‘Music is my way of understanding the world’

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This article was published 23/01/2024 (704 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Missy Mazzoli is living out a childhood dream.

The Brooklyn, N.Y., composer and pianist always wished to make a living out of creating music, and the latest in a growing list of accolades — being named the distinguished guest composer at the Winnipeg New Music Festival, which begins Thursday and runs till Feb. 2 — adds even more belief in herself and the unconventional career path she’s chosen.

”When I was 10, even before I was writing music I would tell people that’s what I was going to do as a job,” Mazzoli says. “In any one day I’m orchestrating an opera, I’m collaborating with a dancer or I’m raising an electronic piece. Every day is completely different.

“Music is my way of understanding the world and my way of investigating the world. It’s much bigger than writing music every day.”

Mazzoli will be in the city to collaborate with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, which will perform five of her works during the festival, including two during Saturday night’s concert at the Centennial Concert Hall.

“I’m not going to lie. Things are tough for the performing arts. A lot of bigger companies are re-evaluating and shrinking, so any opportunity to have my work played in front of a North American audience is really meaningful to me,” she says.

“It’s kind of like an out-of-body experience. I’m hearing things I’ve created but I have no control over how it goes. In live performance, anything can happen and I’ve learned to love that.”

The first performance of Mazzoli’s will be Orpheus Undone, a 2019 work commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, where Mazzoli was its composer-in-residence.

Orpheus Undone began its musical life as a ballet, Orpheus Alive, for the National Ballet of Canada, focusing on the life of the musician and poet from Ancient Greek mythology. Orpheus Undone is its mirror image, stripping the ballet’s happy ending and exploring a fateful moment.

”I know it has been a story that composers have told over and over and over again for hundreds of years but I was really interested in looking at it as an analysis of how we think about trauma,” Mazzoli says. “It happens in a single instance of Orpheus’s life, when his lover has been taken to the underworld and he makes the decision to go after her.”

Mazzoli has been fascinated by time for years, and the work begins with a metronome beat that changes tempo depending on the intensity of the moment.

“You could think about it as a clock ticking. You could also think of it as a heartbeat, a pulse that is speeding up or slowing down,” she says. “It’s really about this very traumatic split-second of time expanded over 15 minutes.”

Another festival highlight takes place Sunday when the festival once again travels to a non-traditional place for music. The Canadian duo Kamancello will perform at The Leaf, the Assiniboine Park’s recently opened horticultural attraction, for two shows eligible only for festival passholders.

Violin Concerto (Procession), a 2022 piece commissioned by the Washington, D.C.-based National Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Symphony and the Cincinnati Symphony, will showcase violinist Karl Stobbe, the WSO’s associate concertmaster.

Much of Mazzoli’s compositions are in the operatic realm. The festival, along with Winnipeg’s Polycoro Chamber Choir, will touch upon Mazzoli’s abilities with vocal compositions Tuesday night at Knox United Church when it performs Year of Our Burning in an evening that includes works by Canadian cellist and composer Raphael Weinroth-Browne, one-half of Kamancello, American composer Michael Gilbertson and Winnipeg’s Jocelyn Morlock.

Mazzoli’s concerto Dark With Excessive Bright, which is also the title track of an album Mazzoli and Norwegian Peter Herresthal teamed up on last year, gets the WSO treatment Thursday night at the concert hall. The festival windup on Friday night will showcase River Rouge Transfiguration, a work that focuses on the history of Detroit.

Herresthal performed works from the album during a concert held in an old coal mine in northern Norway, and Arctic life, with its long moments of darkness in the winter and the seemingly endless summer sunshine inspire Dark With Excessive Bright.

It’s given Mazzoli an appreciation for extreme winter climes, which she says she’s prepared for when she flies to Winnipeg for the festival.

”I have experienced some cold, it was negative 35 when I was (in Norway). I have some of the gear from it,” she says. “I’m thrilled to be there for so much of my music and so many works by other people in particular.

“I’ve known about the festival for a long time. I’ve had friends and colleagues who have been a part of it. I thought, ‘I like extreme temperature, I like Canada. Why not?’ “

Alan.Small@winnipegfreepress.com

X: @AlanDSmall