Sep. 19, 2012 - Issue #883: Best of Edmonton 2012
Prevue
Bird on a Wire: Flocking Patterns
Sun, Sep 23 (8 pm)
Presented by the Boreal Electroacoustic Music Society (BEAMS)
Holy Trinity Anglican Church, $8 – $12
Recorders aren't just for elementary school music lessons. The instrument has been around since the Medieval period, and can accommodate a wealth of creativity past basic scales and tunes.
Former Edmontonian Terri Hron, a renowned recorder composer and performer, has been confronted by people who do not consider the recorder to be a real instrument, but says its unusual nature has allowed her to do her own thing with music and not be compared to other artists.
"Its limitations are also sometimes its real strengths because it pushes you very early to be creative, whereas there's a lot of instruments that are very refined. There's so much technique to learn that you spend such a long time just learning ho to play the instrument before you even start thinking about what you want to do," she notes.
Her project, Bird on a Wire: Flocking Patterns, is the second installment of her ongoing Bird on a Wire series and takes recorder one step further. The project requires Hron to balance performance, composition and exploring acoustic and electronic sounds in written and improvised situations that provides audiences with an all-encompassing experience that immerses them in sound.
"I was playing in bands that were loud and I wanted to be heard, so I started with amplification ... guitar players had all these amazing pedals and I thought, what would happen if I put my instrument through all those pedals?" she explains of her inspiration to start composing electroacoustic music, which she recalls was like opening Pandora's Box.
Hron rallied eight different composers, some of which had experience only writing for acoustic instruments, and vice versa.
"We have this long tradition of instruments, which are like voices we have to express ourselves ... throwing that out the window because we have new technology is maybe not the best idea, but just expressing ourselves with all of the different tools that we have at our disposal with tradition and innovation," Hron says.
Privacy Policy:
Vue respects your privacy. We will not forward your personal information to any other organization except as required by law, and will use your e-mail address only to respond to your comments. We reserve the right to edit and remove comments for length, clarity and/or if they are illegal or inappropriate. Your email address is never shown to visitors to vueweekly.com. Read the whole policy at: http://vueweekly.com/privacy
Comments policy
Comments go online directly without first being seen or reviewed by editors at Vue. Don't personally attack people, don't be defamatory, don't be spam-atory, don't hawk your band, don't pretend to be someone else, be clear, be on topic, be nice. Read our extended comments policy here. »
We use Disqus for our comments system. What's that all about?
We found that managing the comment community at Vue was easier to do with a system like Disqus. If this isn't straightforward to you, get help here.