Music for a fragmented society

For the second year in a row, Toronto Summer Music offered a string quartet workshop for emerging composers. Last year the workshop was led by R. Murray Schafer, and this year it was multiple Juno award winner Christos Hatzis, hailed as one of the most important composers writing today. Four lucky young composers were selected out of a field of fifteen to workshop their compositions with Hatzis and the Penderecki String Quartet. At the end of the week long workshop, all the works were performed at a public concert by the Penderecki.

Hatzis' composition workshop was less a class than a forum, in which philosophy, politics, and of course, music, were discussed with equal passion. He started by telling the students that rather than approaching string quartet writing in terms of a spectrum of sound (satb or sstb), one should approach it as "a play with four characters" (once again, the music-as-story metaphor).

"Composition is always a mirror that reflects it's times", Hatzis tells his students. "Because we are fragmented as a society, composition is also fragmented."

When discussing higher education he points out that "Academia always teaches the culture of at least one generation behind."

Afternoons were spent workshopping the student compositions with the Penderecki String Quartet. Some of the students, after getting feedback in this forum, opted to rewrite some of their works before the Friday recital.

Sitting in on the dress rehearsal for the Friday recital, I watched the amazing Penderecki quartet work through the student compositions, and then they moved on to rehearse Hatzis' second string quartet, "The Gathering", which was also to be performed at the recital. Hatzis asked if I'd like to follow along with a score. The Gathering is a very complex piece, especially the third movement, "Nadir", which gallops along at a frantic pace employing micro-rhythms and utilizing advanced compositional techniques like metric modulation. I'm just happy I could flip the pages at the right time!

I spoke with several of the students afterwards and without exception they felt this was an extremely worthwhile and valuable program. I could not agree more. I only wish that more people were there to hear these wonderful new works performed by an exceptional ensemble.