Arts Features

Halfway through a heady conversation that has already touched on terrorism, music theory, and the divergent philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Giorgio Agamben, Andreas Kahre stops midstream and utters a low, self-deprecating chuckle.

“I’m sorry,” he says, on the line from his Gabriola Island home. “This thing sounds desperately highfalutin. But it’s really goofy.”

The thing in question is Ear/Nose/Throat, Kahre’s new multimedia composition for gamelan orchestra, voice, and electronics. And while this “opinion piece” does indeed have a serious dimension—among other things, it considers Agamben’s response to the line that Heidegger draws between humanity and the natural world—it’s also rich in surreal vignettes and surging rhythms.

Its several narrators—including Radix Theatre Society’s Paul Ternes, various members of Gamelan Alligator Joy, and Kahre himself—give voice to a group of doctors adrift on a tropical river. In that regard, it might help to know that the German-born Kahre is a physician’s son, and that his kaleidoscopic musings are rooted in real-life observation.

“I found myself looking for a vehicle to explore an attitude that I have witnessed for many years,” he explains. “In this case, I’ve used doctors; they could just as easily be lawyers or engineers. But there is a strain to this piece that comes from having experienced an attitude of a certain entitlement that sets the world apart.

“And I did, about 10 years ago, find myself on a boat on the Nile,” he adds. “It was in the middle of a series of attacks on European tourists, and so the tour organizers were rather concerned that they couldn’t find anyone to come and brave the ‘evil Muslim hordes’. And there was just this mindless range of opinions. There’s something about a riverboat that seems to give everybody licence to freely opine about what they aren’t part of.”

Kahre’s philosophical journey is just one of several pieces that Gamelan Alligator Joy—the new-music-oriented wing of the more traditionally inclined Gamelan Madu Sari group—will perform as part of Summer Sonoral, at the VanDusen Botanical Garden on Sunday (June 21). Also on the bill will be works from Vancouver composers Sam Salmon, Michael O’Neill, and Mark Parlett; Kahre is especially enthused about Gary McFarlane’s Détours de Fleurs, which draws on a 14th-century ballade by the French troubadour Guillaume de Machaut.

“He’s managed to write something that’s a beautiful, shimmering, shifting, polyphonic vector through time,” he says. “It’s just gorgeous.”

In a separate telephone interview, McFarlane reveals that he’s long been fascinated by the similarities between the medieval music of Europe and the gamelan styles native to Indonesia.

“Especially in the music of Machaut’s era, they’d take these snippets of plainchant, which they were all trained in, and stretch them out and then write new melodies over top of them,” he explains. “And it’s so similar to what they do with the balungan [core melody] in Javanese music, where they’ll take a classic melody that’s several hundred years old and then overlay all this brand-new melodic material so that you’ve got all these historical relationships happening within one piece of music.”

There are parallels here to Gamelan Alligator Joy’s mission, which is to make new music with ancient instruments. According to Kahre, though, the group has “a solid, on-going commitment to thinking in a different way”.

“It’s not a traditional repertoire with bits added,” he continues, “but a completely contemporary set of approaches, and they do hang together in an interesting fashion.”