Ana Sokolović revisits her sonic youth

Ana Sokolović’s latest work finds inspiration in a long-gone rock band that remains iconic in her native Belgrade.

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      Part of the Turning Point Ensemble’s mandate is to promote and perform underappreciated music from the 20th century. In addition, the Vancouver chamber-music group has dedicated itself to commissioning pieces from the significant composers of today. So it’s clear that the upcoming premiere of Ana Sokolović’s “…and I need a room to receive five thousand people with raised glasses” or “What a wonderful day, the birds are singing Alleluia” meets both aspects of Turning Point’s charter: Sokolović is one of this country’s most inventive composers, particularly in the field of vocal music, and for this new and memorably titled work she has gone back in time to the soundtrack of her youth.

      There’s a twist, however: this may well be the first time that any chamber ensemble has celebrated the enduring legacy of a long-gone rock band from a country that, likewise, no longer exists.

      As the Belgrade-born Sokolović explains in a telephone interview from her Montreal home, her lengthy title incorporates lyrics from a pair of songs by Ekatarina Velika, arguably the most influential rock band ever to emerge from the former Yugoslavia.

      “They were very significant, very important for urban life in Serbia, which I left in 1992,” she says. “And a few years later they started to die, one by one. Some were sick, and some from drugs.

      “What they represented was really the image of the urban Balkans,” she continues. “And what I mean by ‘urban’ is that I’m thinking about all the culture, all the dreams. We were all young, educated people who wanted to make a better life on the planet, if you want, and for ourselves. Of course, I listened to them a lot, and they were very symbolic, in many ways, for a whole generation, our generation. So that’s why this title. And what I’m doing, actually, is I’m taking from these two songs some elements—musical elements, like modes or parts of melodies—and I’m using them as material.”

      Sokolović—who’s probably best known here for her PuSh Festival hit Svadba/Wedding—adds that while she’s drawing on Ekatarina Velika’s anthemic sound, she’s not attempting to make a rock band out of Turning Point’s new-music all-stars. Instead, and rather intriguingly, she’s applying techniques drawn from electronic music to her electric source material, in the pursuit of an entirely acoustic sound.

      “I like challenges, and what I tried to do was use a procedure which we use very often in electronic music or electroacoustic music or any music which is made in the studio without live musicians,” she says. “This means that we can take any existing music and then cut it and repeat it and present it in a very mechanical way. So what I tried in this piece was to be inspired by these techniques, these electronic tools, but I wanted to make it for real musicians. It’s a fast tempo from the beginning to the end, and they have to play in a mechanical way very often.…Yet I think there’s a lot of emotion that comes with this kind of playing or this kind of form. And this energy, this is also a symbol of young people, but it is maybe the kind of character that I have in myself, coming from the Balkans—this willingness to share rapidity, dance, and life.”

      The speedy “…and I need a room” is just one of three pieces Sokolović will present as part of Thirst, an ambitious collaboration between Turning Point, musica intima, and the Nu:BC Collective that also features Bang on a Can mainstay Julia Wolfe’s title composition and the premiere of No Need, by Montreal composer Michael Oesterle. The program appears to be loosely based around contemporary social and environmental issues: Thirst is a meditation on water; No Need draws its text from a list of the world’s top restaurants; and Sokolović’s Dring, dring is a theatrical exploration of telephone etiquette.

      “I know singers, and I know it’s important for them to have the opportunity to play the role of some character,” the composer says of Dring, dring, which is sung in English, Spanish, Serbian, and French. “So this is a short piece, quite short, but it allows the singers to develop different characters, and I gave the singers some liberty to choose their character. They can be characters who are worried about something; some other characters can be more active, or more pretentious. But they keep their character all through the piece.”

      In contrast, Sokolović’s Tanzer Lieder will find soprano Robyn Driedger-Klassen teaming up with Nu:BC for a set of five art songs that address the more timeless issues of love and mortality by way of the Austrian writer Francisco Tanzer’s multilingual poetry. “There are some which play with language,” she says. “Some convey a kind of glacial atmosphere, and then the last song is absolutely touching.”

      If the Montrealer’s three works sound like a decidedly mixed bag—especially as they’ll be performed by three very different ensembles—that’s probably intentional. “I always want to write new pieces, in the same way that I want to do new research,” Sokolović explains, before returning to “…and I need a room”, her newest and largest contribution to Thirst’s program. “This is probably not revolutionary for the history of modern music, but it is a huge step for me, because my way of working was really, really challenging—and I’m absolutely afraid of the result.”

      The Turning Point Ensemble, musica intima, and the Nu:BC Collective present Thirst at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts’ Telus Studio Theatre on Saturday and Sunday (March 29 and 30).

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