Wonderfully bizarre: why more people should take a chance on Montreal's contemporary music scene
Creative juices flow despite drop in funding
Daniel Áñez's fingers slip frantically over the keys of his piano as he manages to play only very short snippets of different songs at a time. A classically trained pianist, it is clear to Áñez the instrument is at fault.
Naturally, a team of surgeons takes to the stage and begins operating on the piano using rubber balls and EBows (electronic or energy bows) — among other unconventional tools — creating music from its exposed top.
That's how No Hay Banda (which translates to "there is no band" in Spanish) begins The Piano's Last Act — the first half of a two-part show the group is performing Friday and Saturday at the Théâtre Rouge du Conservatoire d'art dramatique de Montréal.
The entire show is in the style of instrumental theatre, where "music doesn't accompany the action or the theatre, but rather music 'is' the theatre," explains Noam Bierstone, the group's artistic director.
A promoter of avant-garde and experimental music practices, he says he's always a little stressed out about how many people will attend a show, adding that No Hay Banda has worked hard to build trust with its audience since its formation in 2016.
"One of the challenges is getting people to come out to something that they don't know what they're going to see or hear," he says.
It's become even more challenging since the pandemic, because people don't go out as much as before, said Geneviève Liboiron, a violinist and the third member of the group.
Instrumental theatre can be absurd and comedic but it is meticulously chaotic. Every movement and sound is choreographed and transcribed onto music sheets that might send the most versed musicians running.
"We just want people to see it," said Bierstone. There's not really an instrumental theatre scene in Montreal, although contemporary artists tend to cross paths with the genre in some way in their career, he says.
"To have this stage set up and then have access to a theatre like this ... it's an opportunity to hear and see something that is very rare."
Funding: an 'age-old battle'
Making the contemporary music scene more accessible is something that drives Le Vivier — an umbrella organization that promotes new music events in Montreal, and in Quebec more broadly.
The group runs the Semaine du Neuf music festival, which is about to enter its second week of programming.
Le Vivier's artistic director, Jeffrey Stonehouse, says it's an opportunity to connect Montreal's contemporary music scene not only with international artists but with the local population as well.
"I think Montrealers don't know that it's here a lot of the time," he said. "We're witnessing in Montreal an effervescence of activity, like the music community is in full bloom, I would say, and it's very diversified."
Funding, however, which he describes as an "age-old battle" for contemporary artists, hasn't kept up.
The Canada Council for the Arts's biggest grant program, called Explore and Create, for example, was able to approve only 16.6 per cent of applications in its last competition. The "low success rate," the organization explained, was a combination of a high number of applications and the end of special government funding for the pandemic.
"It's a scary reality right now, which is really too bad because [the] scene here is just so dynamic and exciting," said Stonehouse.
No Hay Banda receives funding through the Explore and Create program but says it didn't have as much success in this last round of funding compared to previous years.
Revelling in the absurd
Áñez first flirted with instrumental theatre when composer Gyorgy Dorokhov asked him to lie under the piano and stare at it while a recording of piano music played. He then had to sit behind the piano and pretend he was playing that same song without actually touching any of the keys.
"Musicians when they're on stage, yes, they make music but for them to make that music they have to do all these movements," explains Áñez. "They're just the cost of those sounds that we hear and in music theatre we deconstruct that, we take them apart."
The style was pioneered by composer Mauricio Kagel in the 1970's, explains Robert Hasegawa a professor at McGill's Schulich School of Music.
"For Kagel it made sense to start to look at the concert as a ritual and start to poke fun a little bit about some of the aspects of that ritual that were kind of held sacred before that," he says.
Instrumental theatre was a way to put the "human" back into the performance by allowing the musicians to express themselves in different ways through facial expressions and their bodies, Hasegawa said.
Liboiron says kids in particular might appreciate The Piano's Last Act/Percussionists at the Circus and that she hopes families will come out to the show.
"It's okay to laugh, it's supposed to be funny, it's not serious," says Liboiron.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
