CCA 2004 Music Festival Reflects on Architectural Ideas of the 1970s

MONTREAL, 9 January 2004—The 2004 edition of the Canadian Centre for Architecture Music Festival will be presented on 22, 29 January, 5 and 12 February in the Paul Desmarais Theatre of the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA). This year's festival is a musical reflection of the exhibition out of the box: price rossi stirling + matta-clark on view at the CCA until 6 September 2004. Under the artistic direction of Neal Gripp, some of Canada’s finest musicians will interpret works written from the 1960s to the 1980s, among which Crumb, Xenakis, Birtwistle, Britten, Petrassi and Dutilleux.

This was a period of cultural conflict and dissent, in which modernist doctrines in all the arts were variously enlarged, questioned, rejected or disrupted. Musicians like George Crumb, whose pieces question the status of the human composer in the face of sounds found in the world about us, can be compared to artists like Matta-Clark — who fried his photographic prints like strips of bacon in order to challenge the sanctimony surrounding the “work of art”. Everything Xenakis wrote looks, as did Cedric Price, at the mechanics of time and the mathematics of motion, rather than aesthetics. Just as Birtwistle finds a radical new musical syntax through memory and through common knowledge of shared myths, so Stirling and Rossi revived neglected terms and moments in the historical lexicon of architecture to develop a fresh language.

Each concert begins with a different composer’s take on a classical form — particularly the toccata, which has always stood for self-confident bravura and here serves to illustrate the impudence and bravado with which the music, art and architecture of this period confronted their sources and traditions.

Those concerts are presented in collaboration with CBC Radio Two (93,5 FM in Montreal) and la Chaîne culturelle de Radio-Canada (100,7 FM in Montreal). On the English network, these concerts will be broadcast later this season on In performance, heard weekdays at 8:00 p.m. with host Eric Friesen, and on Quebec in Concert, hosted by Kelly Rice on Sundays at 12:05 p.m. On the French network, these concerts will also be broadcast on Nicholson, hosted by Georges Nicholson on Sundays at 8:00 p.m., and on Radio-concerts, heard from Monday to Wednesday at 8:00 p.m. with host Françoise Davoine.

Thursday 22 January at 7:30 pm
Petrassi, Nono, Dallapiccola, Britten

Thursday 29 January at 7:30 pm
Headington, Ferneyhough, Harvey, Musgrave, Britten, Davies

Thursday 5 February at 7:30 pm
Perle, Birtwistle, Thomson, Cowell, Cage, Harrison, Rorem, Britten, Knussen, Crumb

Thursday 12 February at 7:30 pm
Britten, Rzewski, Poulenc, Xenakis, Dutilleux .

For information and reservations : (1) 514 939 70 26

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