Written for the Quatuor Bozzini in 2011 and performed here by the Momenta Quartet in 2014, the title of this piece can be loosely translated as “To go around oneself, to conform oneself”. Those concepts play a role in the musical material on several different levels: harmonic material, rhythmic structure, form, the push and pull of musical tradition, the choices the performers have to make, and so forth. My goal was to work in the space on the edge of comfort, where there is enough familiarity for both performers and audience to get into the piece, but also a strong musical challenge that pushes us to the "transcendence" experience that I seek in music.

In this piece, I return to predominantly quartertonal harmonies for the first time in a few years. However, the harmonic framework also fits loosely into G-sharp minor/B major. The intent, like in much of my microtonal work, is that the quartertones go largely unnoticed by the casual listener. I build up a type of pseudo-Renaissance structure, transparent and smooth, using quartertones not to approximate just intonation, but rather to create a sort of “what-if”, alternate-reality harmonic system.

Se contourner se conformer (Momenta Quartet)

Who Made the Inch of Grass was written for Corey Hamm and Nicole Li as part of their Piano and Erhu Project, and they recorded it for Volume Two of their project compilation, released on Redshift Music in January 2015. This was my first time writing for erhu, an instrument that I have long wanted to explore. I am particularly attracted to the lyrical nature of the erhu and its tradition of ornamentation, so I knew I wanted to feature those elements. 

As I was starting on the piece, I remembered a short melodic fragment left over from another piece, buried in my stacks of papers. This fragment had to be left out of the earlier piece for logistical reasons, but I had been hanging onto it because I liked it and wanted to use it somewhere else. I had a hunch it might work for Who Made the Inch of Grass.

That fragment now forms the first few phrases of the piece. I developed it into a delicate, lyrical line, ornamented with traditional erhu slides, warbles, and vibrato. This material is juxtaposed against a floating, asynchronous piano that weaves in and out of the melodic framework. Throughout the piece, the two parts play quasi-independently, dancing around each other, tied together harmonically but not playing at the same time. Sometimes the erhu takes the lead, at other times the piano takes over. The end result is a rich, dreamlike texture, constantly changing through the push and pull of the musical materials.

Who Made the Inch of Grass

Soprano Sarah Kirsch sang Sensational Revolution in Medicine on the Eckhardt Grammaté competition, Canada's preeminent competition for young up-and-coming performers. She went on to win first place and toured Sensational Revolution across Canada along with pianist Maddy Hildebrand. This is a recording of her fantastic, exuberant interpretation, made during the winner's tour.

Sensational Revolution in Medicine (Sarah Kirsch, Maddy Hildebrand)

My performance background is in percussion, but for much of my adult live I've lived in apartments where the loud sounds of percussion are not a good fit. That juxtaposition inspired this piece, written for percussionist Justin DeHart. 

This is the first in a series, each of which will explore a single percussion instrument, played very quietly, at a volume appropriate for performance in an apartment (without disturbing the neighbors)—a sort of percussion chamber music in the original sense of the term. The pieces are amplified and rely largely on “microsounds”: textures and timbres that are too quiet to be heard at regular performance volumes.

Cover photo CC Lauren Manning on Flickr.

Percussion for Apartments: Conga

Break Up Make Up exists essentially because two Vancouver groups—the Nu:BC Collective (piano trio) and Turning Point Ensemble (chamber orchestra)—wanted to perform together. They approached me to compose a piece that would place Nu:BC as concerto soloists within the larger Turning Point instrumentation, setting up what is essentially a modern interpretation of the baroque concerto grosso.

Immediately my mind went to the idea of pitting the two ensembles against each other: opposing forces that try to wrestle the musical material away in a sort of tug-of-war. But I didn’t want this to be a one-trick pony, so sometimes the ensembles would have to cooperate too, putting aside their differences and playing together as one big happy orchestra. 

That framework allowed me to set up a sort of consonance/dissonance relationship in terms of how well the two groups were “getting along.” It also reminded me of the stereotypical stormy couple: that high-drama, off-again-on-again pair that fights, breaks up, and gets back together repeatedly much to the exasperation of their friends.

Inspired as such by the idea of romantic melodrama, I turned to Liszt—whose music I’ve always hated—but who was perhaps a useful resource in terms of finding musical materials to fit my theme. A dyed-in-the-wool contrarian, I thought why not try to bend the Lisztian zeitgeist to my will? Why not fully steep myself in that uninspiring world of empty flourishes to fish out some kernel that actually resonates, that I can make my own and build upon in an interesting way? 

So that’s what I did. The piece isn’t neo-Romantic, and I didn’t quote Liszt anywhere in it, but I distilled the essence of his music as I see it, reimagining and transforming it in ways that make sense to me. It is an homage? A reconciliation? A giving of the middle finger? I’m not sure, but the journey led me into an exciting sound world that highlights the strengths of the concerto grosso format in a decidedly non-traditional manner.

Break Up Make Up

I wrote Puppies!!! for Elevate Ensemble’s “Stravinsky: Reconstructed” program. The task was to create a short duet for trombone and bass trombone, showcasing the characteristics that make the trombone unique. Of course, I turned to glissandi (sliding pitches), the sine qua non of the trombone. But I also didn’t want the piece to be a cliché, as so many trombone pieces are glissando-heavy. 

So I started playing around with a figure that alternates small, quick glissandi between each trombone, back and forth. That worked for me, taking the music in directions that seemed fresh and interesting. Also, somehow this kind of sliding, rambling interplay reminded me of the way puppies play together, tumbling on top of each other over and over. My wife loves dogs, but we can’t have pets right now, and whenever she sees a cute puppy she’s so happy. So I decided to name the piece Puppies!!! as a sort of dedication to her.

Puppies!!!

Don’t Look At is an expansion and recomposition of my short trombone duet Puppies!!! Written for the same instrumentation as Stravinsky’s Octet for Winds, it takes the materials from the earlier piece and reinterprets them for larger forces. Puppies!!!, however, uses a lot of glissandi (sliding pitches), which don’t necessarily translate all that well for other instruments. Especially in this ensemble, the other woodwinds and brass involved are not particularly designed for glissandi.

This means I had to do a fair amount of reimagining and reinterpreting to make the piece work. I took the core ideas from Puppies!!!, but I had to transform them significantly. It’s not so much a question of “take this piano chord and write it for strings,” it more like, “take this piano, and make it sound like a flute.” 

This proved to be a rewarding challenge. The material went in unexpected directions and turned into something I wouldn’t have expected, but that I quite like. And since the piece is inspired by a trombone duet, I thought of the famous mis-quote of Richard Strauss. Everyone thinks he said, “Don’t look at the trombones, it only encourages them,” but in fact he just said something like, “Be brief and direct with the brass when you cue them.” Very different sentiments, but the myth has lived on. In the same way, Don’t Look At misrepresents the ethos of Puppies!!! in many ways, but in the process it turns into something else that is interesting in its own right.

Don't Look At

The idea for Percussion for Apartments came to me a few years ago when percussionist Justin DeHart and I were talking about collaborating on a solo percussion project. My instrumental background is in percussion, but starting in college I often lived in apartments where it wasn’t practical to practice at home. I was always somewhat jealous of musicians who played quieter instruments and could practice without having to head out to the studio.

We struck upon the idea of doing a series of quiet pieces for percussion that were “apartment appropriate”—a sort of chamber music for percussion in the original sense of the term.

Since everything was to be played quietly, it would by necessity involve a lot of extended techniques and nontraditional sounds. In addition, the act of generating all those sounds consistently requires a sort of intimate, tactile relationship with the instrument that would make a multipercussion setup impractical. For that reason, I decided to focus each piece on a single instrument and the sounds it could generate. To add textural interest, I also incorporated a live looping patch, written in SuperCollider, as a part of the performance.

Justin premiered the first piece, for solo conga, at a festival in Goiânia, Brazil, in 2015. Following the success of that piece, we decided to create three additional vignettes, for suspended cymbal, glockenspiel, and pandeiro.

Percussion For Apartments - 4. Pandeiro

Percussion For Apartments - 3. Glockenspiel

Percussion For Apartments - 2. Suspended Cymbal

Percussion For Apartments - 1. Conga

Jackhammer Lullaby is an arrangement of Community-Normed, which was commissioned by the Continuum Ensemble in Toronto in 2008. I’ve become increasingly interested in presenting pieces in multiple versions and combinations. Jackhammer Lullaby, with a few changes, is also the middle movement of Community-Normed. I’ve also written a third version, for a chamber music conference in Vermont in July 2009, with different instrumentation and adapted for amateur performers.

Why multiple versions? Because music today is multiple. Everyone is exposed to music from multiple cultures all the time, from multiple time periods, and in multiple versions. DJs remix pop songs, which are available in numerous versions, and do mash-ups that intertwine multiple tracks in the space of a few seconds. I think this is a good way to deal with the fact that we are, for the first time in history, drowning in more music than anyone knows what to do with. For this reason, creating multiple versions is an important project of mine.

Musically, Jackhammer Lullaby presents a humorous musical setting of trying to fall asleep with construction going on outside the window.

Jackhammer Lullaby

Kiss Around the World was commissioned by New Works Calgary and the Canada Council for the Arts for Ensemble Resonance. It is the second Around the World piece that I have written, taking a single word—in this case kiss—and presenting it in a wide variety of languages.

The idea of kissing takes on very different connotations in different languages, and I wanted to find a connotation that was as universal as possible. Therefore, in Kiss Around the World I decided to focus on the idea of the nurturing kiss, the kiss a parent would give a child. This was the most universal use of kissing I came across. Romantic kissing, which is what I initially thought would make the best focus, is not universal. It did not exist in much of Asia before the arrival of the Europeans; Koreans and Japanese actually use a modified form of the English word for romantic kissing.

Musically, Kiss Around the World is made up of a series of short sound units, usually one per word, that are arranged and developed into a lyrical, flowing texture. Being a composer obsessed with fragmentation and contrast, this was a novel and stimulating challenge for me that grew out of the theme of the piece and the musical materials at hand. The result is a soothing, gentle piece that has certain aspects of a lullaby, all the while employing the collage/mosaic techniques that are the hallmarks of my style. There is even a little collage surprise at the end of the piece…

Aaron Gervais Composer

Pinned to spotlight

Popular tracks