Turning Point Ensemble's Music of a Thousand Autumns mines the past

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      Charged with writing a new piece for Vancouver’s Turning Point Ensemble, Alexina Louie opted to look back to her own roots in this polyglot city—and to her early days as a student composer in San Diego, California. This doesn’t mean that A Curious Passerby at Fu’s Funeral waxes nostalgic, however. As Louie notes in a telephone interview from her Toronto home, she’s investigating some new ideas, too.

      “There are things in this piece that I’ve never done before,” she stresses, citing the new work’s second movement, which initially strikes a meditative stance before moving into far more dramatic terrain. “The piano hammers on the lowest note of the piano, which is a low A, and that goes on for a time, just loud,” she says. “And there are shifting accents that happen down there, so it sort of sounds like drumming.”

      Louie’s long had an affinity for percussion, although this marks the first time the 66-year-old composer has asked a pianist to join the drum corps. Before Turning Point keyboardist Jane Hayes gets physical, percussionist Jonathan Bernard will have already had quite a workout in A Curious Passerby at Fu’s Funeral’s opening movement. “I wanted the piece to start off with a fast-paced, exciting feel to it,” the composer says. “And so I wrote for marimba, and it goes really fast.”

      Louie’s clearly relishing this opportunity to collaborate with some of Canada’s finest chamber musicians. “If I get to write for good players, I tend to stretch myself—and sometimes that’s not a good thing, because it leaves you in a position where not every ensemble or performer can play your pieces,” she notes. “But I grow as a composer when I do that, when I write for the capability of the ensemble rather than writing for the possibility of multiple performances.”

      Just how Louie has grown over the past 30 years may become very apparent during Turning Point’s upcoming concerts. Also on the bill, along with works by Anthony Tan, Linda Catlin Smith, and Dorothy Chang, will be Louie’s Music for a Thousand Autumns, written in 1983.

      Both works are inspired in part by Asian music, although Louie says that’s more circumstantial than a direct nod to her own Chinese-Canadian heritage. “Because I was writing for Vancouver, I consciously revisited the Asian aspects of my music more than I have been in my other recent pieces,” she explains. In the earlier work, the second movement draws explicitly from an ancient composition for the zitherlike guqin, which she was studying at the same time she was doing an MFA in composition at the University of California. With A Curious Passerby at Fu’s Funeral, the references are more cryptic, although they can also be traced back to the composer’s San Diego sojourn.

      “In that piece, the second movement is inspired by an instrument that has always captivated me, the shō,” she says, noting that she was introduced to the mouth-blown reed organ by an Italian-American friend. “It’s Japanese, but there’s a Chinese equivalent, the sheng. It’s always really touched me. The sounds are so haunting, and you can get so many chord clusters, and the timbres are so unusual. I mean, it’s very reedy, but it’s also very sweet at the same time.

      “I put a lot of myself in each piece,” Louie adds, but you don’t have to be familiar with her history to understand her sound. Just as the shō, in Fu’s Funeral, will be represented by woodwinds and strings, her memories have also been transfigured by time. 

      The Turning Point Ensemble presents Music of a Thousand Autumns at the Orpheum Annex on Wednesday and Thursday (October 7 and 8).

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