MONTREAL — When I saw strolling candy hawkers wearing white plastic masks as I entered the concert hall on Feb. 22, I knew this was no ordinary classical-music performance. That was the scene at Agora Hydro-Québec at the University of Quebec the night the composer and video artist Nicole Lizée’s work was featured as part of the Montreal/New Musics Festival.
I attended four concerts at this year’s festival, which has been held every two years since 2003. The theme this year was “Music and Images,” and indeed there was a visual component to every performance I saw.
Back to the candy hawkers: There was no charge for the candy, and each had a title of one of Lizée’s pieces printed on the package. (Lizée, by the way, received MCANA’s Best New Opera Award in 2023 for R.U.R. A Torrent of Light.)
The story lines of each of her works were driven by video with actors relating a surreal story. In 8-Bit Noir, a violist begins to experience music expressed in simplistic digital representation (i.e., 8 bits) as the story — dramatized both on the screen and live on the stage — plunges into increasingly abstract scenes. The sole musician onstage, Marie-Hélène Breault, played bass flute and vocalized, and at one point, two musicians entered the stage and noisily ate candy into microphones. At another moment, a man appeared working on a knitting project with an 8-bit design.
Lizée’s Black Midi story had to do with the effect of a tuning fork on a plastic ear. The solo pianist, Pamela Reimer, was also tasked with playing harmonica and swinging a sound tube over her head. The impact of the video and stagecraft overpowered the auditory element, especially in Lizée’s work.
The festival, presented by Société de Musique Contemporaine du Québec (SMCQ), touts itself as one of the largest new-music festivals in North America. While that is a fairly specific qualification, there’s no doubt that 18 concerts presented in 16 days (Feb. 14-March 2) with a score of world premieres and dozens of performers is a deep commitment to the art form.
Two new works by other composers, both commissioned by SMCQ, were equally compelling. Margareta Jeric’s Les échos de l’Adriatique included vivid landscape images of an abandoned factory in Croatia. The score evoked sounds of nature with trills, slaps on the body of the bass, tinkling piano, and ethereal strings.
The video for Philippe Macnab-Séguin’s Closures included cartoon depictions of doors and windows opening and closing and distorted images of a subway train. Microtonal dissonances, rising lines in the winds, and funky rhythms characterized the music. Ensemble de la SMCQ, led by Cristian Gort, played each work with confidence and conviction.
The following evening’s program, “DigiScores,” featured animated and participatory music scores, a specialty of the Montreal group Ensemble SuperMusique, whose members draw heavily on their improvisational skills.
It was fascinating to watch the score take shape, literally, in Linda Bouchard’s Pandémonium. The work for three players used custom software called Ocular Scores. The musicians’ performance is projected on the screen, with the main voice drawn in white, an accompanying line in blue, and free improvisation in red. A viola solo evoked a long line of red figures; the flute, blue triangles, etc., with mostly sparse, often seemingly random sounds.
Zero Waste by Nick Didkovsky created an uninteresting layered pastiche that relied on morphing the same two measures over and over.
Two other works impressed me with their visuals: Joane Hétu and Manon De Pauw’s La vie de l’esprit featured beautiful watercolors manipulated with a toothpick in real time, and Terri Hron’s Mouth of a River, whose arresting images were of a river framed by the outline of voluptuous lips. The score evoked the sounds of water with an electronic drone, synthesizer vibrato, and sections that ebbed and flowed like the tide, though the resulting music itself was tedious.
Perhaps it’s odd to come to Canada to hear a group based in my hometown of New York City. On the other hand, it was an opportunity to hear the Ekmeles’ all-Canadian program. The vocal ensemble’s longest offering, Taylor Brook’s Motorman Sextet, was also the most effective. With several pages of text drawn from a novel, the words were read by a single member with the rest of the ensemble creating a colorful, wordless soundtrack. The text was absurdist, as was the musical treatment.
Zosha Di Castri’s We Live the Opposite Daring is the second in a series of once-per-decade works Di Castri is writing for Ekmeles. Inspired by fragments of texts by the ancient Greek poet Sappho, the work employed percussive body slaps along with vocalized breaths, squeaks, sighs, and actual words.
SWEET FLAG! turned the concept of a musical score on its head. Composer Charlotte Mundy, who is also the group’s soprano, was determined to separate the musician from the physical score. She put the text (excerpts from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass) on strands of beads, but it didn’t seem to tear the musician away from the page — it’s just that the words were on beads instead of paper.
Like a frog on the road to it by Corie Rose Soumah simply went on too long. The music included electronics, voices whispering, low moans, and frog sounds, making me feel as if I were in a pond with crickets, cicadas, frogs, and mosquitoes. After a quarter-hour of convincing sounds of nature, a completely incongruous section had two individuals of the ensemble read texts introducing themselves and explaining the origin of their names. The video by Camilla Tassi that accompanied the score included spacey green and black designs that reminded me of Aurora Borealis, branches, leaves, human figures, and a sunrise.
I had high expectations for the world premiere of Steven Kazuo Takasugi’s Il Teatro Rossi performed by No Hay Banda on Feb. 25. I had enjoyed Takasugi’s piano concerto in 2024 in New York, and I was also intrigued by the description of the video by Huei Lin, a “visual soundtrack” that follows the music, inverting the relationship between film and film score. Lin wrote in the program notes, “The musicians are the cast performing Takasugi’s musical epic from a vaudevillian showroom.”
The seven musicians of No Hay Banda strode onto the stage of the century-old Theatre Plaza bathed in red light, clad mainly in sequins. Then the one-hour torturous work began. The score included plucked strings, blats on a trombone, clatter from keyboard and percussion, and squeaks and yips from the vocalist, who was at center stage. But there was little variation from those sounds as the hour wore on.
Lin’s video images at first echoed the musicians onstage accurately on the screen behind them. This was displayed in a distorted view as if projected onto a disco ball. As the piece progressed, those images began to veer from reality, showing a grimacing face on the bass clarinetist, a keyboard player wearing clothes different from the musician onstage, and various video fragments. The scene titles should have given me a clue as to what was to come: “The Spasms of Trapped Animals,” “Petrified Performers,” and “More Twitching,” to name a few.
I didn’t like everything I heard at the Montreal/New Musics Festival. But that’s not at all the point. In this series, SMCQ provides an important survey of contemporary music from its own region and elsewhere in North America.
