COMING TOGETHER

Feb 25, 2020 · Peggy Corkum Music Room · Halifax, Nova Scotia

COMING TOGETHER was Alkali Collective’s second concert and brought contemporary chamber music together with spoken word, improvisation, found objects, and audience participation. Built around different forms of connection – between music and language, performers and listeners, and individuals within a larger community – the program featured works by Gabriel Dharmoo, Pauline Oliveros, Amy Brandon, Susan McMaster, and Frederic Rzewski.

The concert culminated in Rzewski’s Coming Together, a landmark 1971 work based on text by Sam Melville, an inmate and organizer killed during the Attica prison uprising. Its combination of a persistent musical line, spoken text, and improvisatory flexibility provided a focal point for a program concerned with collective action and the possibilities that emerge through listening and collaboration. Earlier in the program, Pauline Oliveros’s participatory The New Sound Meditation extended that idea to the audience, inviting listeners to become performers themselves.

Guest Artist: Alice Burdick

Alice Burdick is a poet and author whose work includes four full-length poetry collections as well as Deportment: The Poetry of Alice Burdick, a volume of selected poems published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Her work has appeared in numerous chapbooks, magazines, journals, and anthologies, and she has served as a judge for awards including the bpNichol Chapbook Award and the Latner Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize. Based in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, Burdick has also led workshops and worked with students through Poetry in Voice and the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia.

From the Artistic Directors

Alkali Collective is an artist-led chamber ensemble. It uses music as a vehicle to draw attention to and open dialogues about important issues facing our society. This evening we explore the idea of coming together: music and spoken word, instruments and found objects, artists and audience, and society as a whole.

Dharmoo weaves melodic material with organic sound to blend concepts of civilization and nature. Brandon’s work has a musical fluidity that employs both traditional playing and extended technique. McMaster’s works show how words can be performed in a musical context. Oliveros’ The New Sound Meditation creates inclusivity by bringing the audience into the performance itself. Each example of “togetherness” comes to a head in Rzewski’s pivotal Coming Together.

These works showcase how different groups can learn and collaborate together through listening and celebrating one another. It is our hope that this concert offers you a new perspective of music: as a tie that binds us, as a spark for new dialogues, and as an agent for change. We sincerely thank you for joining us this evening.

– Megan Thibeault & Shauna DeGruchy