Listeners are to slip a morsel of chocolate on their tongues at certain points in Lisa Cay Miller’s new composition at an event called Rippled Modality, Nov. 21.
Concertgoers will receive a box of chocolates specially designed by chocolatier Greg Hook of Chocolate Arts to correspond to the movements in her piece. Shadow puppet duo Mind of a Snail will project symbols that signal when a tidbit of chocolate is to be consumed.
That’s why Miller, artistic director of the New Orchestra Workshop (NOW) Society, says the event is called Rippled Modality. Senses are to be stimulated through sight, sounds and taste.
Amsterdam-based composer/flautist and electronics musician Anne La Berge and Montreal composer/clarinetist Lori Freedman will collaborate with Mind of a Snail and the NOW Society’s Orkestra Futura to create Rippled Modality.
La Berge incorporates electronic recordings of bugs and combines structured and random patches. LED light boxes on the musicians’ stands will signal who’s to play and when.
Musicians include Mike Dowler on bass clarinet, JP Carter on trumpet, Jesse Zubot on violin, Peggy Lee on cello, and Miller and Chris Gestrin playing piano with Orkestra Futura.
Miller’s new work is “a compositional expression of Canadian feminist history,” according to the event’s press release.
Her first movement draws on Nellie McClung and the Manitoba Political Equality League’s satirical play from 1914 The Parliament of Women.
The second movement is set 50 years later, the birth year of Marc Lepine, the man who murdered 14 female engineering students while screaming “I hate feminists!” in Montreal in 1989. Miller’s entire work is named Alea Jacta Est, with which Lepine ended his suicide letter and hit list of 19 women. Analysts believe he misquoted Caesar and meant “the die is cast.”
The third movement is a comment on the present day. Miller says Oxfam released a report July 14 that stated it will take another 75 years to bridge the wage gap between men and women. She also draws on a report by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives that rates Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»as 13th out of 20 best places places to be a woman in Canada.
“Which isn’t so great,” Miller said.
So what inspired Miller to focus on the status of women in Canada?
“I guess I’m getting kind of pissed off,” she said.
She sees complacency and denial when it comes to missing and murdered women in Canada and the marginalization and abuse of women in general.
The CCPA report notes women in Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»earn 30 per cent less than their male peers.
“Often with these sort of statistics, you think, oh it’s far away or it’s another time or it’s a poor country and that wouldn’t happen here, but this is this city, right here, right now,” said Miller.
“The best way you can make a change is through your actions,” she said. “By me doing what I do, I feel like I might make a difference because I’m quite earnest and I work very hard.”
Rippled Modality takes place Nov. 21 at the Pyatt Hall of the Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»Symphony Orchestra’s School of Music. Details at .
