concert and artist Q&A with Jason Doell and Anna Höstman
Wed. Apr. 17, 2019, 7 p.m.
James Bay United Church, Victoria, B.C.
$10
On Wednesday April 17th, A Place to Listen Ensemble members Daniel Brandes, Nathan Friedman, and Hollas Longton will premiere two new trios by Toronto-based composer Jason Doell and Victoria-based composer Anna Höstman.
"I was honoured when Anna and Jason wrote to me last year asking if APTL would premiere these new works," says APTL co-founder Daniel Brandes. "Anna has an incredible sensitivity to small sonic details--simple, humble melodies and harmonies bloom and reveal an incredible depth in her music. Jason's music is beautifully strange and weird, while also having this disarminly lovely harmonic sensibility. It has a quality of being strangely familiar in an ungraspable way that, to me, is totally dreamlike."
Jason's new trio,strings of sound mapping the thresholds of a liminal space, meditates on a series of fragile sonorities. "It presents a delicate trajectory that is struggling to reconcile “toward” and “away from” inside of a space that is familiar, reminiscent, and signifying but never settled or landed," says Jason.
Anna's new piece, Arctic Blooms, began during an artist residency in Isafjördur, Iceland that was sponsored by the Canada Council for the Arts and the SOCAN Foundation.
"What I noticed most in Iceland was the light: how it made certain greens seem yellow, and certain blues seem green," says Anna. "Other blues were grey, as if the sea could be seen through mountains. Snow was part cloud; clouds were part glacier. There were huge geometries — fjords scraped by ice, and steep hills worn down by avalanches. And then there were the tiny blooms: whole fields filled with sparks of restless colour sprinkled low to the ground."
Please join us after the concert for an informal Q&A with the composers.