James Strecker Reviews the Arts

JAMES STRECKER: Please tell us about a creation of yours featured at this year’s Toronto Summer Music Festival. Why exactly does it matter to you and why should it matter to your listeners?

KEVIN WILKS LAU: My Fourth String Quartet will receive its world premiere at the Toronto Summer Music Festival. The work was commissioned by the Ironwood String Quartet, and by Jonathan Krehm, a wonderful and generous patron who happens to be a teaching disciple at Wu’s Tai Chi Chuan Academy in Toronto. The four movements of this quartet will accompany Tai Chi Chuan players (including Jonathan) demonstrating various weapon forms.

This piece documents my initiation into the concepts of Tai Chi, and into the philosophy of Taoism in general. Many of the principles found in Lao Tzu’s collection of ancient writings known as the Tao Te Ching—principles such as stillness, centredness, and flow—have resonated intuitively with me for many years, but in this quartet they are rendered musically explicit. These principles are conspicuously absent in much of modern culture, despite what I believe to be their immense importance to our well-being as individuals and as a species. This piece presents a small opportunity to bring some of these ideas to the forefront of the audience’s attention, intellectually and viscerally.

JS: What are the most important parts of yourself that you put into your creations?

KWL: Music is an expressive conduit that allows me to tap into the more extreme, intense aspects of myself; to transcend the boundaries of both language and ordinary experience. In real life I am a fairly reserved, even-tempered person; I suppose that my music expresses a hunger for life that I don’t find myself expressing as much in my speech and actions. I’m not sure I can articulate it better than that! But that is the nature of music, after all: to communicate something that resists the harsh clarity of words but is nevertheless full of meaning.

JS: What causes you to compose or create as you do? Is it because you play a specific instrument, for instance?

KWL: I have always been primarily inspired by other people’s music. I absorb influences like a sponge; my early compositions were all stylistic imitations of music I liked. Over time, I began to develop a certain way of processing these influences that I felt was unique to me. Composing has been (and continues to be) a journey of self-discovery, and I mean this literally—there are so many parts of myself I don’t fully understand, and the process of discovering and nurturing my own creative voice has been a highly illuminating and fulfilling one.

Learning piano at a young age undoubtedly served me well, especially when it comes to hearing and utilizing harmonic patterns, but I try not to rely on the actual physicality and sonic profile of the piano too much when composing—especially when it comes to orchestration, where the piano can place unwieldy limits on the imagination.

JS: What are your biggest challenges as a creative person?

KWL: Maintaining a state of flow as a creator. I don’t mean flow in the narrow sense of being joyfully engaged in every local moment of your life—that would be unrealistic, and I think not particularly desirable. But flow in the broadest sense: recognizing that creativity has a playful dimension, and preserving and integrating that playfulness into the business of daily life. Protecting the spirit of play is vital. That isn’t to say that composition shouldn’t be difficult or frustrating. But difficulty has a purpose. It’s a bit like parkour: there are obstacles everywhere, and sometimes those obstacles seem painful, even insurmountable, but with practice, patience, and with the right balance of focus and openness, the obstacles themselves become part of the landscape of play, the tapestry of living.

JS: What are the hardest things for an outsider to understand about your life as a person working in the arts?

KWL: The sheer unpredictability of everything. I can’t speak on behalf of all outsiders, but when I think of my immediate family members (none of whom are in the arts), I think they find the variation in every aspect of my life—from how much I made to what projects I’d be working on to what my daily schedule was like—bewildering and even anxiety-provoking. I would read their anxiety as a lack of trust in my ability to thrive in my chosen field, which then produces feelings of insecurity—something I really had to deal with over the past few years. But I have sympathy for their position, especially since stability is such valuable currency these days.

JS: Let’s talk about the state of the arts in today’s society, including the forms in which you create. What specifically gives you hope and what specifically do you find depressing?

KWL: I am neither hopeful nor depressed about the state of the arts. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that I have gratitude, and I have concerns. First off, my hats off to the arts councils: they have been doing a great job in supporting composers’ livelihoods, and I owe a big chunk of my career to the granting bodies (in particular the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council) that have funded so many of my commissions. I entered my field fully expecting that it would be impossible to make a career as a concert composer (I grew up never having heard of such a profession!) And the fact that it is possible at all is a testament to the organizations that keep music alive, and the advocacy and generosity of countless individuals that make up our cultural support system.

A few weeks ago, I attended a speech given by the percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie, who was being awarded the Léonie Sonning Music Prize in Copenhagen. Glennie, who is profoundly deaf, made a case for listening as an ultimate value—one that lies at the core of our collective humanity. I think we are in danger of losing our ability to listen. One symptom of this is when we begin to mistake preaching (often under the guise of inclusive rhetoric) for the kind of genuine connection that actually produces lasting, healthy change. Listening is more than hearing; it’s a complex, multi-directional process, requiring openness and space and a suspension of our basic impulse toward categorization and judgment.

JS: What new works are you working on at present?

KWL: This summer I am creating an orchestral arrangement of The Nightingale (originally scored for clarinet, violin, piano, and narrator) for ROCO, a wonderful orchestra based in Houston that I have a close relationship with. I am also writing a new piece called The Infinite Reaches for the National Arts Centre Orchestra (which I can now call my ‘hometown’ orchestra since I just moved to Ottawa!), which will be paired, excitingly, with Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration. In the fall I will get to work on a new version of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, from the perspective of a composer writing 100 years from now (in a world dramatically transformed by climate change), a piece that will blur the lines between arranged and original music.

JS: What do you yourself like about the music you create?

KWL: Lately I have become more open about my love of film music, and the way this manifests itself in my concert music. There was a time when film music was looked down upon, and I would be very reluctant to cite John Williams as a source of inspiration (he is.) Now I take pride in the challenge of integrating my cinematic influences into structural contexts that are completely independent of visual language.

And then there is flow, which I mentioned before. I have always been attracted to musical flow as an ideal—the sense that one musical event leads inexorably to the next, not just on a superficial level but on some deeper plane. It’s something I strive for, both consciously and unconsciously, and I’m absurdly happy on the occasions I’m able to achieve it. Particularly when I’m ‘flowing’ between things that, on paper, seem like binary contradictions—old and new, high and low—or unlikely associations, like erhu and space travel (see Between the Earth and Forever). I think flow is a metaphor for so many things in life, including the possibility of connection between disparate entities that is both the hallmark and the challenge of true diversity.