Edge of the Center
26/10/11 13:54 Filed in: Music
A blog posting about my studies at SUNY Buffalo is online at the University at Buffalo’s Center for 21st Century Music blog: Edge of the Center.
Spring for Music
26/10/11 13:53 Filed in: Music
The Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra needs your vote! The WSO has entered a proposal for a concert at Carnegie Hall in 2014, and it's now in the public voting stage. They need more votes to get this to happen. The proposed concert has a work of mine, a new work by Vincent Ho (resident composer with the WSO) and Murray Schafer's new symphony. Although public votes aren't the only criteria, they will help. If you could take a moment to vote for this it would be greatly appreciated!
http://springformusic.com/2011/10/2014-program-27/
Voting is open until Nov. 4, 2011.
Cheers!
Derek
http://springformusic.com/2011/10/2014-program-27/
Voting is open until Nov. 4, 2011.
Cheers!
Derek
Raga Saat – New Flute Quartet
12/09/11 11:03 Filed in: Music
A new flute quartet is now available. Raga Saat is the companion work to Raga Cha. The work is available from me, and will be available soon from the Canadian Music Centre. To learn more about this work visit: Raga Saat
Symphony No. 1 on CBC Concerts on Demand
07/09/11 17:35 Filed in: Music
Symphony no. 1 ‘Transient Energies’, performed by Symphony Nova Scotia, is now available on the CBC website.
http://music.cbc.ca/#/concerts/Symphony-Nova-Scotia-Charke-2011-04-07
Recording sounds for Symphony no. 1
http://music.cbc.ca/#/concerts/Symphony-Nova-Scotia-Charke-2011-04-07
Recording sounds for Symphony no. 1
Camping in the Yukon Territory
18/07/11 09:51 Filed in: Personal
Here are a few photos from a camping trip to the Yukon:
On the Dempster Highway
Dempster highway
Tombstone Park
This is what your camper looks like after driving on the Dempster highway! It was white... I think?
Dawson City
Yukon River
It wants my coffee!
On the Dempster Highway
Dempster highway
Tombstone Park
This is what your camper looks like after driving on the Dempster highway! It was white... I think?
Dawson City
Yukon River
It wants my coffee!
Tundra Songs in Scotland
11/05/11 07:37 Filed in: Press
15 May 2011 13:48 GMT
“Finally it was the truly inimitable Tanya Tagaq who joined the Kronos Quartet for an entire mini-set, who before and after performance was obviously delighted to be in attendance and so rapturously received by the audience, looking demure and smiling sweetly. But for the duration of Tundra Songs, oh my! Almost impossible to take your eyes off as she took centre-stage in between the quartet, gutturally growling and moaning rapidly heavy-breathing and gyrating and crooning and then calmly narrating and at all times looking as though she was locked in some sort of trance state, the Canadian’s skills in Inuit throat-singing allowing a development into something quite extraordinary as the Kronos Quartet provided swirling, engrossing accompaniment and kayak, paddle and other natural recorded sounds ricocheting around them. It was an epic sweep with which to end the night, and entirely fitting when over the course of a couple of hours the audience been exhilaratingly flung around several far corners of the globe.”
Read the full article here
SNS offers huge works by Brahms, Charke
09/04/11 15:10 Filed in: Press
By STEPHEN PEDERSEN
Concert Review
© Sat, Apr 9, 2011, Chronicle Herald, Halifax
Derek Charke and Bernhard Gueller Backstage after the premiere of Symphony No. 1
It was blockbuster night for Symphony Nova Scotia on Thursday at the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium.
Only two pieces filled the program, which will be repeated Sunday at 2 p.m., the world premiere of Derek Charke’s Symphony No. 1 Transient Energies and the great Brahms Violin Concerto.
Both challenged the limits of possibility, though by now the Brahms, written in 1878 and initially considered unplayable, is standard repertoire for college level violinists.
Certainly concertmaster Robert Uchida made it sound, well, not easy, but formidable still, though he transformed each of the profound technical challenges into artistic opportunities for ever-deeper musical expression.
Charke’s challenge was to integrate sounds associated with energy production from wind, water, oil and internal combustion, into a contemporary symphonic palette of instrumental colour, rhythmic invention and electronic manipulation.
And he had to guide his audience’s attention span, challenged even by the sweetly sonorous soundscape of the Brahms and much more so by contemporary music where the safety rope of intelligible melody has been heartlessly swept away.
Charke took care of this, partly, by means of unexpected changes of direction and tireless building and rebuilding musical momentum, all packaged into a tightly knit, four-movement score of unusual length.
His ear for instrumental tone as well as the shimmering timbres of natural sounds of automobiles, wind turbines, flowing water, gurgling oil, shovelled coal and the clatter of trains over buzzing steel rails is amazingly acute and all-inclusive.
Charke’s ability to extract rhythmic episodes from subtle sonic hints was paid for with hours of listening and the compilation of 450 sound files, some reproduced as recorded, others subjected to state-of-the-art digital manipulation, and all of it accumulated into a mind-boggling mass of musical material.
Consistently and forcefully, Charke marshalled them into order, while maintaining firm artistic control of imagery, shape and playability.
Moments of extraordinary tranquility, as in the mystical vision at the end of the hectic fourth movement, echoed through the Mahler-esque cello solo, played so expressively by principal cellist Norman Adams in the melancholy first movement.
The sound image of cars swooping by on a busy Highway 101 outside Kentville began the first movement and returned at the end of the fourth to diminish into the silence of vanishing momentum, a strangely sad sound.
The orchestra played the score like the musical Olympians they are when meeting such a challenge. Bernhard Gueller, the symphony’s music director, maintained control with an extremely light but unalterably sure touch.
Resident conductor Martin MacDonald sat at a small table back of the cellos, furnished with a notebook computer screen and a controller with eight pads on it that allowed him to play the prepared electronic score with the timing of a trained musician.
After intermission, the opening measures of the Brahms concerto, radiant with warmth and dark-tone colour, took us into the 19th century sound world as quickly as a click of the mouse on a computer.
Before long Uchida, Gueller and the orchestra revealed the details woven by Brahms into musical tapestries alive with subtle colour and melodic variation.
The controversy that raged around Brahms’ head in his day between his "absolute" music and the "program" music of Berlioz and Liszt is long gone. Yet, in a curious way, the complexities of Brahms’ musical invention, and the pictures deliberately painted by the tone painting of some of his contemporaries, was unselfconsciously combined in Charke’s music of more than a century later.
Whatever energized that somewhat abstract debate in the musical politics of the 19th century has yielded, in the 21st, to the growing confidence of contemporary composers in the art of organic musical invention, where everything is made new, and impossibility is seen only as opportunity.
(spedersen@ns.sympatico.ca)
Stephen Pedersen is a freelance arts writer who lives in Halifax.
Concert Review
© Sat, Apr 9, 2011, Chronicle Herald, Halifax
Derek Charke and Bernhard Gueller Backstage after the premiere of Symphony No. 1
It was blockbuster night for Symphony Nova Scotia on Thursday at the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium.
Only two pieces filled the program, which will be repeated Sunday at 2 p.m., the world premiere of Derek Charke’s Symphony No. 1 Transient Energies and the great Brahms Violin Concerto.
Both challenged the limits of possibility, though by now the Brahms, written in 1878 and initially considered unplayable, is standard repertoire for college level violinists.
Certainly concertmaster Robert Uchida made it sound, well, not easy, but formidable still, though he transformed each of the profound technical challenges into artistic opportunities for ever-deeper musical expression.
Charke’s challenge was to integrate sounds associated with energy production from wind, water, oil and internal combustion, into a contemporary symphonic palette of instrumental colour, rhythmic invention and electronic manipulation.
And he had to guide his audience’s attention span, challenged even by the sweetly sonorous soundscape of the Brahms and much more so by contemporary music where the safety rope of intelligible melody has been heartlessly swept away.
Charke took care of this, partly, by means of unexpected changes of direction and tireless building and rebuilding musical momentum, all packaged into a tightly knit, four-movement score of unusual length.
His ear for instrumental tone as well as the shimmering timbres of natural sounds of automobiles, wind turbines, flowing water, gurgling oil, shovelled coal and the clatter of trains over buzzing steel rails is amazingly acute and all-inclusive.
Charke’s ability to extract rhythmic episodes from subtle sonic hints was paid for with hours of listening and the compilation of 450 sound files, some reproduced as recorded, others subjected to state-of-the-art digital manipulation, and all of it accumulated into a mind-boggling mass of musical material.
Consistently and forcefully, Charke marshalled them into order, while maintaining firm artistic control of imagery, shape and playability.
Moments of extraordinary tranquility, as in the mystical vision at the end of the hectic fourth movement, echoed through the Mahler-esque cello solo, played so expressively by principal cellist Norman Adams in the melancholy first movement.
The sound image of cars swooping by on a busy Highway 101 outside Kentville began the first movement and returned at the end of the fourth to diminish into the silence of vanishing momentum, a strangely sad sound.
The orchestra played the score like the musical Olympians they are when meeting such a challenge. Bernhard Gueller, the symphony’s music director, maintained control with an extremely light but unalterably sure touch.
Resident conductor Martin MacDonald sat at a small table back of the cellos, furnished with a notebook computer screen and a controller with eight pads on it that allowed him to play the prepared electronic score with the timing of a trained musician.
After intermission, the opening measures of the Brahms concerto, radiant with warmth and dark-tone colour, took us into the 19th century sound world as quickly as a click of the mouse on a computer.
Before long Uchida, Gueller and the orchestra revealed the details woven by Brahms into musical tapestries alive with subtle colour and melodic variation.
The controversy that raged around Brahms’ head in his day between his "absolute" music and the "program" music of Berlioz and Liszt is long gone. Yet, in a curious way, the complexities of Brahms’ musical invention, and the pictures deliberately painted by the tone painting of some of his contemporaries, was unselfconsciously combined in Charke’s music of more than a century later.
Whatever energized that somewhat abstract debate in the musical politics of the 19th century has yielded, in the 21st, to the growing confidence of contemporary composers in the art of organic musical invention, where everything is made new, and impossibility is seen only as opportunity.
(spedersen@ns.sympatico.ca)
Stephen Pedersen is a freelance arts writer who lives in Halifax.
Sounds of the world make music
06/04/11 07:09 Filed in: Press
Charke brings Transient Energies to the symphony
By STEPHEN PEDERSEN
© 2011-04-06, Chronicle Herald, Halifax
Symphony Nova Scotia brings the outside world into the concert hall on Thursday.
In a concert, which also features concertmaster Robert Uchida playing the Brahms Violin Concerto, the orchestra premieres its latest commissioned work, Transient Energies, by Acadia University flutist-composer Derek Charke.
Charke integrated more than 400 recordings of traffic, wind turbines, water gurgling and coal being shovelled into a 40-minute, four-movement symphony with an environmental, energy-inspired soundscape.
But the piece does not have an ecological purpose, Charke said in a Saturday afternoon interview in Halifax.
"I’m using environmental sounds, sounds which have been derived from energy production in Nova Scotia, but I have no environmental agenda with this piece," he said.
Charke took his microphone and digital recorder to capture the sounds of the diesel generators in Acadia’s power plant, stood under giant wind turbines in Pubnico, hunched down in a ditch beside heavily travelled Highway 101. He pointed his microphone at running water on the Bay of Fundy’s tidal flats, squeezed a bottle of ketchup to get that gulping sound that oil also makes when poured, recorded trains clacking over the tracks and even shovelled small rocks and gravel in his backyard to suggest shifting coal.
With 450 files of what he calls "power sounds," Charke spent hours listening, cataloguing and manipulating their pitches.
"There are various levels of processing the sounds," he said. "The first is just the raw sound, which makes its way into the piece at points where you hear just that. The traffic is one of them. Water is another, the sound of the wind turbine another. Many other sounds make their way in maybe for only a couple of seconds, electric saws, for example."
Charke began to manipulate the sounds after listening long and closely to understand the characteristics of each sound, the rhythms that can be related to it, for example.
"At one moment, the train sound comes in and several layers of things happen and (conductor) Bernhard Gueller has to ignore the soundtrack to make sure it does not affect the tempo of the orchestral sounds," he said.
"The last movement is a large scale accelerando, which starts at a slower pace and gradually builds up to a climax. Bernhard has to go through something like 15 tempo changes in it."
The four movements are titled Highways (eight minutes), Dis-shovel’d (nine minutes), Rotations (11 minutes) and Crude (12 minutes).
Charke has written several other long works, the 30-minute Tundra Songs commissioned by the Kronos String Quartet, a 20-minute concerto for Kronos and the Toronto Symphony and, in 2009, Falling From Cloudless Skies, his first work for symphony orchestra with electronic soundscape that was commissioned by the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra.
"Transient Energies does have references to traditional symphonic structure," Charke said. "But I did not set out to imitate symphonic form. The material the orchestra is playing and each one of the movements is very different from the others. Each movement has its own form."
Audiences will find much in the piece that resonates with what they have heard before. But not exactly, given the electronic soundscape, he said.
"The actual shape of the piece, I think they are going to find that it is absolutely natural. I hope, I hope, you never know."
(spedersen@ns.sympatico.ca)
Stephen Pedersen is a freelance arts writer who lives in Halifax.
By STEPHEN PEDERSEN
© 2011-04-06, Chronicle Herald, Halifax
Symphony Nova Scotia brings the outside world into the concert hall on Thursday.
In a concert, which also features concertmaster Robert Uchida playing the Brahms Violin Concerto, the orchestra premieres its latest commissioned work, Transient Energies, by Acadia University flutist-composer Derek Charke.
Charke integrated more than 400 recordings of traffic, wind turbines, water gurgling and coal being shovelled into a 40-minute, four-movement symphony with an environmental, energy-inspired soundscape.
But the piece does not have an ecological purpose, Charke said in a Saturday afternoon interview in Halifax.
"I’m using environmental sounds, sounds which have been derived from energy production in Nova Scotia, but I have no environmental agenda with this piece," he said.
Charke took his microphone and digital recorder to capture the sounds of the diesel generators in Acadia’s power plant, stood under giant wind turbines in Pubnico, hunched down in a ditch beside heavily travelled Highway 101. He pointed his microphone at running water on the Bay of Fundy’s tidal flats, squeezed a bottle of ketchup to get that gulping sound that oil also makes when poured, recorded trains clacking over the tracks and even shovelled small rocks and gravel in his backyard to suggest shifting coal.
With 450 files of what he calls "power sounds," Charke spent hours listening, cataloguing and manipulating their pitches.
"There are various levels of processing the sounds," he said. "The first is just the raw sound, which makes its way into the piece at points where you hear just that. The traffic is one of them. Water is another, the sound of the wind turbine another. Many other sounds make their way in maybe for only a couple of seconds, electric saws, for example."
Charke began to manipulate the sounds after listening long and closely to understand the characteristics of each sound, the rhythms that can be related to it, for example.
"At one moment, the train sound comes in and several layers of things happen and (conductor) Bernhard Gueller has to ignore the soundtrack to make sure it does not affect the tempo of the orchestral sounds," he said.
"The last movement is a large scale accelerando, which starts at a slower pace and gradually builds up to a climax. Bernhard has to go through something like 15 tempo changes in it."
The four movements are titled Highways (eight minutes), Dis-shovel’d (nine minutes), Rotations (11 minutes) and Crude (12 minutes).
Charke has written several other long works, the 30-minute Tundra Songs commissioned by the Kronos String Quartet, a 20-minute concerto for Kronos and the Toronto Symphony and, in 2009, Falling From Cloudless Skies, his first work for symphony orchestra with electronic soundscape that was commissioned by the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra.
"Transient Energies does have references to traditional symphonic structure," Charke said. "But I did not set out to imitate symphonic form. The material the orchestra is playing and each one of the movements is very different from the others. Each movement has its own form."
Audiences will find much in the piece that resonates with what they have heard before. But not exactly, given the electronic soundscape, he said.
"The actual shape of the piece, I think they are going to find that it is absolutely natural. I hope, I hope, you never know."
(spedersen@ns.sympatico.ca)
Stephen Pedersen is a freelance arts writer who lives in Halifax.
Kronos Quartet surprise, unsurprisingly, at the Walker Art Center
16/02/11 09:06 Filed in: Press
BY KATE GALLAGHER, TC DAILY PLANET
February 16, 2011
Friday’s program opened with Derek Charke's Cercle du Nord III, a piece written for Kronos that begins with the sounds of the Canadian far north: sled dogs barking, wind howling, boots crunching on snow, and then the sounds of civilization: truck tires on snow, a car door slamming. As the quartet began to play, a driving pace was established that continued throughout the work. I often find it difficult to visualize what instrumental music may be trying to suggest, even after reading the program notes, but as Cercle du Nord III took off, my mind was flooded with images of sled dogs racing across a vast frozen landscape, their panting and the sound of the paws breaking the crust on the snow the only noises to interrupt the frozen landscape. Even in this world the sounds of humanity were never far away; I was pulled from my imagined world by Inuit throat singing also featured prominently in the work. I had never heard throat singing before and was struck by the depth and intensity of the music.
Quoted in Part. Read the full article here: http://www.tcdailyplanet.net/arts/kronos-quartet-walker-art-center-review
February 16, 2011
Friday’s program opened with Derek Charke's Cercle du Nord III, a piece written for Kronos that begins with the sounds of the Canadian far north: sled dogs barking, wind howling, boots crunching on snow, and then the sounds of civilization: truck tires on snow, a car door slamming. As the quartet began to play, a driving pace was established that continued throughout the work. I often find it difficult to visualize what instrumental music may be trying to suggest, even after reading the program notes, but as Cercle du Nord III took off, my mind was flooded with images of sled dogs racing across a vast frozen landscape, their panting and the sound of the paws breaking the crust on the snow the only noises to interrupt the frozen landscape. Even in this world the sounds of humanity were never far away; I was pulled from my imagined world by Inuit throat singing also featured prominently in the work. I had never heard throat singing before and was struck by the depth and intensity of the music.
Quoted in Part. Read the full article here: http://www.tcdailyplanet.net/arts/kronos-quartet-walker-art-center-review
Review of Sea to Sea in The Globe and Mail
01/02/11 08:58 Filed in: Press
Sea to Sea
St. Lawrence String Quartet (Centrediscs)
In Sea to Sea, the St. Lawrence String Quartet (currently the resident string quartet at Stanford University in California) acknowledges its roots with six new compositions by Canadian composers. These tend to acknowledge their roots, too, referencing Canadian fiddle tunes and birdsong, Inuit folk songs and throat singers. This risks a certain provincialism – it’s a bit like sewing a Canadian flag on the back of one’s jacket – although at their best the allusions serve as mere points of departure, soon enough obscured. Derek Charke’s smeared lines and quivering textures have an immediate appeal; Brian Current’s Rounds is more bracingly abstract; Marcus Goddard contrasts whip-snapping exchanges with a delicate lyricism. The SLSQ plays with its trademark commitment, precision and fantasy, giving all the pieces a cosmopolitan polish.
© By Elissa Poole Link
St. Lawrence String Quartet (Centrediscs)
In Sea to Sea, the St. Lawrence String Quartet (currently the resident string quartet at Stanford University in California) acknowledges its roots with six new compositions by Canadian composers. These tend to acknowledge their roots, too, referencing Canadian fiddle tunes and birdsong, Inuit folk songs and throat singers. This risks a certain provincialism – it’s a bit like sewing a Canadian flag on the back of one’s jacket – although at their best the allusions serve as mere points of departure, soon enough obscured. Derek Charke’s smeared lines and quivering textures have an immediate appeal; Brian Current’s Rounds is more bracingly abstract; Marcus Goddard contrasts whip-snapping exchanges with a delicate lyricism. The SLSQ plays with its trademark commitment, precision and fantasy, giving all the pieces a cosmopolitan polish.
© By Elissa Poole Link
New work for the Toronto Symphony and Kronos Quartet Announced
27/01/11 08:18 Filed in: Press
The Toronto Symphony Orchestra Announces Its 90th Season (Jan 26, 2011 11:08 ET ) The TSO continues its tradition of orchestral commissions and première performances with four TSO 90th season commission premières. In the first programme of the 2012 New Creations Festival, TSO Music Director Peter Oundjian conducts the TSO and the Kronos Quartet in the world première of a TSO commission from Canadian composer Derek Charke, his Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra (Mar 3, 2012).
Click here for the full press release.
Click here to visit the TSO’s website.
Click here for the full press release.
Click here to visit the TSO’s website.
Acadia music festival hits Halifax market
26/01/11 08:27 Filed in: Press
Students and faculty from Acadia University say their music festival is different every year. This year, they pushed for variety by holding one of the events at a new location: the Seaport farmer's market.
Read the complete story: http://unews.ca/story/item/acadia-music-festival-hits-Halifax-market/
Read the complete story: http://unews.ca/story/item/acadia-music-festival-hits-Halifax-market/
Sea to Sea
06/01/11 08:51 Filed in: Press
Just released: ‘Sea to Sea’ with the St. Lawrence String Quartet. Includes “Sepia Fragments” by Derek Charke plus works by Brian Current, Suzanne Hérbert-Tremblay, Marcus Goddard and Elizabeth Raum.
SEA TO SEA
St. Lawrence String Quartet
Various
2010 Centrediscs / Centredisques
CMCCD 16310
Purchase
SEA TO SEA
St. Lawrence String Quartet
Various
2010 Centrediscs / Centredisques
CMCCD 16310
Purchase
