John Burge: Winter, text by Bliss Carman
Stephen Chatman: Shadow River, text by Pauline Johnson
Mary Gardiner: Zhawaninodin, text by Valancy Crawford
Stephanie Moore: Reflective Pieces, text by Anne Michaels
Alexander Rapoport: Northscapes, text by Barker Fairley
Erik Ross: The Rising Fire, text by Gwendolyn MacEwen
Roberta Stephen: The Eye of the Seasons, text by Lorna Crozier

The relationship of artists to the natural environment is a rich and complex one, and this evening’s programme explores the reactions of a variety of Canadian artists both to landscape and to one another’s work – painters are represented in the readings, and poets and composers in the musical repertoire. The poetry ranges from the late 19th century to the late 20th, while all the music dates from the last quarter-century.

Perhaps the most marked difference in the depiction of the natural world across this spectrum of compositions is the implied relationship between nature and culture, or between exterior and interior landscapes. The two earliest poets, E. Pauline Johnson and Isabella Valancy Crawford, represent (and themselves experienced) the encounter of Aboriginal and European cultures. Both treat the natural world as autonomous and objectively observable; curiously, Johnson (the Mohawk "insider") offers a more "European" view of landscape, while Crawford (the Irish "outsider") consciously incorporates elements of Ojibway tradition into her personification of natural forces. Both musical settings intensify the sense of nature’s power and mystery.

The poems of Bliss Carman and Barker Fairley represent a period during which writers attempted to forge new means of expression, integrating European lyric tradition and the Canadian experience of nature (as in Carman’s extended comparison of a winter wood to a Gothic cathedral), rather as the painters of the Group of Seven struggled to find new but recognizable ways of representing the Canadian wilderness to a southern, urban audience. Burge and Rapoport reflect this process in their choice of musical style, using contemporary tonal and harmonic language within traditional structures.

Anne Michaels’ poems, in Stephanie Moore’s settings, suggest the contingency of interior, emotional states on the external frame of nature. Lorna Crozier’s texts reflect this same concern, but also hint at the impact which human settlement has had – and continues to have – on the creatures with whom we share the land; and the delicacy of Roberta Stephen’s setting serves to emphasize this delicate balance. The three Gwendolyn MacEwen lyrics set by Erik Ross are perhaps unique in this programme, in that their focus is wholly subjective, and wholly interior, with natural images invoked only in passing.

John Burge (1961- ) – Winter, for voice, flute, and piano (1995)

John Burge is a composer, teacher, and pianist who has taught composition and analysis at Queen's University since 1987. He has received numerous commissions from organizations including Ottawa's Opera Lyra (The Master's House, 1984), Christ Church Cathedral in Vancouver (Mass for Prisoners of Conscience, 1987), and New Music Concerts (Interplay, 1989).

Winter is a setting of a 1916 sonnet by Bliss Carman (1861-1929). The composer remarks that "...Carman’s poetry is marked by both an attachment to the Canadian landscape and a somewhat mystical vision of the world", and he goes on to describe the work as

...structurally organized around a chorale-like theme, stated initially in the flute and piano, and the subsequent six treatments applied to this theme. The overall arc of the song is focused around the climactic setting of the phrase “showing the sunset glory through the chinks”. Thereafter the music gradually relaxes as both the momentum and tension recede to silence.

The theme is characterized by legato pairs of notes, descending suspension figures, and a rocking figure (in the first four notes of the flute); these elements, rhythmically and melodically transformed and expanded, provide the material for the six variations. At the climactic phrase, the flute and the left hand of the piano are in their most widely separated ranges, and brief rests in the vocal line combine with occasional staccato notes in the flute part to create the "chinks" for the light of the setting sun.

Stephen Chatman (1950- ) – Shadow River, for voice, alto flute, English horn, bass clarinet, horn, and bassoon (1981)

Born and trained in the United States, Stephen Chatman has been head of the composition division at the University of British Columbia since 1976. Shadow River dates from a period when his early style – complex, virtuosic, and atonal – was giving way to a more eclectic musical expression which includes simplified musical language, modality, and theatrical elements. It was commissioned for the Camerata d’Amici Woodwind Quintet, in Vancouver, and first performed in November of 1981. The text is by the Mohawk-English poet, Emily Pauline Johnson (1861-1913), also known as Tekahionwake (Mohawk for “double wampum”), a poet much in demand for performances in both Canada and England; her work combined a passion for Six Nations culture and oral tradition with a Victorian poetic sensibility and love of nature.

Chatman echoes the rich visual imagery of the poem in the contrasting timbres of the wind instruments, and the melodically compressed figures in significant sections of the vocal line reflect the delicacy and close interdependence of the elements of nature. The palette of irregular rhythmic subdivisions (primarily triplets and quintuplets), especially those in the opening and closing sections of the vocal part (which “indicate feeling; they need not be performed exactly in time”) brings into relief the sense of flux and unpredictability which might otherwise be obscured by the rather conventional tone of the poem.

Mary Gardiner (1932- ) – Zhawaninodin, for voices, percussion, and piano (1987)

Composer, pianist, and educator Mary Gardiner is a former chair of the Association of Canadian Women Composers, and she has been active in the Canadian Music Centre, and as president of the Alliance for Canadian New Music Projects. Her music has been published, recorded, broadcast and performed across Canada and internationally; in 2002, Conservatory Canada released The Music of Mary Gardiner, the third CD in its "Canadian Composers" series, and the CMC and the Canadian League of Composers presented her with the 2003 "Friends of Canadian Music" Award in recognition of her exceptional commitment to Canadian music.

Zhawaninodin (meaning “south wind” in Ojibway) is a setting of part of a epic poem entitled Malcolm’s Katie, by the Irish-Canadian poet Isabella Valancy Crawford (1850-1887). Crawford settled in Ontario with her family in 1857; she wrote poetry, novels and short stories for a variety of Canadian newspapers and magazines, but only one book, Old Spookses' Pass, Malcolm's Katie and Other Poems (1884), was published during her brief lifetime. Zhawaninodin was commissioned for the sesquicentennial celebrations of Victoria College. The work alternates sections in strict pulsing rhythm with highly atmospheric sections in free rhythm, in which both the singers and the pianist whisper the text. The singers are also required to play windchimes, shaker, and hand-drum, in an echo of the landscape and the Aboriginal culture which Crawford was attempting to evoke.

Stephanie Moore (1979- ) – Reflective Pieces, for voice and piano quartet (2007)

Stephanie Moore is a composition graduate of the University of Toronto who has written a number of works for voice and chamber ensembles, including settings of poems by Toronto poets, and an opera scene based on a libretto adapted from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Her teachers have included John Hawkins, Gary Kulesha, Chan Ka Nin, and Christos Hatzis.

Reflective Pieces sets texts from Lake of Two Rivers by Anne Michaels (1958- ), a Toronto poet perhaps best known for her novel Fugitive Pieces; it was first written for voice and piano, and this evening’s performance is the première of a revision for piano quartet. Michael’s imagery ranges from the purely visual, through evocation of the rhythms and smells of nature, to the completely metaphorical and abstract, and Moore highlights this variety in her use of accompanimental figures: the lapping waves in “Perfect Lethargy of Orbit”, the terse and percussive movement of “Women on a Beach”, the sustained and complex sonorities which reflect the depths of “Miner’s Pond”, and the sweeping droplets in “Rain Makes its Own Night”. “Emerges from Silence”, Michaels’ brilliantly concise statement on the relationship of nature, love, creativity, and silence, is also the most self-effacing of the settings, with spare sustained sonorities over an inexorably repeated single note.

Alexander Rapoport (1957- ) – Northscapes, for voice and string quartet (2001)

Alexander Rapoport received his musical training at the Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Vienna, and at the University of Toronto, where he is now a faculty member. His works cover a broad spectrum of genres – orchestral music, concertos, vocal, choral, and chamber music, musical comedy, and film scores. Northscapes was commissioned as a 25th-anniversary gift for an anonymous patron’s wife; the texts are by Barker Fairley, and celebrate the wilderness of northern Ontario, where the couple had spent many happy days hiking and canoeing in their youth. Fairley is most famous as a literary scholar and painter; his poems (58 in number) all date from 1922, a period during which he often went on canoe trips with artist friends, including members of the Group of Seven.

Each of the four movements establishes, in an instrumental introduction (and coda), a sense of the movement imagined in the text. In “Moon River”, the quick eddying of shallows, in rhythmic trills and background syncopations, alternates with the illusory stasis of flat or open water. Similarly, the contrast between the epic journey of migration and the rapid movement of wings in “Wild Geese” is echoed in the juxtaposition of highly active instrumental parts and a soaring vocal line. “The Forest” emphasizes the immensity and impenetrability of the woods: the watchers are arrested by the fall of a great tree, and eventually recalled to awareness of the world around them by the movement of water. In “Memories”, the subjectivity of the poet’s viewpoint is reflected in the unity of the arioso vocal line, while shifting instrumental figures convey the movement from prairie sunrise to the recollection of eastern woodland and waterfall, to the prospect of the Rockies and, finally, to a sense of the oneness of Creation.

Erik Ross (1972- ) – The Rising Fire, for voice and marimba (1999)

Erik Ross’ portfolio includes solo, chamber, vocal, and orchestral works, and he has composed for theatre, film and dance. His works have been performed in Canada, the United States, Mexico, England, Japan and Australia. His graduate studies were at the University of Toronto, where his advisor was Christos Hatzis, and he has been the recipient of numerous awards and commissions from the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council and the Laidlaw Foundation.

The Rising Fire sets three poems by Toronto poet Gwendolyn MacEwen (1941-1987). These texts are fragmentary and allusive, and Ross sets them in a declamatory recitativo style, using the higher part of the vocal range for emphasis and structural demarcation, as in the repetition of “[we have learned] nothing”, in “The Catalogues of Memory”, and in “Universe And”, where the musical climax of the entire set, on the word “high” is marked by a slow climb and crescendo to a high G flat. This same point features the most intensely active figures in the accompaniment; in fact, the marimba’s role throughout is to frame and colour the text and to draw together the words which the poet has strewn in patterns which - particularly in “Black and White” – defy the usual restrictions of syntax.

Roberta Stephen (1931 - ) – The Eye of the Seasons, for voice, clarinet, and piano (1997)

Alberta composer, singer, teacher, and publisher Roberta Stephen has been celebrated by the Canadian Music Centre for her role in creating and supporting new music in western Canada. Her repertoire includes solo piano, vocal, choral and chamber music, and she is currently President of New Works Calgary. The poet Lorna Crozier (1948- ) was born in Saskatchewan; she has lived and worked in various parts of western Canada (and occasionally in Toronto), and now teaches at the University of Victoria.

The Eye of the Seasons sets five lyrics from Crozier’s collection The Weather, highlighting the mutual vulnerability of human beings and the natural world. Stephen deploys her instrumental resources with restraint: “The Apple Tree” uses both clarinet and piano, and depicts the buzzing of bees and the gentle movement of leaves. “Study in White” and “Study in Grey” depict more static scenes; the former is set for voice and clarinet alone, unfolding long-breathed legato melodies, while the latter features a gently declamatory vocal line and a delicate piano accompaniment. All three performers are involved in “Magpie”, but never simultaneously – quick, darting figures are tossed from one to another, anticipating the magpie’s warning. Finally, the jovially driving 6/8 metre of “Spring Storm, 1916” conveys not only the inexorable whirl of the wind, but also the rueful humour which makes it possible for humans to survive in an arbitrary environment.