Aaron Gervais, composer » clarinet

Elegy of Others

Aaron Gervais — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 07:01:10 +0000

Much of my recent work deals with the issue of reappropriation. Where do we get our ideas? What do we owe, if anything, to our sources of inspiration? Historically, composers have stolen ideas from each other regularly, reworking these into their music and taking all the credit (and the money, if they could). The invention of copyright was the first attempt at giving credit to the originators of ideas, but this has evolved over time into a corporate-controlled system of property that promotes the fiction that new ideas somehow spontaneously appear out of nothingness.

Composers have always taken each others’ ideas, and if they didn’t, there would be no composing. But now the big music companies would want us to believe that this is somehow wrong. It is, certainly, wrong to profit from the work of others without making any contribution oneself, but there are many uses of existing music that do make new, meaningful contributions. For this reason, I’ve taken an interest in quotation, collage, and related techniques. It’s a way to pay homage to the music that has influenced me while at the same time exposing the false idea that creativity comes out of nothingness. So here I am, cards on the table, showing everyone the music I was thinking of when working on this piece—by quoting that music.

Thus the title Elegy of Others. I wanted to write a piece that was reflective and sombre, and I wanted to make it a collage of the work of others. This was a particular challenge, because I have found collage better suited to fast, upbeat music than it is to the slow and sombre; quotations tend to lose their character when the tempo is slow, and phrases made up of long quotes do not cohere very well. For this reason, I had to approach this piece differently than in my previous work, transforming the material in more extreme ways for the sake of musical expression. In Elegy of Others, therefore, the quotations are not always immediately recognizable, though they do come to the surface periodically. Nevertheless, almost every note in Elegy of Others is quoted, with few exceptions. The pieces quoted are, in order of appearance:

The Four Seasons, “Drunkards Asleep”, Antonio Vivaldi, 1723
“The Girl from Ipanema”, Antonio Carlos Jobim, 1962
“Everybody Hurts”, R.E.M., 1992
“Dazed and Confused”, Led Zeppelin, 1968
Die schöne Müllerin, “Des Müllers Blumen”, Franz Schubert, 1823

Kiss Around the World

Aaron Gervais — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 18:10:35 +0000

Kiss Around the World was commissioned by New Works Calgary and the Canada Council for the Arts for Ensemble Resonance. It is the second Around the World piece that I have written, taking a single word—in this case kiss—and presenting it in a wide variety of languages.

The idea of kissing takes on very different connotations in different languages, and I wanted to find a connotation that was as universal as possible. Therefore, in Kiss Around the World I decided to focus on the idea of the nurturing kiss, the kiss a parent would give a child. This was the most universal use of kissing I came across. Romantic kissing, which is what I initially thought would make the best focus, is not universal. It did not exist in much of Asia before the arrival of the Europeans; Koreans and Japanese actually use a modified form of the English word for romantic kissing.

Musically, Kiss Around the World is made up of a series of short sound units, usually one per word, that are arranged and developed into a lyrical, flowing texture. Being a composer obsessed with fragmentation and contrast, this was a novel and stimulating challenge for me that grew out of the theme of the piece and the musical materials at hand. The result is a soothing, gentle piece that has certain aspects of a lullaby, all the while employing the collage/mosaic techniques that are the hallmarks of my style. There is even a little collage surprise at the end of the piece…

Love in the Time of Connectivity

Aaron Gervais — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 08:05:05 +0000

Love in the Time of Connectivity is a collage. In fact, even the title is a collage: I took the title of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, and combined it with a reference to the culture of Internet file sharing. I have been interested in collage and the reappropriation of material for some time, because as the saying goes, good artists borrow but great artists steal. Collage is the most honest way to honour that principle, and I spent most of 2008 working in this direction.

Collage, as well as related ideas such as sampling, remix, and mash-up, are among the few unifying forces driving artistic change today. Through video sites like YouTube and audio sites like ccMixter, these ideas have been responsible for renewing amateur art on a mass scale, for challenging the standards of creativity, for expanding musical taste, and even for influencing legal precedent.

For the first time in history, we are drowning in art. There is too much music of the highest artistic quality for anyone to ever hope to experience. So how can artists contribute to culture in a situation like this? I think collage is an important part of the answer, and the proof is in the attitudes of those who grew up with the Internet. For many of them, art is not something simply to be experienced, it is a resource to be adapted, changed, built upon, and shared.

While composing Love in the Time of Connectivity, I gave myself some restrictions in order to inspire creativity. For example, I decided to try to present all quotations in as recognizable a form as possible. I did not allow myself to transpose fragments from their original tonalities, and I did not allow myself to compose my own new material to bridge together the quotations—every note is borrowed. I also made tempo an integral part of the musical development, and I tried to make grammatical sense of all the text fragments I combined. Finally, every quote relates to the others in some way, either in terms of theme, title, text, artist, or (obviously) musical sounds.

Community-Normed

Aaron Gervais — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 07:59:05 +0000

Only a small part of music is actually about sound. The majority of music-making has to do with social interactions more than anything else. Music fulfills certain functions (usually pre-determined) within certain social situations, or serves as a replacement for various social functions when we use it in private. Therefore, music can be said to be a community-normed phenomenon: what makes music music are the people who find a use for it, usually by listening.

On top of that, the most useful (or best) pieces of music are generally those for which there is the most consensus on usage: Beethoven’s ninth symphony and Michale Jackson’s album, Thriller are both “good” because a lot of people agree that they are good; i.e., a lot of people have found those two pieces of music useful for certain social functions.

Anyway, these were some of the thoughts running through my head while writing this piece, and they influenced my choice and usage of musical materials.

Jackhammer Lullaby

Aaron Gervais — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 07:53:49 +0000

Jackhammer Lullaby is an arrangement of Community-Normed, which was commissioned by the Continuum Ensemble in Toronto in 2008. I’ve become increasingly interested in presenting pieces in multiple versions and combinations. Jackhammer Lullaby, with a few changes, is also the middle movement of Community-Normed. I’ve also written a third version, for a chamber music conference in Vermont in July 2009, with different instrumentation and adapted for amateur performers.

Why multiple versions? Because music today is multiple. Everyone is exposed to music from multiple cultures all the time, from multiple time periods, and in multiple versions. DJs remix pop songs, which are available in numerous versions, and do mash-ups that intertwine multiple tracks in the space of a few seconds. I think this is a good way to deal with the fact that we are, for the first time in history, drowning in more music than anyone knows what to do with. For this reason, creating multiple versions is an important project of mine.

Musically, Jackhammer Lullaby presents a humorous musical setting of trying to fall asleep with construction going on outside the window.

The Enslavement and Liberation of Oksana G.

Aaron Gervais — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 01:29:24 +0000

I wrote this chamber opera for three singers and six instrumentalists in conjunction with Colleen Murphy for Tapestry’s Opera To Go series. It tells the story of a young Eastern European woman (Oksana) who has found herself in the safehouse of an Italian priest (Alessandro). She has escaped from a pimp (Konstantin), who tricked her into prostitution, and now finds that she is falling in love with Alessandro. He in turn, despite his priestly calling, finds himself tempted by Oksana. During this scene, they dance around the complications of their situation, each one afraid to reveal him- or her- self to the other. In addition, another problem presents itself at the end of the scene.

Culture no.3

Aaron Gervais — Sat, 07 Jan 2006 01:19:23 +0000

Culture no.3 is the last in a series of pieces that deals with the ways that modern popular culture can inform Western art music. More specifically, Culture no.3 is involved in exploring the interrelation between the visceral elements of popular music and timbre. By visceral elements, I mean, for example, the sense of motion, the forcefulness of the articulations, or the character of the rhythm or tempo, to name a few. The traditional pitch resources of the popular sphere have required that viscerality and timbre play a greater role in defining popular genres (and subsequently in determining what we find interesting within them) than is seen in the majority of Western art music. Culture no.3, with a greater emphasis on timbre and viscerality and a subsequently lesser emphasis on other aspects of the musical whole, uses the resources of the Western ensemble to feature this aspect of popular music.

Scene from Euripides’ Medea

Aaron Gervais — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 08:19:58 +0000