Exhibition | The Score鈥檚 the Thing: Humour and the Absurd in the Music of Brian Cherney
The Marvin Duchow Music Library鈥檚 latest exhibition entitled,聽The Score鈥檚 the Thing: Humour and the Absurd in the Music of Brian Cherney celebrates the Canadian composer Cherney鈥檚 recent 75th聽birthday and focuses on five theatrical pieces written over a thirty聽year聽span.
Three of the first four works (Tangents I,聽Group Portrait with Piano聽and聽Playing for Time), composed between 1975 and 1981, explore and expand upon several integrated and overlapping themes. Cherney examines, in various humourous and improbable ways, the influence of nineteenth-century Romantic music on late twentieth century performers and composers who share a love for its beauty but also must bear the weight of its unshakable influence. He also critiques classical music performance traditions and pokes fun at the absurd relationships between live performers and seemingly inanimate musical instruments.聽The 鈥渋rrational鈥� and 鈥済hostly鈥� appearances of 19th聽century musical excerpts and the theatrical conjuring of the composers themselves reinforce expressions of anxiety and ambivalence.聽The fourth theatre piece from this period is born out of Cherney鈥檚 frustration with the lack of live and recorded performances of Canadian music.聽In聽Trois petites pi猫ces, the second movement joins together snippets of traditional music notation with a collage of 19th聽and early 20th聽century lithographic images thereby creating a score that is according to the composer, 鈥渟o visually interesting that it doesn鈥檛 need to be played.鈥澛燚ecades later, Cherney combines the fruits of these early theatrical and absurdist experiments in the 2009 piece entitled聽Brahms and the German Spirit.聽 In this extended and complex work he expands his examination of 19th聽century German high-art music and culture and contrasts it with Jewish musical traditions and history, culminating in the powerful imagery of the Holocaust.
We hope you will take the time to look carefully at the scores and read the small essays or captions (English, French, Yiddish) accompanying each work in the display cases facing the elevators and on the third floor wall north of the Library front entrance. For your convenience, there are also two video performances of聽Brahms and the German Spirit聽located on iPads in front of the complete score.
Don't miss the associated Schulich School of Music 肠辞苍蹿别谤别苍肠别:听Illuminations: Brian Cherney at Seventy-Five.
