Slow Rise Music, a Toronto-based contemporary classical concert series, has partnered with Charles Street Video and guest curator Alexandra Fol for the multimedia showcase titled Where the Eye Meets the Ear.
There will be two performances on May 23, available in-person or as a live stream from Charles Street Video.
Bulgarian-Canadian composer and organist Alexandra Fol is based in Montréal. She is a graduate of Boston University, the Eastman School of Music, and McGill University. Her music has been performed by Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, the Sofia Philharmonic, and the New Score Chamber orchestra, among others, and her more than 40 works include chamber, orchestral, and choral pieces.
Fol lives with a neurological condition called pitch-colour synesthesia, which means that she perceives sound visually, with colours linked to specific pitches. Her work MuSyn is designed to give audiences a glimpse at her experience of the world via a mixture of chamber music, visual art, film, and poetry.
Video becomes light, and sound becomes video. Visual art turns into music.
Alexandra has collaborated with a variety of artist for the program, which combines music for clarinet, trumpet, violin, and cello with electronic sounds, spoken word, video, lighting effects, and visual art works. Her collaborators include award-winning poet and visual artist Jessica Hiemstra, emerging musicians Elias Doyle, Kailan Fournier, Joelle Crigger, and Emma Schmiedecke, and Canadian composers Matthew Lane, Saadi Daftari, Ana Paola Santillán Alcocer, and Tristan Zaba.
We asked Alexandra Fol about her art, and the multimedia show.
Alexandra Fol: Q&A
Another conductor told me that playing the organ — since it involves improvisation — often acts as a kind of gateway into composition. How did you come to decide you wanted to become a composer?
Today’s Bulgaria being a majority-orthodox country, I had not seen an organ from up close until I was 18 years of age and already an experienced composer. Orthodox churches do not allow instruments in worship. Having transferred to Boston University from the Bulgarian State Academy of Music in January 2000 for a composition and piano degree, I visited Tanglewood composition teacher, Dr Julian Wachner, at his workplace, Marsh Chapel, where he was serving as titular organist. I immediately fell in love with the organ. A week later I had changed to organ as my primary instrument over piano.
When I was really young, I was practicing the first movement of Mozart’s A-minor Sonata, the only one written originally for harpsichord. I was convinced that the second chord should be a ii half-diminished 4/2.
Over dinner I was telling my parents about the wrong chord. My father then uttered the life-changing phrase, “Well, why don’t you write the good version yourself?” and I had an epiphany.
My first work, in E-minor, A-A1 form, comprises two chords: the tonic, and the ii half-diminished 4/2. Fate had spoken. I started composition lessons at age five with Parashkef Hadzhiev.
How do you think pitch-colour synesthesia affects how you compose music — or, perhaps it doesn’t?
It does. My preferred sonorities, based on {0, 1, 3} and {0, 1, 4} pitch-class sets, allow for the thickness and the brightness of my colours to balance. Layering these sonorities in different permutations produces superimposed major-minor chords, which emerge as the referential sonorities in my music. The slow harmonic development, which underline the fast foreground, maps the soundscapes onto a slowly transforming visual.
How would you describe your musical style? Are there any particular composers that have influenced you?
I do not have a one-word description for my style, which comprises a multitude of influences, including Bulgarian folk music, neoclassical music, minimalism and others. Specific works have influenced me much more than specific composers, notably Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Chopin’s Noctunes, and Beethoven’s 7th Symphony.
What can you tell our readers about MuSyn?
The work is very happy, joyous and much more virtuosic than its minimalist influences would imply. I like taking my time to let a texture develop and allow people to enjoy the pulsating sonorities. Each instrument has a soloistic moment to shine. The work is accessible to all audiences.
What can you tell us about your collaboration with Louis Horvath? How did you develop the visual elements to reflect your own experience of music?
Louis Horvath and I elaborated a fractal using the available technological resources. Subsequently I chose the colour palette of each of the five images that accompany MuSyn. In the words of the Fractal Foundation: https://fractalfoundation.org/
“A fractal is a never-ending pattern. Fractals are infinitely complex patterns that are self-similar across different scales. They are created by repeating a simple process over and over in an ongoing feedback loop. Driven by recursion, fractals are images of dynamic systems — the pictures of Chaos. Geometrically, they exist in between our familiar dimensions. Fractal patterns are extremely familiar, since nature is full of fractals. For instance: trees, rivers, coastlines, mountains, clouds, seashells, hurricanes, etc. Abstract fractals — such as the Mandelbrot Set — can be generated by a computer calculating a simple equation over and over.”
So, the patterns creates similar, but not identical results. Each tree leaf is different, clouds resemble one another, but are never the same, et cetera. I find that Horvath’s art best reflects my approach to a renewed minimalism: musical motifs are restated, but never repeated exactly as before. We are constantly on a musical journey, which I, the composer, can lead to a certain finish — but never an end. Some colleagues have remarked that some of my works seem to continue an idea started in another work, and they are correct. MuSyn opens a universe, but this universe may continue in another piece of music down the road
- Find more details and tickets to the two performances on May 23 [HERE].
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