Breton piper Erwan Keravac aims to surprise audiences with his music. Photo: CIMF.
The sound of bagpipes will probably never seem the same again after listening to Breton piper Erwan Keravac and his group at the Canberra International Music Festival from Thursday 30 April to Sunday 4 May.
Keravac, with his Scottish highland bagpipe, will bring his 8 Pipers for Phillip Glass to Australia for the first time, a performance of four of the minimalist early works of the influential US composer and pianist. The performance at Snow Concert Hall on Saturday 3 May starts at 7:30 pm.
Keravac will also perform in two free events during the festival:
SONNEURS, at Dairy Road on Sunday 4 May at 2 pm, a series of contemporary works for four pipers, culminating in a large-scale participatory work for wind, bagpipes and brass players, created by renowned composer Otomo Yoshihide.
Whitewater: A performance intervention at the all-day MOSSO: music in motion event at the National Film and Sound Archive on Saturday 3 May at 11:20 am.
Accompanying Keravac during the festival will be players on bombard, a Breton oboe, and biniou, a small, high-pitched Breton bagpipe.
The pipes with their enveloping sound were made for Glass’s music, Keravac says.
“They are the perfect instruments for playing repetitive music,” he says. “The continuous sound produced by the bag ensures the sound never stops.
“However, these instruments are not chromatic. Therefore, you need to find pieces that are within the bagpipe range. This is the case with Philip Glass’s four pieces.”
Keravac says Glass composed the works in 1969 based on the idea of an incessant flow of notes forming musical cells that grow or decrease, starting with a unison, passing through sequences of fifths, to an orchestral piece.
He says the music has hypnotic trance-like quality.
Steeped in the musical culture of Brittany, Keravac wants to expand the boundaries of the bagpipe and make new opportunities for it.
“This instrument was always close to me,” he says.
“At the beginning it was a simple question: what kind of music can I play on bagpipe without any references about traditional music? There were a lot of challenges, finding different techniques.”
But he doesn’t feel he’s on a mission to take the bagpipe to the world or that his interpretation of contemporary works is separate from the piping tradition.
“Traditional music is a heritage music. We receive something that we transform, we open new paths. It’s up to future generations to choose whether or not we continue this or that path. I’m simply part of this lineage,” Keravac says.
He says his quartet has been playing contemporary works for a decade.
A dozen works have been commissioned from composers of different nationalities.
One of them, Walk on By, is composed by Japanese composer Yoshihide.
“According to Otomo, his piece can be performed from one to 100 musicians,” Keravac says.
SONNEURS will be an outdoor event at LESS, a public space and art work designed by Chilean art and architecture practice Pezo von Ellrichshausen at the Dairy Road estate.
“This SONNEURS concert will be an opportunity to perform this work with several musicians and participants,” Keravac says.
“I hope there will also be a lot of discoveries of new ways of thinking about our instruments.”
Keravac hopes his music at the festival will surprise audiences. The form of his ‘performance intervention’ Whitewater will only be known on the day at the NFSA event.
He says this latest solo effort is a synthesis of his work with choreographers, improvisers and composers, something he describes as a whirlwind.
“Often, I don’t know how I’m going to organise the music until I arrive at the concert venue.
“Each time I reshape my music and my movements to fit the space offered to me.”
To learn more and buy tickets, visit the Canberra International Music Festival website.
