Moshe Denburg got turned onto music from other countries and cultures in the 1960s.
"It was instilled in the '60s starting with The Beatles who went off to India and there were other experiments, too," said Denburg, founding artistic director of the Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»Inter-Cultural Orchestra, one of the only orchestras in the world that performs new intercultural music on a grand scale. "The early influence obviously is Ravi Shankar who brought the sitar and tabla and Indian music to the West in a bigger way through George Harrison who helped him sort of publicize that at the time."
The Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»Inter-Cultural Orchestra will close its 10th anniversary season with a concert featuring the 25-member ensemble, chamber choir Laudate Singers and the world premiere of three new compositions in a show called Imagined Worlds: Intertwined, March 31.
Intercultural music incorporates the ideas and instruments of different cultures in new compositions.
"It means learning how to communicate one cultural esthetic to people from another culture. It means overcoming limitations that might be in your own culture by working in a new way," Denburg said.
Some members of the ensemble were unfamiliar with reading music and following a conductor and more comfortable playing in smaller ensembles and responding on the spot. Others may not be as accustomed to improvising.
Audience members will hear an avant-garde instrumental piece composed by Dutch composer Joël Bons played by an ensemble of 13 or 14. It will premiere alongside a new Canada Council commission by Coat Cooke that features elements of jazz and structured improvisation. Bic Hoang will play the dan bau, a Vietnamese instrument with a long wooden body and one string in both pieces.
Between the orchestra and the choir, concertgoers will see 50 people perform renowned Canadian composer Dr. Stephen Chatman's piece that incorporates poetry from The Ruba'iyat of Omar Khayyam.
The audience will also hear Denburg's composition "El Ginat Egoz" for choir and an intercultural trio that includes erhu (a two-stringed Chinese instrument), zheng (a long-zither-like instrument from China with a harp-like sound), and marimba (a deep-toned xylophone originating from Africa and Central America).
World famous virtuoso Guilian Liu will perform a solo work for pipa, or Chinese lute, and Hossein Behroozinia on barbat, or Iranian lute, will lead an Iranian sextet.
You don't have to be from a certain culture to master its music, according to Denburg.
"You don't have to be Jewish to play a fiddle, to play klezmer, in fact there've been some very good klezmer musicians who have not been Jewish," said Denburg, who's also an associate composer of the Canadian Music Centre. "You don't have to be Indian to play tabla because over the last 25, 30 years, people have actually spent significant amount of time and effort acquiring skills in these different traditions. That is what is exciting about the intercultural movement today."
The orchestra's tabla player, Niel Golden, is a Canadian-born man from Victoria.
"But he studied with a master for many, many years," Denburg notes. "That's the kind of musician that we are trying to nurture, a musician who in his or herself is intercultural."
Imagined Worlds: Intertwined starts at 8 p.m. at the Norman Rothstein Theatre, 950 West 41st Ave. For more information, see vi-co.org.
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