the Kronos Quartet performing
Nunavut, their first collaboration,
The Kronos Quartet: (left to right) David Harrington, violin,
John Sherba, violin, Sunny Yang, viola, Hank Dutt, cello
THROAT SINGING: Imagine having the capacity to sound like a
string quartet, all through using your throat and voice. That’s exactly
how David Harrington, Kronos Quartet’s first violinist, described the
exhilarating and ferocious throat singing of Tanya Tagaq. Although
Tagaq was raised on the lands of the Inuit people in the Arctic village
of Cambridge Bay in Nunavut, the traditional sounds of throat singing
were unknown to her while growing up. In fact the first time she
heard it was while studying at the Nova Scotia College of Art and
Design, on tapes sent to her by her mother. Fascinated by the sound,
she taught herself the technique by singing in the shower.
It was another recording (a January/February 2003 fRoots Magazine
compilation CD) that led to a meeting between Tagaq and the
legendary Kronos Quartet. While travelling home on a plane some 13
years ago, Harrington was listening to that CD. Track 1 was Youssou
N’Dour. Track 18 of 18 was something called “Ilgok” by Tanya Tagaq.
Harrington was transfixed. “It was an incredible vocal performance,”
he told me in a recent interview. “Although I had known about Inuit
throat singing for 30 years, I had not heard anything like it. It sounded
as if it were two to three people singing at the same time. After
listening to it about 30 times in a row, I knew I had to be in touch with
her and figure out a way to do music together.” They eventually met in
Spain when Tagaq, who was living there at the time, came to a Kronos
soundcheck and performed for them. “Knocked out” by what they
heard, the quartet resolved to make music with Tagaq.
It was up to Harrington to figure out how this was going to happen.
The night before their first rehearsal together in Whitehorse, Yukon,
he still didn’t know how it was going to work, but finally at 5am he
had an idea. Using his granddaughter’s crayons he made five coloured
squares – one for each performer – with the idea that each player
would musically interpret their own colour. Later they added more
coloured squares and found a way to connect the sounds that each
person came up with. This first collaboration, Nunavut, will be one of
a full program of works performed by Kronos in the opening concert
of the 21C festival on May 25.
Kronos is renowned for charting a wildly different musical path
for the string quartet as a chamber ensemble, and for their work
in mentoring emerging artists. This vision continues at the heart of
Fifty for the Future, their latest project, designed to create a repertoire
of training works for young string quartets to introduce them to
contemporary music. Starting in this current concert season, Kronos
will be commissioning 50 new works by 25 women and 25 men over
five years. Four of the works from Year One will be performed on the
May 25th concert, including the world premiere of a new commission
from Tagaq.
Reflecting on the Nunavut project, along with other pieces Kronos
and Tagaq have created together, Harrington says: “Tanya is an
amazing composer, even though she doesn’t necessarily think of
herself as a composer, she just does music.” Harrington so values his
experience of having worked with Tagaq that he invited her to be one
of the first ten composers to participate in the Fifty for the Future
project, because their collaboration over the years has been one aspect
of his own musical life and that of Kronos that he wants to be sure
other musicians, especially young musicians, are able to experience.
Why a vocal performer as a model for string quartet players, I
asked? “Because it sounds to me like she has a string quartet in her
throat,” Harrington replied. “And because Tanya is very connected to
nature and the way she thinks of music is a natural part of her life, it’s
effortless, even though she works very hard.”
For anyone who has had the experience of hearing Tanya Tagaq
perform, this statement will ring true. Something exudes off the stage
that seems rare yet also distantly familiar, like a calling back to our
primal roots. I asked her about the nature of this place it seems she
goes to when performing. “It’s not so much a place I go to as a place I
come to,” she responded. “It’s a freedom, a lack of control, an exploration,
and I’m reacting to whatever happens upon the path.” She spoke
about the limits we put upon ourselves as humans, and exclaimed
“Things need to happen to raise us to live in the moment!” This place
she comes to “requires being in the present, for when you are in the
8 | May 1, 2016 - June 7, 2016 thewholenote.com