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Richard Marsella, The Whole Note
What a year...By far, one of my favorite concerts from the past season was TOCA LOCA's masterful presentation of their P*P Project at the Glenn Gould Studio on March 25. The concert drove home the fact that a new generation of Canadian composers has certainly landed. The musicianship of the trio is really unprecedented. Percussionist Aiyun Huang and pianists Simon Docking and Gregory Oh are the country's best kept weapons of mass destruction. Seriously "Stevie", forget about the funding of new tanks and choppers...feed these three mouths until they stop breathing, PLEASE!!! TOCA LOCA do justice to the idea of genre inclusiveness in modern art music. Most of the pieces in the concert were influenced by popular culture and this theme for the pieces had pianist Gregory Oh screaming "China!" at the top of his lungs for one piece (Andrew Staniland's Made in China), then the trio mashing Alanis Morissette's Hand in my Pocket in the next (Juliet Palmer's Five).
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Rob Teehan, Mondo Magazine
Ticket to Ride
Music for 6008 Spokes
May 31 - Track field, King Edward PS, 112 Lippincott St. @ 3:00 p.m.
Part of the soundaXis 08 festival
By Rob Teehan
Yet another near miss on my bike: riding along College Street, I'm caught off guard when a rogue cyclist pops out suddenly from behind a parked car, heading straight for me. I swerve to avoid him and lose control, skidding wildly onto the streetcar tracks; I hear a pedestrian gasp. Luckily there are no cars in the lane, the tracks are empty, and I manage to stay upright. Pedalling onward, I can't help thinking: just once, I'd like to ride to an avant-garde new music concert without almost getting killed en route.
Still rattled, I arrive at the running track behind King Edward Public School and join the growing crowd. We're giving up our Saturday afternoons to perform Mauricio Kagel's Eine Brise ("Procession"), a strange composition that calls for 111 cyclists. Gregory Oh, the day's impresario and field marshal, has billed the event as "Music for 6,008 Spokes" (although my rough estimate puts us shy of 3,000). It's part of the ongoing soundaXis festival (May 21-June 15), which presents wide-ranging concerts of unusual art music.
Juggling the folded pages of the graphic score, Oh walks us through the rehearsal: we will ride in close formation, making sounds at each of four checkpoints according to the instructions on posted signs. One sign has us ringing our bells, another singing or whistling, and so forth. The events were meant to happen only once, Oh explains, the formation approaching a fixed body of spectators from a distance, serenading them as it rolls past, and riding away into the sunset. Instead we plan four or five go-arounds on our oval track.
Oh picks me to be point man; I'm instructed to maintain a slow, easy pace (after my close call, I need no convincing). I look behind: the cyclists stretch out, a motley crew of musicians, composers, friends, families, and anyone else who answered Oh's internet-wide appeal. As we snake past the first checkpoint on our test run, the park echoes with our bells - an amazing, ethereal sound, like being surrounded by wind chimes. Gradually the whistlers and singers join in; we make an eerie racket.
The bewildered faces of bystanders ask the question: 40 grown men and women riding bicycles around in a circle and making strange noises, isn't this all a little silly? Maybe, but that's not the point: the composition creates a unique theatrical experience for the audience, but needs no special skills to perform. In fact some parents show up later with their young children, who become equal partners in crime. This is art for the people.
Performance time, and storm clouds are gathering. Will we stay dry? It's looking doubtful, and indeed the drops start just as we begin our ride. But it's a light drizzle, not yet the day's promised thunder, and so the show goes on. As expected, we performers - now some sixty strong with late arrivals - outnumber spectators more than two to one.
Oh stands trackside with a video camera, grinning impishly; I strive for a convincing flutter-tongue sound as I pass. One bike loses a pedal during the second lap - I stretch down and kick it aside. Two locals walk into the middle of the field and stand in silent mockery. Ignore them! But now I've lost count, is this lap 3 or 4? Better keep going to be safe. There's Oh waving his arm: the checkered flag.
It's over quickly, and we scurry to the sidelines to clear the field for the Etobicoke School for the Arts' dance company, DancESAtion, who have prepared a charming Bicycle Ballet. Decked out in fluorescent tights, the grade 10-12 students pedal in circles and criss-crossing patterns, standing on their seats in graceful rolling arabesques or trading high-fives according to Julia Aplin's light-hearted choreography (bikeography?), and ringing their bells in musical patterns designed by John Gzowksi. At one point the bike dancers burst into song, belting out The Blue Danube and ringing the famous offbeats as they wheel around like a chorus line. Still sitting on our bikes, we join from the audience: da-da-da-da-daah…ring ring! ring ring! Somehow I'm reminded of synchronized swimming. Thankfully nobody slips in the worsening rain.
The day's third act - what would have been a very wet reading of Terry Riley's minimalist masterpiece In C — is cancelled. But after the bulk of the crowd has dispersed, our luck changes: the rain abates, just in time for the ride home.
I give every parked car a wide berth.
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Tamara Bernstein, Globe and Mail
(Source)
A genre-bender with a crazy touch
The P*P show takes this Toronto trio into the territory of pop and jazz
TAMARA BERNSTEIN
From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
March 25, 2008 at 3:28 AM EDT
If you glance at the program notes to Toca Loca's current show, you might be forgiven for thinking, initially, that you were in for business as usual, in that "new music" way. Here, for instance, is how Toronto composer Erik Ross describes his newly minted piece: "Fibodoiccannez Splice is a play on the Fibonacci [number] series going forward and backwards at the same time and a dozen providing security. ... Moments of stasis happen just before all of the upper Fibonacci moments, and the piece ends where 12X12 hits the Fibonacci at 144."
Ooooookay! But if you keep reading, you'll find names like Michael Jackson, Alanis Morissette and Earl Hines popping up (no pun intended) in the notes to other pieces. The composers' roster includes jazz musicians such as saxophonist Quinsin Nachoff, a performance artist (Myra Davies) and Nicole Lizée, the McGill University music grad whose master's thesis was a work for turntables and orchestra and who plays keyboards in the indie band Besnard Lakes.
Welcome to the touring show P*P, Toca Loca's foray into new music-pop genre-bending. And if that conjures up images of stiff, classically trained musicians trying in vain to fit into the new, pop-worshipping CBC, don't run away. As that mysterious asterisk in the show's title reveals, Toca Loca has its own delightful, quirky style. It would also be tough to find a new-music group with more integrity than this Toronto-based trio, whose members are pianists Gregory Oh and Simon Docking, and percussionist Aiyun Huang. Toca Loca's mixture of electrifying performances, free-spirited curiosity, discerning musical taste and a whimsical sense of humour has made it an irresistible presence on the new-music scene since its birth in 2001. The name sets the tone: Oh, the group's artistic director, explained recently that it "doesn't exactly mean anything, but 'toca' means 'play' (an instrument) or touch [in Spanish] ... 'loca' (feminine singular) means 'crazy.' 'Toca' can also be some sort of weird hairstyle ... I think ... also a headdress of some sort. So to recap: play crazy; touch crazy; crazy hairstyle; crazy hat ... of course, this is coming from a non-native speaker who only learned Spanish because he was in love with an Argentinean poet."
Back in 2006, Toca Loca contacted "a group of carefully selected individuals," according to the program notes, and "drew them into the dark corridors of P*Pdom. ... These individuals were charged with a formidable task: to write a piece based in some way on P*P."
The asterisk, the composers were told, is "a wild card that can represent whatever you wish. Be careful what you wish for ..." But Oh's final instruction to the composers was: "Write what you want to write."
U.K.-based Hywel Davies took full advantage of the wild card and called his piece PUP. ("Watch out for the percussionist throwing sticks for her new dogs," he writes in the program notes.) Several composers covered pop tunes in their own style; many focused on some aspect of pop culture beyond the purely musical. Andrew Staniland's Made in China was inspired by his discovery, after the birth of his daughter, "that nearly everything she touches is 'Made in China' - "her crib, clothes, toys ... you name it."
The subject line of a piece of spam e-mail provided the title and text for Aaron Gervais's Do you crave to shoot like a film star, bro? Oh explained that the shooting refers to a porn star's ejaculation, but Gervais insists the text offers many meanings, which he prefers to leave to the reader. For the word "film," for instance, he chose a diminished seventh chord - "a cliché from silent films" laden with cheesy associations of tension.
Gervais says that his piece is "explosive" in a way that he may not have written if he had been writing for anyone other than Toca Loca. "I knew they could handle it. Aiyun has to change instruments every quarter note in first part of piece. I knew that she wouldn't ask me to make it easier."
Oh, meanwhile, is no stranger to pop music, his two masters degrees in classical music notwithstanding. He plays with the band the Lollipop People and confesses that he has "always had a secret life as a lounge singer."
"What I love about pop music," Oh says, "is that there's a groove. There's a shying away from over-intellectualization. The audience can enjoy themselves and make noise; the performers can feel a little more free. I really enjoy that feeling of being able to do whatever I want onstage."
Oh sensed the same spirit of liberation in many of the pieces. "A lot of the composers wrote something especially good, because they didn't feel they hadn't had to adhere to a rigid code of conduct," he said.
That takes us back to the asterisk, and the question of musical genres. "If something is 'classical,' does that make it by nature of a higher art form," Oh asks. "People are still saying: 'Is [the Québécois band] Arcade Fire art music or pop (in a pejorative sense)?' And when some of the really slick string quartets, like the Kronos or Turtle Island, or Alarm Will Sound play a piece, does it automatically become art music because it's done by a classically trained string quartet?"
Oh likes to ponder these questions, but doesn't worry about finding answers, "because there's a lot of room in life for beautiful things and probably not enough time to worry about whether they're going to be in museums in 100 years."
Special to The Globe and Mail
Toca Loca's P*P tour plays at the Glenn Gould Studio in Toronto tonight at 8 p.m., Halifax tomorrow and Montreal April 1.
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Sam Worthington, The Coast
(Source)
Toca Loca and the P*P Project
Imagine minimalist composer Steve Reich with his hand in a blender.
by Sam Worthington
If you don't know what Steve Reich looks like, just picture pretty much any composer with their hand in a blender. Now imagine that as music. That's how Toca Loca pianist and conductor Gregory Oh describes a particularly challenging piece he and bandmates Simon Docking and Aiyun Huang played at Toronto's soundaXis festival in 2006.
The piece was Dutch composer Louis Andriessen's "Workers Union" and the performance at Queen West and John in Toronto was memorable because soon after its start a shopkeeper's assistant came out and offered them $20 to stop playing. They accepted.
Oh laughs hard telling the story. "That's so much more interesting than just saying something's 'OK,'" he says.
Plenty of other musicians might have felt demoralized by the reaction, but not Oh. "Having a strong reaction is just as important as loving something," he says. "Art isn't meant to be medication."
Formed in 2001, Toca Loca is made up of some serious musical muscle. Korean-Canadian Oh holds graduate degrees in piano from the University of Michigan and the University of Toronto, where he teaches. And he's worked as music director for a long list of operas, ensembles and institutions in Canada and the United States. Australian-born Docking is also a pianist and an accomplished soloist with a doctorate in piano performance. He lives in Halifax and curates the KumQuat new music series. Taiwanese-Canadian Huang is percussionist in Toca Loca. She is one of only three percussionists to win first prize at the Geneva International Music Competition in its 57-year history. She's played at Carnegie Hall, is a Doctor of Music Arts and teaches at McGill.
It's safe to say no one in Toca Loca is hurting for musical distinction and classical training. They all regularly play traditional classical music. So, what draws them to the envelope-pushing term "new music" deserves discussion.
"There's nothing academic about it," says Oh. "There's always a groove going."
"New music is, by definition, mostly unfamiliar to an audience," adds Docking. "Our job is to find what the message of a piece is and to make the piece speak to the audience as best we can."
For all their qualifications and individual prestige as musicians, Toca Loca have a sense of fun, too. After all, the triple meaning in translation of their Spanish name is: "crazy play, crazy touch or crazy hat."
Not limited to two pianos and percussion, the group draws many elements into their sound---from backing electronics and bizarre effect-pedals to spoken word performances and rap. At any given show, Huang's percussion could involve traditional drums or veer into vibes, anvils or smashing glass.
"We hit hard," Oh laughs. "We're always striking things."
"You have to put something very strong across, or people may not get it, as they're only hearing it once," says Docking. "Any person in the audience is not going to like everything we do. But what I've noticed is that for every piece on a program, there's someone who says it was their favourite."
Toca Loca's MySpace page cites Pocky, the famous Japanese stick-shaped cookie snack, under their influences. Listed with new music and traditional composers, the choice might seem out of place for anyone else.
"It's a little tongue-in-cheek, and a little not," says Oh about the Pocky.
In this case it represents Oh's interest in Japanese pop culture and his desire to draw from a variety of overlooked non-musical influences. He talks about "hidden treasures" as inspirations not commonly associated with the genre---hidden treasures like Pocky, graphic novelist Seth, visual artist Shary Boyle, or Japanese video game soundtracks.
"The arts can't live in a vacuum," says Oh.
Toca Loca will play as part of Docking's KumQuat series in Halifax next week. Presenting a new work, The P*P Project. Oh says to expect an adventurous show.
"Anything between Alanis Morrisette and Michael Jackson, or electric guitar-thrashing amid ice cracking to just beautiful contemplative music."
Don't forget to wear your crazy hat.
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John Terauds, The Toronto Star
Don't describe the music, just feel it TheStar.com - entertainment - Don't describe the music, just feel it Toca Loca defies genres with abstract, kinetic sounds of P*P Project
March 20, 2008
John Terauds
CLASSICAL MUSIC CRITICFor all the time and energy we devote to self-expression, we are stymied the moment we encounter it in pure form.
Take the case of Gregory Oh – pianist, conductor, teacher, square peg in a cosmos of round holes.
On Tuesday, a live audience at the Glenn Gould Studio and listeners of CBC Radio Two's Canada Live will get a dose of real musical eclecticism as Oh and his new-music performance pals Toca Loca showcase their P*P Project.
"I don't know what to call it," replies the 34-year-old when asked about the asterisk, although he calls it "pop" most of the time. It could also be peer-to-peer, he says.
"I like the idea of 'pap' because I love ironic self-deprecation," Oh adds. P*P is not about having pop and classical composers cross over into one another's turf. "It's more about finding a theme that would appeal to a lot of people without telling people what to do."
The P*P Project is getting a national tour, with stops in Edmonton and Winnipeg this week, and a trip to Halifax after the Toronto performance next week. The trio – Oh, Simon Docking (piano) and Aiyun Huang (percussion) – have already played Montreal, with an invitation to New York City next fall.
"When people ask me what sort of music I play, I always cringe," says Oh, who works across all genres.
He teaches at the University of Toronto Faculty of Music. Earlier this winter, he led five weeks of rehearsals at the piano for the Canadian Opera Company production of Leos Janacek's From the House of the Dead. He regularly conducts Toronto new music ensemble Continuum – among a mountain of other projects that would make most people collapse into a heap.
Then there is his role as keyboardist for the art-pop big band The Lollipop People. "What do you call this? It's not indie pop or indie rock," says Oh.
Toca Loca's style is no easier to describe, although it's fair to say that most of what they play is highly kinetic and abstract.
"We need genres," says Oh of finding the means to describe things to each other. "We need to be able to discuss music, so we need to come up with a language, but at the same time, it can be alienating or it can be misleading."
In other words, nothing beats going out and listening, even if it means taking a risk. (You can get a taste of P*P by visiting myspace.com/tocaloca.)
Ultimately, Oh takes what we could call a Zen approach to performing, listening and appreciating music – one where the listener does not try to impose meaning or purpose to the notes, but rather experiences (and, hopefully, enjoys) the music for what it is.
Oh remembers going to a Dancemakers show a few years ago and chatting with former artistic director Serge Bennathan afterward. "I told him I understood everything I saw, but there was one section that I didn't get. He said, `When are we going to get past the point that we need to understand things?'"
The realistic answer to Bennathan's question is: Likely never. But free spirits like Oh can help guide some of us beyond such limitations.
Just the facts
WHAT: Toca Loca
WHERE: Glenn Gould Studio, 250 Front St. W.
WHEN: Tuesday @ 8 p.m.
TICKETS: $15-$20 @ 416-205-5555
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Robert Everett-Green, The Globe and Mail
Playing crazy never felt so good
My rough Spanish tells me that Toca Loca means "play crazy." That seems a good description of the way Toronto's Toca Loca ensemble attacked a boffo program of contemporary music at the Music Gallery Sunday.
Toca Loca are a trio (pianists Gregory Oh and Simon Docking, and percussionist Aiyun Huang) who clearly believe that contemporary music should grab the listener as much as any other kind. With a posse of like-minded friends, they put on a passionate, disciplined performance that at times rocked harder than many shows I've heard in clubs.
In the opening piece, Jerome Kitzke's Sunflower Sutra, Oh chanted, sang and shouted a poem by Allen Ginsberg while playing a vigorous, gestural score laced with imitations of locomotives and postwar piano jazz. The high energy typical of Ginsberg's own readings was still there, minus the monotony, as Kitzke and Oh exposed the physical and dramatic shape of the verse. Ginsberg's twin metaphors of mortality (trains that come and go, flowers that bloom and fade) seemed to take on new colour and majesty, culminating in a contemplative setting of the beatific conclusion: "We're all beautiful sunflowers inside." My only quibble about Kitzke's moving work was that it seemed not to know when its own journey was over, offering us several plausible endings one after another.
At the other end of the show, Frederic Rzewski's Bring Them Home! expanded an old Irish protest song into a series of variations for two pianists and two percussionists that often shifted from miniature to epic scale in a moment. Rzewski excels at expressing a Victorian taste for the monumental with a modernist's need for clarity about essentials. Bring Them Home! made this seemingly contradictory fusion feel like a normal form of address. At times, the music billowed up so hugely as to imply that this was an arrangement of some larger, as-yet-unheard version of the same piece.
In between, Toca Loca performed two premieres, plus a quartet of fleet piano Improvements by Daniel Koontz, played with apparently effortless virtuosity by Docking. Erik Ross's Dark set a dozen lines by Pat Lowther with a gathering of strings, piano, percussion and voices (soprano Vilma Vitols and mezzo-soprano Marion Newman) that felt like a musician's close reading through his own medium of a richly evocative text. Ross's use of near dissonances to extract extra colour from his small ensemble was especially effective in the hushed closing chords.
Juliet Kiri Palmer's W Is For started with a recollection of Palmer's experience of Maori action songs in her school in New Zealand, and a list of words related to Maori terms for "container" and "ignorance." This promising ground produced a work that I found puzzlingly opaque. Palmer set the word-list as a series of drones and incantations, above an instrumental score that made its sparse instrumentation feel frustratingly thick and balky. The voices passed into slippery counterpoint for an endless final warning against forgetfulness, as I wondered what it was exactly that this talented composer was trying to help us remember.
The show opened with a set by the Remainders, a comedy duo (Katie Crown and Ryan Hays) who combined the cheesy charm of a pair of morning-radio hosts with the dive-bombing sensibility of Lenny Bruce. They sang satiric songs in a style reminiscent of Donald O'Connor and Debbie Reynolds, and did cornball comedic routines that usually ended up bowling you over from behind. My favourite bit was a dialogue for two marshmallows stuck in a plastic bag, performed while the pair wore pillow cases on their heads. Way to play crazy, guys.
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Jason van Eyk, The WholeNote Magazine
(Source)
Toca Loca Takes Residence
Fledgling new music ensemble Toca Loca takes roost at the Music Gallery in 2006 for a year-long residency. The Music Gallery, Toronto's internationally recognized home for creative music, has always been committed to providing the environment for new and unusual music to come into its own. This Toca Loca residency is just another positive way in which it is putting that environment to good use. In the words of Toca Loca's Gregory Oh "This is an ideal vehicle for younger ensembles that have not yet established their funding and resource base. Having a home, a rehearsal space and a place to play in is an incredibly valuable commodity."
Formed in 2001, Toca Loca is one of Toronto's youngest ensembles. "The name is a kind of triple word play in Spanish," Oh explains. "Toca can mean to touch or strike, or a kind of hat. So crazy touch, crazy play, crazy hat,... and beyond that it's just a name with a nice percussive feel - like what we do."
In just a few years Toca Loca has made some pretty big strides with a handful of notable concerts and a truly different attitude. As Oh says "We try to avoid being too stodgy. We are trying to add a little bit of zest to Canada's music scene."
Don't mistake zest for dumbing down, though. They certainly don't avoid daring programming, pulling in some of the heavy hitters of new music alongside challenging Canadian works. Under their belts already: repertoire by Alice Ho, Chris Paul Harman, Claude Vivier, Georges Aperghis, Gyorgy Kurtag, Michael Finnissy, Heinz Holliger, Walter Buczynski, Thomas Kessler, James Rolfe, Jocelyn Morlock, Andrew Staniland, Melissa Hui, Toshio Hosokawa, and Unsuk Chin, just to name a very few.
Add to that some significant commissioning, CBC broadcasts, and tours to the USA, and you've got a sense of a little powerhouse just ready to explode out on the new music scene in a big way. "We're never out there just to replicate the recital hall experience, we're less top-button-done-up than that."
Toca Loca launches their Music Gallery residency on February 24th with a programme of French spectralist music, including Gerard Grisey's Vortex Temporum (dubbed 'the most important chamber work of the late 20th century') and works by Phillippe Leroux - a composer whom Discoveries editor David Olds has made a personal plea to hear more often in Toronto.
"The thing about the spectralists," Oh says, "is they really believe the human ear has limits and that you should create for those limits rather than always challenging them. To me the music is very exciting, very kinetic, very fluid. In terms of an audience, it's not the youth we have to worry about, young people are much more tuned to hearing new sounds. It's the more settled audiences, shall we say, the ones who are already sure they know what they like. We'd really like to say hey, give this a chance."
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Demian Carynnyk - Wavelength Interview
It would seem easy to define Toca Loca as avant garde/new music nerds of the highest order, but it wouldn't be fair. First, they do cool stuff with comic book artists, filmmakers, and various youth and students. And they play cool pieces with titles like Half-Remembered City, Diabolical Birds, and L'Oubli et la Mort. And they cite influences with names like the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne. Essentially Toca Loca are so post-rock that they make Godspeed! look like Lynyrd Skynyrd. Demian exchanged e-mail with pianist/conductor Gregory Oh.
What human beings make up Toca Loca? What evolutionary path has the band followed?
When we started Toca Loca in 2001, we were just looking for a way to explore music and ideas that were a little bit outside of the traditional box. First I called up my good friend, Aiyun Huang [percussionist]. Simon Docking [keyboardist] was next on the list. Sometimes it'll just be one of us, or two, and we usually add other friends -- musicians, poets, artists, creators, whoever happens to fit.
What is "new music"? How is the Toronto "scene"?
New music is like pornography -- I can recognize it but not define it. Also, it corrupts the youth and I only read it for the articles. If there is anyone out there who can define pop music for me, I'd be mighty impressed... I like what happens in Toronto, and I like being in this community. I think that anyone who is interested in expanding their brain can't help but like both indie rock and new music, because ultimately they're about the same thing.
I'm curious about the ideas within your mostly instrumental music. What would you encourage audiences to imagine, listen for, or think about?
I'd just suggest being open and not worrying about experiencing anything in particular. I think that the music we play sometimes requires a slightly more active listening role for the listener, but generally, good music is good music whether it be techno, Scandinavian death metal or Darmstadt-certified.
What is this soundaXis festival you're involved in this summer?
The soundaXis festival is dedicated to exploring the music and ideas of Iannis Xenakis. This guy was sentenced to death as a revolutionary in his native Greece, and he had to flee to Paris as a refugee, having been left for dead after shrapnel from a mortar round destroyed his face. He went on to become a civil engineer, a brilliant architect, and then he set the music world on its head.
You curated a show called Use Your Pocky. The name is really cute. What does it mean?
I started thinking about the weird juxtaposition of Asian culture and North America, and the whole project began to take shape. We ended up involving various graftings from Asian pop culture, music by Asian composers living in the western world, and the crowning moment, free Pocky straight from Glico. I can't go into an Asian grocery without at least thinking about buying Pocky, and I thought it suited our theme perfectly. And I really liked the nature of the command -- here is your box, now go forth and be fruitful.
And you've held lectures and young composer workshops, and toured high schools with the Toca Loca EDU program. And you're commissioning works by Canadian comic-book artists and professional and student filmmakers, all part of your 2006 Music Gallery residency. What kind of interdisciplinary mess are you making?
Interdisciplinary is one of those words that is ugly and doesn't need to be used as much as it is. I'm trying to work with other artists and creators to make something good. Communicate or stimulate or fail miserably.
What are you going to bring to your Wavelength performance? What is the "101-hit combo" which you describe as the trademark of your shows?
I'm hoping to bring in monster clarinet player Lori Freedman, [sax player] Wallace Halladay from New York/Toronto and [percussionists] Ryan Scott and Trevor Tureski. We're not sure exactly what we're doing, except that it will be loud, hard, fast, fierce and sensitive. As far as our "101-hit combo", I'm not at liberty to say much except that it starts with Hadoken and ends with U-U-D-D-L-R-L-R-B-A.
- Diane Tamblyn's Toca Loca Project
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Tamara Bernstein, National Post
"(Toca Loca Artistic Director) Oh is clearly on his way, through performances, commissioning and programming, to making a lasting contribution to new music in this country." February 28, 2005
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Alex Ross, The New Yorker
"The ensemble Toca Loca offered a vibrant short set of works by Georges Aperghis, Dai Fujikura, Louis Andriessen, and Andrew Staniland (whose 'Adventure Music' is an alternately beautiful and terrifying instrumental meditation constructed around recorded sounds of ice sheets cracking)."
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Feast of Music
(Source)
Toca Loca started their set with Georges Aperghis' Le corps a corps (1978) a rousing, almost primitive work for solo percussion and vocals, performed by Aiyun Huang. Next was pianist Simon Docking from Tuesday's MATA Festival performing Dai Fujikura's Half-Remembered City for piano four hands with his friend Gregory Oh. Docking said beforehand that Fujikura wrote the piece so that the two performers' hands would often be intertwined, hoping the performers would develop an "intimate relationship."
"Greg's a good friend," Docking joked, "but I'm sorry to say our relationship hasn't progressed beyond that."
Andrew Staniland joined the group to perform his own Adventure Music, which he accurately described as being like the sound of an ice pack breaking apart. They finished with Louis Andriessen's minimalist composition Workers Union (1975), which was written without specific pitches for "untrained musicians" of no particular instrumentation, other than they be loud and play "with conviction." As the title indicates, it is a politically motivated work, designed to give the musicians (i.e., the "workers") more freedom to play as they see fit.