WolfGANG Sessions #21

A Wild Night of Chamber Music

2023-10-14 21:00 2023-10-14 23:00 60 Canada/Eastern 🎟 NAC: WolfGANG Sessions #21

https://nac-cna.ca/en/event/33741

In-person event

The WolfGANG Sessions at Club SAW offer nights of music that are sure to entertain. Grab your adventurous friends and take them out for a wild concert of chamber Music with your favourite musicians from the NAC Orchestra.  This special edition will be fully dedicated to the work of the much-missed composer Jocelyn Morlock.

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Club SAW,67 Nicholas Street,Ottawa,Canada
Sat, October 14, 2023
Sat, October 14, 2023

≈ 90 minutes · With intermission

Last updated: October 3, 2023

A note about Jocelyn Morlock

Tonight’s WolfGANG Sessions is a special edition dedicated to the work of the much-missed Canadian composer Jocelyn Morlock (1969–2023). One of the country’s leading composers, Morlock wrote compelling music that has been recorded extensively and receives numerous performances and broadcasts throughout North America and Europe. Born in Winnipeg, she studied piano at Brandon University, and later earned a master’s degree and a Doctorate of Musical Arts from the University of British Columbia, where she was recently an instructor and lecturer of composition. The inaugural composer-in residence for Vancouver’s Music on Main Society (2012–2014), she took on the same role for the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra from 2014 to 2019. She had close ties with the National Arts Centre Orchestra, who in 2017, commissioned My Name is Amanda Todd, a powerful work about the teen from Port Coquitlam, BC, who took her own life due to cyberbullying. It subsequently won the 2018 JUNO Award for Classical Composition for the Year.

Recognized for their “richly satisfying harmonies and solo melodies full of emotion” (Winnipeg Free Press), “shimmering sheets of harmonics” (Georgia Straight), and a “deftly idiomatic” (Vancouver Sun) style, Morlock’s moving and vibrant compositions are inspired by birds, insomnia, nature, fear, other people’s music and art, nocturnal wandering thoughts, lucid dreaming, death, and the liminal times and experiences before and after death.

Program

COMPOSITIONS BY JOCELYN MORLOCK

Vermilion for string quartet  (11 min)

Vespertine for flute and harp (10 min)
I. Twilight
II. Verdigris

Blue Sun for violin and viola (11 min)

Three Meditations on Light for cello and harp (17 min)
I. The birds breathe the morning light
II. Bioluminescence (wine-dark sea)
III. Absence of light – gradual reawakening

Unfurl for wind quintet (21 min)

Repertoire

Jocelyn Morlock

Vermilion for string quartet

Vermilion for string quartet was commissioned by David Pay, the founder and artistic director of Vancouver’s Music on Main Society and is also the work’s dedicatee. The single-movement work, composed in 2014 during Morlock’s residency with the Society, was premiered in March 2014 by the Aeolus Quartet.

Morlock included the following note in the score that point to the various concepts, images, and emotions the music of the quartet evokes:

shape: frenetic, restless, brief moments of calm that are increasingly distorted, pulled in numerous directions as sharp fragments and shards of sound pixelate

colour: brilliant red, cinnabar, scarlet, orange, red lacquer with flashes of acid green

animalian etymology (via Wikipedia): The word vermilion came from the Old French word vermeillon, which was derived from vermeil, from the Latin vermiculus, the diminutive of the Latin word vermis, or worm. It has the same origin as the English word vermin…

Jocelyn Morlock

Vespertine for flute and harp

I. Twilight
II. Verdigris

Sensuous musical colour and texture are front and centre in Vespertine, a piece for flute and harp that Morlock composed in 2005 for the Krutzen/McGhee Duo (Lorna McGhee, flute; Heidi Krutzen, harp). Drawing on the natural timbral qualities of the two instruments, Morlock weaves their delicate lines into ethereal webs of sound, which she says refers to “the night-blossoming plants and to nocturnally active creatures—the mysterious flora and fauna that inspired my music.” As she further explains:

In Twilight, I wanted to explore the darker sounds of the harp; a sense of ritual, anticipation, and nervousness at the opening gives way to a growing feeling of tension and increasing energy. At the climactic point of Twilight, I imagine seeing trails of bright sparks wheeling through the air. These are followed by a peaceful ending, in which we calmly await the morning light.

Verdigris is written in the style of a postlude. It is melancholy and fully of existential solitude, like a lone bird crooning to itself in the night.

Jocelyn Morlock

Blue Sun for violin and viola

Musicians have found that many of Morlock’s compositions allow them a certain expressive autonomy that makes them satisfying to play. Her piece Blue Sun for violin and viola, composed in 1998, is written in a way that encourages interpretative freedom between its two players, thereby creating a special kind of intimacy in its performance. As she instructed in the score:

This piece is in seven short sections, which are to be played without pause. Both players read from the score. At times proportional notation is used; sometimes one player has notated rhythms while the other plays more freely. Do not be too concerned about exactly where to play the proportionally notated music, just fit it in vertically between the other player’s notes.

As to the subject of the piece, Morlock says,

The name “Blue Sun” is a reference to the lingering image or ghost sun that persists in your field of vision after looking at the real one. These pieces were written after I’d encountered some folk music that wouldn’t let me be; although they are not based on folk music, the moods of that music permeate them nonetheless, lingering like the after-image of the sun.

Jocelyn Morlock

Three Meditations on Light for cello and harp

I. The birds breathe the morning light
II. Bioluminescence (wine-dark sea)
III. Absence of light – gradual reawakening

Three Meditations on Light is a three-movement piece that Morlock wrote in 2011 for Couloir—the duo of harpist Heidi Krutzen and cellist Ariel Barnes. They premiered it in October 2012 at Music on Main’s Modulus Festival.

In an interview with Ken Bolton before the work’s premiere, Morlock expressed that she initially had mixed feelings about writing a piece for the instrumental combination, “I thought ‘Oh, good! I love writing for Heidi, and for Ari.’ And then I thought ‘Oh, strange! I’ve never heard music for harp and cello before.’” Discovering that she “actually really like the combination,” she sought new ways to use each instrument, explaining that while both have huge ranges, composers rarely made use of the cello’s higher register or the lower notes of the harp.

The idea of the piece, she says, “was inspired by various conceptions of light and sun, in particular Sol Invictus, the unconquerable sun. In ancient Egyptian culture (ca. 3000–2000 BCE) it was believed that each night, the sun god Ra made a heroic journey, and fought a nocturnal battle in order to rise again in the morning. I love the idea that the sunrise is not a given, that each new day is miraculous.”

Jocelyn Morlock

Unfurl for wind quintet

One of Morlock’s recent compositions, Unfurl for wind quintet was composed in 2021. Commissioned by the Seattle Chamber Music Society Commissioning Club, the one-movement work is dedicated to the SCMS and its artistic director, James Ehnes, and was premiered at the Seattle Chamber Music Festival in August that year.

As she explains in her note to the piece,

The title of my quintet, Unfurl, came from a poem called “For a New Beginning”, written by John O’Donohue. I read it after hearing that it was sent to President Joe Biden by the Irish President Michael D. Higgins, on the occasion of his inauguration. I hope that its mood of optimism and growth will characterize 2021, after the long difficulty of 2020. Unfurl is a similarly hopeful piece, somewhat bucolic, written during late winter and early spring of 2021 as I witnessed rebirth and resurgence beginning in the natural world, and our own human one.

Morlock was especially moved and inspired by one particular line from O’Donohue’s poem: “Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning.” “That just provoked so many beautiful images in me,” she said, “including an almost physical image of a sound coming out and rising gently.” For the sound world and palette of Unfurl, she was significantly influenced by American composer Samuel Barber’s Summer Music, which was written for the same instrumental combination. The piece also incorporates one of Morlock’s favourite sounds—that of birds: “You’re going to hear a lot of melody that sound like bird, something kind of natural in the piece, and something sort of gentle and optimistic.”

Program notes compiled and edited by Hannah Chan-Hartley, PhD

Artists

  • jocelynmorlock-bio
    composer Jocelyn Morlock
  • sean-rice-2
    host Sean Rice
  • flute Stephanie Morin
  • anna-petersen-2
    oboe Anna Petersen
  • clarinet Kimball Sykes
  • darren-hicks
    bassoon Darren Hicks
  • lauren-anker
    horn Lauren Anker
  • 343-rose
    harp Antoine Malette-Chénier
  • bio-image-template-marjo
    violin Marjolaine Lambert
  • violin Noémi Racine Gaudreault
  • paul-casey
    viola Paul Casey
  • dscf0118-curtis-perry-nov-5-1pm
    cello Rachel Mercer