Big, ambitious. I like that. Transcendent power, yup. Wide harmony, close dissonances, choirs well prepared, strings as well, cellos doublebass carry the mystery from Eastern Europe...

Gate Study 05a uses samples from the following pieces commissioned by Soundstreams:
- Hatch, Peter "Time Zones" (2010)
- Hui, Melissa "Fred and John Were Having Tea (When I Dropped By)" (2004)
- Ka Nin, Chan "The Charmer" (1994)
- Staniland, Andrew "Hex" (2011)
Check out http://www.soundmakers.ca

Escher Creak (2014)

East Winging It - Ft Black Bear

Using text from Salman Rushdie’s novel 'The Ground Beneath Her Feet' and from abbreviated versions of the Latin Mass, Keys to the Unseen examines the subject of music itself. Two of its parts, Kyrie and Sanctus, refer to music from the past that survives in our consciousness and continues to exert an influence on the way we hear things today. If We Were Worthy of the World is about the transcendent power of singing and its uneasy connection with what used to be called the sacred. 

Instrumentation:
For children’s chorus, mixed chorus, strings, organ, vibraphone.

This work was premiered on February 6, 2000 during the '4 Choirs in Concert' presented by Soundstreams at St. Patrick's Church in Toronto, Canada

For more information about Randolph Peters and his work, please visit our SoundMakers website: http://www.soundmakers.ca/composers/randolph-peters



Keys to the Unseen by Randolph Peters

Charms

Vorwissen
Duration: 7 minutes
Instrumentation:  Piano Trio
Performed by:  The Gryphon Trio
Commissioned by:  Roger D. Moore, for Soundstreams Canada

Dedicated to Karen, Cézanne, and Kuusta

The bedrock of Vorwissen is the retrograde/palindrome problem. In a temporal medium such as music, retrogradation is a concept or sensation, but ultimately an artificial distortion of time.  Presenting material forward and then backward creates a central fulcrum of energy around which material is outwardly distributed.  Movement is made from the beginning toward the centre point (without knowledge of its location or existence), followed by the journey away - tracing unrealistically backward through the material while time moves forward (a 1 2 3 2 1 statement of materials competing against time’s momentum of 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9...).  The mercurial conflict between forward and implied backward motion is like two flints being rubbed together, their friction both complex and inflammatory, outward and inward.  

As well, the contrapuntal overlapping and superposition of normal-form and retrograded materials highlights the issue of objectivity.  Material presented simultaneously in opposite directions (as in Bach’s “crab” canons) implies a predetermination outside of the work.  Otherwise, how would one know the location of the middle and end points that are folded over one another?  Simultaneous and varying attenuations of the primary material heighten the stress of the objectivity, and the conflict with time’s forward momentum.

In a page right out of history, the plethora of retrogradation in Bach’s music is matched only by the palindromes of Olivier Messiaen.  Both are devoutly religious composers, and therein rests the problem that for years necessitated my compositional ban on retrogrades.  Are objectivity and material predetermination metaphors for the “Hand of God” in music?  Are retrogrades and palindromes artistic symbols of faith?  Such backward thinking was the inspiration for Vorwissen.



Vorwissen (excerpt), by Paul STEENHUISEN

Recording of John Kameel Farah's live performance from Roy Thompson Hall during the Toronto Symphony's New Creations Festival, March 7, 2013.
Presented by SoundStreams, as part of Farah's Residency with SoundMakers.

containing orchestral samples from the SoundMakers database; samples from pieces by Andrew Staniland, Peter Hatch, Kelly-Marie Murphy and James Rolfe

http://soundmakers.ca
http://www.soundstreams.ca



Soundscape from New Creations Festival, Mar26,2013 @ Roy Thompson Hall

Soundstreams is a Toronto-based music presenter that commissions, develops and showcases the work of contemporary Canadian composers and their international counterparts. 

Keys to the Unseen by Randolph Peters

Soundstreams

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