On the bill for the Suoni per il Popolo festival, which begins on Thursday, Quebec composer and harpist Sarah Pagé will offer a duet performance with her collaborator Patrick Graham, percussionist. The project will be the subject of a discographic release, different from the album that it will offer tomorrow, voda, a complex work that explores our relationship to water as a metaphor for the cycle of life and which also serves as the soundtrack for the next creation by Montreal choreographer of Ukrainian origin Nika Stein. Explanations.
Sarah Pagé has just returned from Japan, where she spent several weeks with two masters of the koto, this long zither which is associated with traditional Japanese music and which, moreover, has certain characteristics of the harp, to which Sarah Pagé was formed.
“I started playing koto five or six years ago,” she explains. During the pandemic, I spent a lot of time rehearsing with this instrument, so I decided to take lessons from teachers there. During her stay, Sarah traveled between Tokyo and Kyoto, lingering especially in the Japanese capital to learn from the American Curtis Patterson, of the Academy of koto Sawai.
“It’s a very modern school, founded by a couple, Tadao Sawai [aujourd’hui décédé]the greatest composer of contemporary repertoire for koto, and his wife, Kazue Sawai, the best interpreter of this instrument — John Cage, John Zorn and Ryuichi Sakamoto have composed works especially for Kazue Sawai”, a musician recognized among others as a virtuoso of jūshichi-gensō, the koto bass, which has 17 strings rather than 13 and which thrills Sarah. “There are so many subtleties and nuances in the sound of this instrument, it is so rich, it reminds me a lot of the sound of the harp,” she says, stars in her eyes.
If we insist on the koto, it’s because the musical heritage of Japan has followed the musician in her professional career (her bassist spouse also plays the shakuhachia traditional flute) and that it is one of the favorite sound materials of voda, Sarah’s new album. Three years after a first album of original compositions (Dose curves) exploring the multitude of sounds of the harp, Sarah Pagé offers a dynamic and choral work, “even if it should have been a more collaborative album, except that the pandemic forced me to work more often alone in the studio”.
You can sometimes hear the storm roaring over vodabetween two contemplative compositions where the notes of the harp, the koto and the violins blur in the convoluted electronic manipulations of the musician, who was inspired by the story imagined by the choreographer Stein to conceive the album.
” vodais the story of our relationship with water — water representing the cycle of life and death, hence the album’s more abrupt and shocking passages”, as in the disturbing atmosphere of Banya or the sustained cadence (by Robbie Kuster on drums and Shawn Mativetsky on tablas) of snake dance. “It is because it is about death that these passages are justified: expressing it is not supposed to be comfortable. I found it difficult to measure how far I could push the music in that direction: when you’re in a room, with the decor, the projections, the dancers, you can more easily push in that direction, whereas on record, I didn’t want to hold people up. I had to find the right balance”, specifies the musician. Goal nicely achieved in this work which is as much contemporary music as post-rock and ambient.
This collaboration with Nika Stein began shortly before the pandemic, explains Sarah, who says she was inspired by the visual material accompanying the choreography that her colleague provided her. “Nika had a well-defined idea of the story she wants to tell in her creation, and her images, her metaphors touched me a lot. The album was recorded in the months following the start of the pandemic, but recent events suddenly give new meaning to voda.
“The album was finished before the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but I feel that voda already had a link with the story told by Nika, whose family had already left Ukraine, a good fifteen years ago. » It is the voice of Nika Stein that we hear at the beginning of the album reciting (in Russian) a text, entitled Rusalka (Mermaid), of the novelist and poet Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841). vodaexplains Sarah, is inspired by Ukrainian culture, and thus helps to give context to the conflict that takes place there.
“Obviously I wouldn’t want to speculate on the meaning of the work,” says Sarah. Especially the meaning it may have taken on since the beginning of this war, since it is first and foremost Nika’s vision, but we think a lot about all that these days, especially since several other paintings by this creation refer directly to Russian music and literature. While waiting to be able to attend the creation of this show, let’s take advantage of its soundtrack, published by Backward Music.
voda, by Sarah Pagé, will be released on June 2 by Backward Music. She will be in concert with Patrick Graham on June 16 at the Cité-des-Hospitalières chapel, on the bill for the Suoni per il Popolo festival.