Time to let you know about the changes that are going to take place for The Signal.
As I hope you already know - the weekend Signal is having their final weekend of programming June 26 - 28. I hope you tune in so we can all give them a great send off.
Then on the Monday, June 29 the weekday Signal will move from 4 nights a week to 7 nights a week. The other big difference is that the show will be 2 hours in length instead of 3. We're on air from 10:00 p.m. to midnight Monday through Sunday. On Saturdays, the show starts an hour later in the Atlantic and Newfoundland time zone, 10:00 p.m. everywhere else.
Andy Sheppard, Franz Lehrbass and I have got a new production schedule ready to go, just in time for those long, warm summer nights.
Thanks to everyone for all your kind comments about the show, we appreciate them for sure. Keep them coming, either here on the blog, or at thesignal@cbc.ca
Posted by The Signal on April 16, 2009 at 03:36 PM
Let me start this week by saying thanks again to everyone who’s written in or called. The ending is always the tricky part of any creative endeavour and we’ve started thinking about the right finale for our two years here at the Weekend Edition of the Signal. As I mentioned in my last post, this is the time when earlier themes come back, so this weekend we’ll hear from a few old favourites, including Final Fantasy, Krista Muir and CocoRosie. We’ll also introduce some new material, Vancouver pianist and composer Jason Zumpano has very kindly offered to write us a new piano piece every week – from now until we’re done. So starting Friday, just after 11 p.m. we’ll be unveiling the first in a series of world premieres.
Our concerts this weekend come from The Sound Symposium – Karen Bulmer and Gina Ryan on Saturday and The Hot Earth Ensemble on Sunday. On Friday, we’ll pop in on Acadia University’s Shattering The Silence Festival. Derek Charke and Mark Hopkins are the co-directors. The world premiere performance of Derek’s Disturbances of Circadian Rhythm for Flute and Electronics will be on the program and I thought you might like this video of another flute piece by Derek. This is Teresa Payne playing Derek Charke's "Raga Cha:"
We are starting the process of closing up shop here at the "weekend edition" of The Signal. It's funny, but I've started thinking about the next while as a long echo-y coda - kind of like the title track of Shout Out Out Out Out's new album Reintegration Time. We had already programmed that song for Friday night this week - before the announcement of the changes here at CBC last Thursday.
The coda and the postlude have been around for a long time. They're devices that musicians have been using for hundreds of years. Sometimes they change the mood from what's been going on before, or they can introduce new material and give the composer one last chance before they let go of the audience's ear. They might even bring back some themes from earlier in the piece. I think we'll blend all three of those options over the next couple of months.
For sure we will keep programming new music as it comes out, but I also want to take the opportunity to dig out some of our favorites and maybe play a few big ones that were a bit frightening for us when we were first getting started.
I'll also be shifting my brain back into "composer" mode. So who knows what that'll bring out in the mix.
Thanks for all the emails and calls. Your kind words and support mean a lot to us. I hope you'll continue to share your time with me until we're done. So much great music. So little time.
Posted by The Signal on March 27, 2009 at 03:00 PM
March 31st is the fiscal year end for a lot of businesses and for all things government related. It's a crazy deadline as people try to make their budgets balance and wait for word on next year's funding. Our Evolution finalists all met their deadline last week and I hope you were able to listen to the concert on Thursday night. Congratulations to all - and to Veronique Lacroix and Ensemble contemporain de Montreal for bringing the music to life for us. It was a marvellous night of music.
We have lots more where that came from on The Signal this weekend. We'll hear two Jazz concerts - one led by Mark Duggan from the Atlantic Jazz Festival and the other from Simon Fisk's One is the water (not the fish) Festival - in Calgary. We also have lots of new music - from Elvis Perkins, Psapp, Bell Orchestre, DM Stith, Gary Kulesha, Anni Rossi - and more - including the St. Lawrence String Quartet's Canadian premiere of Jonathan Berger's Fourth Quartet.
A few weeks back I wrote about missing a deadline for finishing a new piece of music. Fortunately, it wasn't for a performance that was about to happen. I did finish and the semi-finalists in the Egre National Music Competition now have my piece and I think they have plenty of time to get it ready before they arrive in Brandon at the end of next month. Most of us hate deadlines, but I think you'll probably agree that they are great motivators. I'm a steady worker - and I have a pretty hectic deadline to meet every week for The Signal, but as a composer, I've always found that if I have six months to write a piece, it always takes six months - right to the day. There's always something you can keep polishing or tweaking.
Over the years I've pulled a lot of all-nighters - mainlining caffeine and keeping my eyelids open with toothpicks. When that happens, it almost always means you'll find mistakes during the first couple of rehearsals. By then you've woken up again and hopefully you can sort out what the heck you were thinking. That's one of the good things about music. The final product can usually be massaged before the performance. In the final years of Bramwell Tovey's time at the New Music Festival in Winnipeg, he managed to have a set of rehearsals about three or four weeks before the Festival. It was a brilliant idea, because the composers could find all the bugs that were hiding in their music and it ensured that the newly commissioned pieces would be ready. It also gave the performers a heads up if there was a really tricky part coming their way.
My fondest deadline memory, is from finishing my first Violin Sonata. We were living in New York and the concert was in two days. My wife, Mary Jo, who is a pianist, was in a rehearsal room with the violinist, working through the first two movements and I was across the hall trying come up with an ending for the third movement. By the end of their hour of rehearsal, it had all worked itself out. The concert was a hit and a few years later the piece was nominated for a JUNO.
I'd love to hear about your experience with deadlines - good - bad or otherwise. Just click the link below to leave a comment.
Posted by The Signal on March 27, 2009 at 01:47 PM
Friends,
As you may have heard, many programs on CBC Television and CBC Radio have been affected by recent budget shortfalls. The Signal has been affected directly. It was announced yesterday that the weekend version of The Signal with Pat Carrabre would be cancelled. Obviously, this is devastating news, and our thoughts are with our Winnipeg colleagues.
Last night, on the CBC new program The National, it was reported that The Signal had been cancelled outright. This was an error. Contemporary music will continue to be represented on the service by the weekday version of The Signal with Laurie Brown. It is not clear at the moment how these changes will affect the schedule, but we will keep you posted on developments.
Many thanks for your emails and phone calls of concern for the show. We will continue to do our best to bring you the broadest range of contemporary music from across Canada and around the world.
Posted by The Signal on March 20, 2009 at 12:33 PM
The Listening process is still largely a mystery. Over the last twenty years there have been lots of scientific studies, but we still have so many questions to answer about listening - especially as it relates to different types of music. Some believe that we use a different mental process depending on how the sounds we hear are organized - so language and some kinds of music have a preferential path, that allows us to extract every bit of information from the sounds we receive.
This weekend on The Signal we'll hear music from a couple of composers who are pondering that kind of question - especially Michael Berger. His piece Skeleton shows up on Sunday night's concert segment - featuring Ensemble contemporain de Montreal.
On Friday night we have collaborations galore - with a concert pairing Laura Barrett and the Hylozoists - duets featuring Laura Borealis and Veda Hille - and electronic pairings from the Nortec Collective and Desormais. And on Saturday we celebrate the arrival of Spring with music about the Earth - and Birds.
Last week, Steve posted a comment on the blog - saying that he's hoping the barriers will come down between artists and audience. That got me thinking - because I have very different listening experiences depending on whether I'm the composer, the performer or the listener.
My composer ears listen for structure. I almost don't care who's playing the piece, because I kind of fill in my own interpretation - as long as the broad strokes are there. As a performer, I have to change up my listening - so that I'm a bit ahead of things - listening for the space just in front of what's actually coming out of the instruments. I also listen that way when I'm in the studio here at The Signal, so that I don't get too caught up in what's going on and miss turning my mic on to give the extro for a piece. When I'm listening for enjoyment, I like to turn off some of the technical parts of my brain and let the "feel" of the music take over my body. Each of these options is great, but they are very different.
What's your experience? I'd love to hear how you react to the sounds we play on the show.
As promised, here's a link to Veda Hilles new video for "LuckLucky"
Posted by The Signal on March 15, 2009 at 09:00 PM
Our in box has filled up with some incredible new music lately. A wealth of new releases. We feel rich. Looking back a year ago at this time it felt like we'd be lucky to get a really good release once every three weeks. This spring, a different story.
It could simply be that word is getting out about the program and it's finding its way to us, or that our sources are getting better. It's probably some of that, but I'm sensing a swing towards the kind of music The Signal plays. Music without borders, boundaries or a classifiable genre. Whoo-hoo!
So I thought I should spread the wealth. If you're itchy to discover some new music, here's our favourite recent releases for your perusal along with links to their music.
Posted by The Signal on March 13, 2009 at 12:25 PM
To follow up on Laurie's last post, in ten years I'm hoping that all of the music I'm listening to these days will have been absorbed and assimilated into my little brain, so that some of these great ideas will come back out in my own voice. I went through an intense listening period in my early twenties and it took about a decade before I figured out how to plant my musical feet in a place that really made the music I was writing sound like me! I'm also hoping that as time marches on, my joints won't give out and that I'll be able to keep running a couple of half marathons a year and find the time (and the money) to go south for a week or two in the winter - because other than the cold, I've always liked living in Manitoba.
All of this forward thinking makes me want to play the same "what will it be like" game with the musical future. In ten years, I think that even more musical barriers will have come down. Pop music has just started to get a "toe hold" in the university system. The University of Western Ontario now offers a degree in Popular Music Studies - and so does the University of Southern California. Some of my favourite indie musicians came through the classical training programs offered at University and then ditched it for "alt" music of various kinds. Final Fantasy (Owen Pallet), Gonzales (Jason Charles Beck), Bell (Olga Bell) and My Brightest Diamond (Shara Worden) are all examples.
Not that sucking a musical style into University will make it better. But I think it might help some of the next generation of musicians to dream even bigger - and I like those big conceptual-type projects. Final Fantasy has already done a gig with the orchestra at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In ten years I'm hoping he'll be sound painting on an even bigger canvas.
I think we desperately need a regular flow of ideas between musicians in all genres - especially as the whole interface between music makers and their audience changes with new technology. There's way too much "us vs. them" in some corners of our musical rhetoric right now. I'm hoping that ten years will sort all of this out and that we'll be in one of those great "win-win" phases of music history. What do you think?
Margaret Leng Tan is a great example of a classical musician who's gone way beyond her training (she was the first woman to graduate from Juilliard with a doctorate in piano performance). This weekend we're playing her interpretation of Glen Kucevsek's Sweet Chinoiserie - for toy pianos, toy accordion, melodica, toy and kitchen percussion. It's a very fun piece and here's a video of her performing it:
We'll also have updates from the Evolution finalists in Banff. Don't forget to check out their blog (Evolution blog) and have a great weekend.
You've heard the phrases...a lot...be "in the now", live in the present moment. Eckhart Tolle is responsible for some of this with his book The Power of Now. So OK, I get it. It's good advice, I'll take it. But if I dredge around my past, present and future, it's my attention to the future that's lacking in a serious way. And I'm not talking RRSP's, or my financial future. (Now that would be an entertaining blog.)
The last time I remember seriously dreaming and scheming about my future was in my early 20's and at that time it was all about career. Then, as husband and children arrived, the future suddenly seemed too far away. Instead, I'm thinking about what's for dinner, and how my son is going to be expelled from school if he doesn't get a tetanus booster shot this week. I have forgotten to dream a future.
Where do you want to live in 10 years? What do you want to be doing? With who? What kind of old person will you be? (I say envisioning yourself as a senior citizen will help you get there - forget 'die young and leave a beautiful corpse - I missed that stop.)
So now is a good time to dream it forward. In 10 years, I'd like to have traveled the African continent, completed and published my novel and have lost 10 pounds.... and still be listening to music that boldly looks ahead.
How about you?
Music to push you into the future this week: Sin Fang Bous from Iceland and his new album called Clangour.
Earlier this week I heard Laurie talking about the blog that Andrew Bird wrote for the New York Times, while he was working on his most recent album - Noble Beast. It's still up, so just click here (Andrew Bird Blog) to check it out. In the old days it was only 'history" that could know the innermost thoughts of a composer - usually through their diaries or letters. Now a blog gives us an almost real-time window into the creative process. Composers across all the different genres are blogging as they write - or hit the wall trying to write - their newest music.
I found a couple of nice blog entries from artists we'll listen to this weekend on The Signal. On Friday night - we'll find out what the Brooklyn band Yeasayer are eating while they make their new record - and we'll hear how Lykke Li lost her luggage on the way home from her last tour.
The Evolution Competition is in full swing and the five composer finalists are starting to produce some blog entries (Evolution Blog). The site also includes spectacular shots of Banff and few good ones of Vincent Ho playing the piano. Vince, you have to stop improvising and write down those note! Every night off the top of the show, we'll have a little update on how things are going at the Banff Centre.
Which brings me to my blog question for this week. I really want to know what you like to read about - when you're surfing the blogosphere. Is it a good thing for musicians to bare their souls and dish about their insecurities - or is it better to stay on the lighter side - with goofy pictures and candid videos? Let me know. All you have to do is click on the link below and add your own thoughts to the historical record!
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