Sonic Responses invites eight musicians and one composer to respond to the changed aural conditions of UBC’s outdoor spaces. Their music making confronts and enters into a dialogue with the quiet that currently resides on campus. Responding to different locales and situations, the repertoire for Sonic Responses stretches across a broad range of traditions.

Weaving together the location, the composer’s process of creating the score and its interpretation by the musician, this performance creates a bridge between Sonic Responses and the Belkin Art Gallery’s upcoming exhibition Soundings: An Exhibition in Five Parts. Soundings features newly commissioned scores, performances, videos, sculptures and sound by Indigenous and other artists who respond to a question posed by curators Candice Hopkins and Dylan Robinson: How can a score be a call and tool for decolonization? Unfolding in a sequence of five parts, the scores take the form of beadwork, videos, objects, graphic notation, historical belongings and written instructions. During the exhibition, these scores are activated at specific moments by musicians, dancers, performers and members of the public, gradually filling the gallery and surrounding public spaces with sound and action.

Standing on the crest of the grassy knoll in front of the AMS Student Nest, Lucy Strauss conjures both familiar and unconventional sounds from the viola in response to a beaded score created by Anishinaabe artist Olivia Whetung. As one of the contributing artists in Soundings, Whetung has created Strata, a series of beaded works, one produced from each of the territories the exhibition has travelled. A cumulative work, each individual score is composed by threading different coloured beads from a mason jar in the order they are collected. The jar is filled through the participation of gallery visitors during the opening weeks of the exhibition.

Reflecting on her interpretation of Whetung’s score, Strauss writes, “I spent my first days with the score meditating on its physical elements: the individual beads, their texture, their colours, the patterns they form, the nail in the wall, the folds where the tapestry reaches the flat surface and the strings that loop around the nail and run invisibly through the piece. I also thought about the process of the creation of the tapestry: the hands that picked the beads to drop into glass jars. The hands that picked the beads out of the jars and arranged them into a three-dimensional object – a fourth dimension. I improvised freely on these concepts to build the material of my response, then chose to read the tapestry score from the top down as the material I was improvising shaped itself. Ultimately, I memorized concepts, a few key musical events, and the feelings and the physical gestures that fit these events – such as bowing parallel to the string to represent the falling strings of the tapestry, rather than perpendicularly. I am extremely grateful to have been afforded the opportunity to explore this work in this way. I gained some beautiful insights and I hope that my response can enhance the connection between the viewer and the work.”

In past decades, the mound where Strauss performed has served as a site of protest. During the 2007-08 academic year, a parking lot and the grassy knoll that it overlooked was the site of student gatherings to listen to music and raise awareness about a proposed new development that included an underground bus loop, a shopping mall at grade with condominiums above. Local bands from Vancouver and UBC performed to students who protested, signed petitions and demanded to be included in meaningful consultation with administration about how their needs would be reflected in the university’s expansion. The knoll had been the site of informal gatherings for a wide variety of student-initiated events for quite some time and on April 4, 2008, a demonstration that supported protecting it from future development resulted in the arrest of 19 students. The grassy knoll became a symbol of what might constitute public space – a space that was “free and open to all.” Some 12 years later, when thinking about whose land upon which the university stands, the Soundings exhibition brings to the fore a different perspective about public space.

“At the core of the exhibition is a grounding in concepts of Indigenous land and territory. To move beyond the mere acknowledgement of land and territory means offering instructions for sensing and listening to Indigenous histories that trouble the colonial imaginary. Soundings activates and asserts Indigenous resurgence through the actions the featured artworks call forth.” – Candice Hopkins and Dylan Robinson

Sonic Responses furthers the collaborations between the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery and the School of Music that will continue through Soundings: An Exhibition in Five Parts (Fall 2020). The project is led by Barbara Cole, Curator of Outdoor Art, David Metzer, Professor of Musicology and Chair of the University Art Committee, and Judith Valerie Engel, a doctoral candidate in piano performance. Sonic Responses was initiated by the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery in collaboration with the School of Music and supported by the British Columbia Arts Council’s Arts and Culture Resilience Supplemental Award and UBC’s Catalyzing Research Clusters Program.

Images (above and below), except where noted: Rachel Topham Photography