A Vancouver New Music production. At the Vancouver East Cultural Centre on Saturday, February 23. No remaining performances

2Stones (scores of rounded beach cobbles, spread across the stage of the Vancouver East Cultural Centre like a meandering watercourse) and gloves (scores more, hanging like leathery white bats from the ceiling) figured largely in the staging of Vancouver New Music’s Roy Kiyooka tribute, Marginalia. Both played a talismanic role in the late artist’s work, most notably in his StoneDGloves photo series from 1969-1970, so that was appropriate. A few wisps of smoke might also have helped set the stage, as a nod to both Kiyooka’s recreational pleasures and the evanescent nature of his art practice, which incorporated painting, poetry, music, performance art, photography, film, and correspondence.

Perhaps the music was hazy enough. While Hildegard Westerkamp’s sonic memoir MotherVoiceTalk and Stefan Smulovitz’s Triptych K stood out, Jocelyn Morlock’s Scribbling in the Margins and Stefan Udell’s Lattices of Summer served more as background texture. Vancouver composers occasionally fall into a certain default position, a kind of sonic séance where seriousness is invoked by long, slow notes and the spirit-rapping of a woodblock. Marginalia tipped that way too often to be a complete success, and could easily have been trimmed by a quarter of its length.

Still, success didn’t mean that much to Kiyooka, despite his numerous accomplishments. What mattered most to the Japanese-Canadian artist were doing and being. In that sense, even the longueurs and lulls in this Alcan Performing Arts Award–winning project were Zenly appropriate.

I loved the first part of Smulovitz’s triptych, a starkly beautiful score for solo cello, played with consummate attentiveness by Peggy Lee. Westerkamp’s montage of archival recordings and ambient sound was equally enthralling. Kedrick James’s literary contributions were extraordinary: by running Kiyooka’s poems through the Babel Fish translation program—English to Japanese and then back again, 20 times—and then editing the results, James achieved an eerie and powerful cybernetic synthesis of his own and Kiyooka’s voices.

I liked the way Udell left space in his compositions for James’s readings, and how Morlock used bass drum and piano to reference Kiyooka’s Japanese heritage and spacey zither noodlings. If, afterwards, anyone felt moved by Marginalia to further explore Kiyooka’s multifarious artistic legacies, then its mission was accomplished.