Lutalica: solo flute music from the Pacific Rim

Wrenegade for solo flute (excerpt) by Nova Pon, performed by Mark Takeshi McGregor. Available on the album "Lutalica" on Redshift Records. Download the Lutalica album for free at: https://redshiftrecords.org/releases/tk468/

Wrenegade was inspired by a conversation between Canadian composer Nova Pon and flutist Mark Takeshi McGregor, which revealed the latter’s fear of birds—as well as his fascination with this fear. As a composer who frequently turns to nature for her “raw material”, Pon looked to the Pacific Wren, “a compact little bird, with an even more compact song: to most humans, it is an incomprehensible blurry burst of sound. However, if one seeks the means to listen to the song at a slower speed, one can approach perceiving it on a human scale, and begin to appreciate the complexity of information.” By presenting the wren’s song at various speeds (including “as fast as humanly possible”), Pon gives us a glimpse into the sound world with which birds communicate, all the while lightheartedly playing with the old trope of the flutist as the extrovert, flamboyant exponent of birdlike virtuosity.

Nova Pon: Wrenegade for solo flute (excerpt)

Harakeke for solo flute (excerpt) by Philip Brownlee, performed by Mark Takeshi McGregor. Available on the album "Lutalica" on Redshift Records. Download the Lutalica album for free at: redshiftrecords.org/releases/tk468/

Composer and sound artist Philip Brownlee is based in Wellington, New Zealand (Te Whanganui- a-Tara). While his recent work has focussed on improvisation, flexible musical notation, and collaborations with performers of traditional Māori music, the score for his 1999 solo flute piece, Harakeke, calls to mind the complexity works of Brian Ferneyhough. Inspired by the New Zealand flax plant (known also by its Māori word, “harakeke”), this work suggests flickering, swaying movement, and dry, rustling sounds — all set in motion by the agency of air, of wind, and, in this case, of human breath. Commissioned by flutist Bridget Douglas, the piece exploits the often unstable relationship between the flute as an acoustical system and the human gestures which activate it.

Philip Brownlee: Harakeke (excerpt)

Forever after for solo flute (excerpt) by Hope Lee, performed by Mark Takeshi McGregor. Available on the album "Lutalica" on Redshift Records. Download the Lutalica album for free at: redshiftrecords.org/releases/tk468/

Hope Lee is a Chinese-Canadian composer, born in Taiwan and immigrated to Canada in 1967; she’s presently based in Calgary (Treaty 7 territory), where she composes and teaches. Her solo flute piece, forever after (2000), is based on a previous work, ...I, Laika... for flute, cello, and piano, dedicated to the memory of the composer’s father, Colonel Luke S.S. Lee, an airforce pilot who was reported missing during a mission to Laos in 1961. While...I, Laika... evokes a requiem,forever after is a song of remembrance — though not without its moments of grief or even outright anger. The work alternates between lyricism and fits of percussive angst before finally evaporating into a peaceful latticework of grace notes and whistle tones.

Hope Lee: forever after (excerpt)

Hiraeth (Migration No. 2) for solo flute (excerpt) by Emilie LeBel, performed by Mark Takeshi McGregor. Available on the album "Lutalica" on Redshift Records. Download the Lutalica album for free at: redshiftrecords.org/releases/tk468/

Canadian composer Emilie LeBel hails from Toronto (Mississaugas of the Credit, Anishnabeg, Chippewa, Haudenosaunee, and Wendat territory) but presently teaches at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta (Treaty 6 territory). She composed Hiraeth (Migration no. 2) at the request of Mark Takeshi McGregor in 2017. LeBel states that Hiraeth is a Welsh word with no direct English translation: it means a homesickness, a nostalgia, a yearning, a grief for the lost places of one’s past. The second work in LeBel’s Migration series, Hiraeth explores a microtonal language that alternates between the intensely lyrical and the unsettlingly constricted — reflecting the traveller’s desire to be free and unfettered, all the while longing for a home to which they cannot return, or a home which maybe never was.

Emilie LeBel: Hiraeth, Migration No. 2 (excerpt)

De Mares Imaginados for solo flute (excerpt) by Pedro Alvarez, performed by Mark Takeshi McGregor. Available on the album "Lutalica" on Redshift Records. Download the Lutalica album for free at: redshiftrecords.org/releases/tk468/

Pedro Alvarez is an composer, improviser, and scholar, born in Chile and currently based in Perth, Western Australia (Whadjuk-Nyoongar country). His solo flute work, De Mares Imaginados (2009), consists of short, virtuosic statements interspersed with moments of silence, the exact durations left to the discretion of the performer. In lieu of a program note, Alvarez provides the following quote from the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet (translated by Alvarez): My soul is a black maelstrom; vast vertigo around the void; movement of an endless ocean around a hole in nothingness; and in those waters that are more a turn than waters all images float of what I ever saw and heard in the world – there go houses, books, drawers, traces of music and voices’ syllables, in a sinister and bottomless swirl.

Pedro Alvarez: De Mares Imaginados (excerpt)

Described as a “mind-blowing” musician of “huge physical energy” (Times Colonist), flutist Mark Takeshi McGregor is one of Canada’s leading interpreters of classical, contemporary, and experimental music. As a soloist, chamber musician, and interdisciplinary artist, Mark has performed extensively across five continents, including appearances at Vancouver New Music Society, Little Chamber Music Series That Could, Innovations en Concert (Montreal), GroundSwell (Winnipeg), Honolulu Festival, Internationale ADEvantgarde-Festival (Munich), the Melos-Ethos Festival (Bratislava), Núcleo Música Nova’s International Symposium of New Music (Curitiba, Brazil), and the 2017 ISCM World New Music Days (Vancouver). An outspoken advocate of new music, Mark is the principal flute of the Aventa Ensemble in Victoria, flutist of the Vancouver-based Tiresias Duo with pianist Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa, and flutist of the McGregor-Verdejo Duo with guitarist Adrian Verdejo. McGregor has given many local and world premieres, and considers the commissioning of new works by contemporary composers to be a cornerstone of his work as a musician.