According to Carl Jung’s notion of synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence, Rachel Iwaasa’s upcoming Cosmophony concert was meant to be—even if, at first, the Vancouver pianist only wanted to play George Crumb’s zodiac-inspired Makrokosmos II in an unusual setting.

In order to make that happen, she enlisted the help of flutist and Redshift Music event producer Mark McGregor, and together they arrived at something remarkable: a concert that will celebrate the beauty and mystery of the solar system we inhabit.

The idea, as Iwaasa explains by phone, was to commission a group of local composers, each of whom would write a piece about a specific planet. The problem, though, was that there were more composers they wanted to work with than planets to go around.

Half jokingly, she suggested that someone be assigned the asteroid belt, but her coproducer shot it down. “How mean is that?” McGregor said, according to Iwaasa. “You call up a composer and say ”˜We’re commissioning pieces about the planets, and you get the asteroid belt?’ ”

“But when Mark was pitching the idea to Jordan Nobles, his partner in Redshift, he tells him this story and goes, ”˜You get the asteroid belt,’ and laughs,” Iwaasa continues. “There’s this dead silence on the phone, and then Jordan says, ”˜I wrote a set of pieces about the asteroid belt.’ So he was really pleased, as one of them in particular had never been performed—and it’s one of the ones I’m going to be doing.”

Iwaasa will unveil Nobles’s Fragments, along with Makrokosmos II and new works by Jennifer Butler, Emily Doolittle, Chris Kovarik, Jocelyn Morlock, Alexander Pechenyuk, Marci Rabe, Jeffrey Ryan, Rodney Sharman, and Stefan Udell, at the H. R. Macmillan Space Centre on Monday (June 30). And the asteroid-belt connection is only one of several coincidences to pop up when she and McGregor were assembling their program.

“Rodney Sharman, who is doing Mercury, had two different inspirations,” Iwaasa says. “Most of his piano pieces have been based on opera transcriptions of one sort or another, and for this one he took a short quote from Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea—basically the only operatic mention of Mercury he could find.

But he also discovered that Mercury orbits the sun in 88 days—and of course the piano has 88 keys. So he wrote a piece that uses every key on the piano at least once.”

Chance also handed former Vancouver Symphony Orchestra composer in residence Ryan his musical material, as Iwaasa explains. “He chose Saturn. And, again, he did some research on the planet and discovered that Saturn’s rings are named with the letters A through G—but in the order in which they were discovered, not in the order in which they appear around the planet.

"The order of them goes, I think, D, C, B, A, F, G, E, so he’s based his piece on that—and he’s called it Study in White, because it’s all on the white keys of the piano.”

Those unable to attend will be glad that Iwaasa hopes to record her galaxy of commissioned pieces for a CD. “I was expecting great things, because every one of the composers that I asked was someone whose music I found really fascinating,” she says. “But as the pieces started coming in, I’ve realized just what an incredible gift, really, I’ve been given here.”