Highlights Of Sol 3 Include Asteroid Music By VSO Composer

Somewhere between us and the sun spins the asteroid Cruithne, eternally linked to Earth in its orbit, yet eternally pushed away by gravitational forces. Unless we own an exceedingly fine telescope, it's unlikely that we'll ever see this lonely, five-kilometre rock, but we'll be able to hear it, in a way, at the Roundhouse Community Centre next Friday (January 21) as part of Sol 3: Musical Visions of the Planet Earth.

"I'm almost always inspired by something that has nothing to do with absolute music," says Vancouver Symphony Orchestra resident composer Jeffrey Ryan, reached at home by phone. His flute concerto, Cruithne, is one of two new works making their debut next Friday, the other being rising star Jordan Nobles's Aurora Borealis.

"I'm usually inspired by something extra-musical," Ryan continues. "And I do keep a list of inspirations; when I find something where I think, 'Oh, that's really an interesting idea, it must suggest something musical to me,' then I just set it aside until I have an opportunity to use it. I don't remember at all how I found out about Cruithne, the asteroid, but I've had an interest in astronomy my entire life. When I was a little kid I learned all the constellations and all the planets, and I'd go out late on winter nights in rural Ontario with my binoculars and check everything out. So the idea that there's this other astronomical body that shares our orbit and that is in this really intricate dance with us because of the laws of physics--from our perspective it seems to travel in this little spiral dance, and it gets close to us but because of the laws of physics it gets pushed away again--it just suggested a dance to me."

The idea of a dance in turn suggested a Celtic jig, and the idea of a jig suggested the flute, and the idea of the flute suggested Camille Churchfield, who's the soloist in Ryan's piece, as well as a member of the chamber orchestra of VSO players that Montreal-based trombone virtuoso Alain Trudel will conduct at the Roundhouse.

"I want to describe her sound as liquid," Ryan enthuses. "It's just a wonderful, rich, fluid kind of sound. And she's so skilled in all the techniques of flute playing. She can play all the fast stuff as well as all the beautiful, lyrical stuff. So I wanted to include a little bit of both of those in this piece."

The composer and the soloist worked closely in developing Cruithne, with Churchfield helping conceptualize the piece as well as providing technical input. "First, before Jeffrey had really written much, we discussed concept, and he told me about the basic idea he had in mind," the flutist explains on the line from North Vancouver. "And then when he had the piece more or less down on paper, we had a good look over it in terms of what works on the instrument. He's used quite a few avant-garde techniques and sounds, and I had a few ideas about how things could work more flutistically, I guess you'd say. So we collaborated quite a bit, and I'm sure that all the way up to the concert we'll be tweaking it."

Getting to premiere a piece written with her specifically in mind is going to be quite a thrill, Churchfield adds, and it's likely listeners will feel the same way about the program as a whole. In his other role as curator of the VSO's innovative Roundhouse series, Ryan points out that the Yaletown venue allows for sonic and theatrical departures from the symphonic norm that would be unlikely to occur at, say, the Orpheum.

"For instance, we're starting an orchestral concert with a tape piece [Hildegarde Westerkamp's Cricket Voice], which I think is a fun thing to do," he says. "And one of the wonderful things about being in the Roundhouse is that we've got this theatre-lighting grid, and we can configure the space in different ways. So I can really play up the theatrical aspect of concert-music performance."

Cruinthe does include a theatrical element, although in the interests of suspense we won't divulge it here. Any surprises in the other pieces, however, are likely to be more purely musical: also on the bill are Toru Takemitsu's sumptuous Rain Coming, T. Patrick Carrabre's highway-inspired Chase the Sun, and Michael Torke's intensely rhythmic December.

"It's an environmental journey, in a way," Ryan says. "We start out in the desert, go into the rain, and then from there we look at different environments on the planet and also things that are going on around our planet."

All told, it looks like Ryan and his accomplices have prepared an intriguing musical journey--and the music of this sphere may never sound as good.