PuSh Play

Gabrielle Martin chats with Owen Underhill, Artistic Director of Turning Point Ensemble.

Show Notes

Gabrielle and Owen discuss:

• How did your relationship with PuSh begin?

• Why was interdisciplinary work important?

• What was Norman Armour’s role in the early stages of Turning Point Ensemble?

• How did the company evolve in terms of process, practice, points of interest and project choices from its inception until now?

• What are the benefits of partnering with PuSh?

• What is the cultural context of PuSh and its significance in Vancouver?

• What are you excited about with upcoming projects?

• Of all the Turning Point projects at PuSh, of which do you have the fondest memories?

About Turning Point Ensemble

Founded in 2002 by its musician members, Turning Point Ensemble (TPE) is a large chamber ensemble (16 instrumentalists and conductor) with a mandate to increase the understanding and appreciation of music composed during the past hundred years. The ensemble has built a strong reputation for outstanding musicianship and linking seminal 20th century repertoire to contemporary works through thoughtful programming and innovative presentations. Uniquely and flexibly sized between a small chamber ensemble and a symphonic orchestra, TPE presentations offer a symphonic palette with a chamber music sensibility. In addition to its concerts, tours and recordings, the ensemble has regularly mounted innovative interdisciplinary productions including operas, and collaborations with dance, theatre, visual art and moving image.

Turning Point Ensemble has released six CDs and one DVD on the Artifact, Centrediscs, Atma Classique, Redshift Records, Orlando, and Parma labels. We have presented a diverse range of repertoire, commissioned and performed works by Canadian and international composers, and partnered with a number of community and cultural organizations.

In 2010, TPE was awarded the Rio Tinto Alcan Award for Music 2011 – the largest production prize for music in Canada for its presentation of FIREBIRD 2011, resulting in 4 sold out performances in March 2011 at The Cultch in Vancouver.

Other significant large-scale interdisciplinary projects include Flying White -飞白 which was co-produced with Wen Wei Dance for the 2020 PuSh Festival with three sold-out performances and the premiere of air india [redacted] (5 performances November 2015). We have also had two major partnerships with Ballet British Columbia, and several projects with live music and moving image.

We are proud to have presented a diverse range of repertoire, commissioned and performed works by Canadian and international composers, and partnered with a number of community and cultural organizations. A highlight is our ground-breaking cultural collaboration with the Westbank First Nation in the Okanagan for an outdoor presentation of Barbara Pentland/Dorothy Livesay’s 1954 opera, The Lake at Quails’ Gate Winery, the original homestead of Susan Allison and her family.

The central artistic vision of the TPE is to bring to the public extraordinary music for large chamber ensemble written from the early 20th century through to present day. We draw audiences to this music through outstanding performances, and intelligent programming that creates a lively context for the music. We seek to create links from the music of earlier times to new music, to explore relationships and connections between composers and their music, to perform significant large-scale works from the Canadian and international repertoire, to collaborate with multiple art forms in extraordinary ways, and to establish meaningful long-term relationships with some of Canada’s most talented composers through commissioning and multiple performances.

Turning Point has toured internationally in 2018 to Asia and the Czech Republic, in addition to two Canadian tours. We have performed in many festivals and series including the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, New Music Concerts Toronto, ECM+ Montreal, groundswell Winnipeg, New Music Edmonton, MusicFest Vancouver, Vancouver International Jazz Festival, the Sound of Dragon Festival and the Modulus Festival.

Land Acknowledgement

This conversation was recorded on the unceded, stolen and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish Peoples: the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), colonially known as Vancouver.

It is our duty to establish right relations with the people on whose territories we live and work, and with the land itself.

Show Transcript

Gabrielle Martin 00:02

Hello and welcome to Push Play, a Push Festival podcast featuring conversations with artists who are pushing boundaries and playing with form. I'm Gabrielle Martin, Push's Director of Programming, and in this special series of Push Play, we're revisiting the legacy of Push and talking to creators who have helped shape 20 years of innovative, dynamic, and audacious festival programming.

Gabrielle Martin 00:23

Today's episode features Owen Underhill of Turning Point Ensemble and is anchored around the 2017 Push Festival. Owen Underhill is a composer, conductor, and programmer who has been active in new music in Vancouver for several decades as the Artistic Director of Vancouver New Music, 1987 to 2000, and in his current role as Artistic Director and Conductor of the Turning Point Ensemble.

Gabrielle Martin 00:45

From 1981 until his recent retirement, he was a faculty member in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University. Turning Point Ensemble, founded by its musician members in 2002, is a collaborative large chamber ensemble committed to the performance and production of music of the 20th and 21st centuries in flexible and innovative contexts.

Gabrielle Martin 01:07

Intersecting with multiple art forms, crossing genres, working with diverse communities and partners, engaging with ideas of contemporary relevance, and inspiring and enlivening local, national, and international audiences.

Gabrielle Martin 01:21

Recent tours have included Montreal, Zagreb, Belgrade, Santander, Taipei, Beijing, and Singapore. Here's my conversation with Owen. We are here on Victoria Drive, just off Commercial Drive, in so -called Vancouver, which is on the stolen ancestral and traditional territories of Coast Salish peoples, the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil -Waututh.

Gabrielle Martin 01:49

It's a place that both of us call home. You're just up the street.

Owen Underhill 01:55

Yes, I've been in the commercial drive area for quite a few years. Love it here.

Gabrielle Martin 02:00

and I grew up here as well. This, we're just across from Victoria Park, where I spent a lot of time as a kid. So in a feeling very comfortable in the neighborhood and happy to be having this conversation here and grateful to be on these indigenous lands.

Gabrielle Martin 02:15

Turning Point Ensemble has a wonderful, long, rich history with the Push Festival. We're gonna definitely be talking about the 2017 production that Push presented. Zappa meets Verez and Oswald, the present day composer refuses to die.

Gabrielle Martin 02:33

But there are also so many other projects that Push presented, so we're gonna get a chance to talk about some of those. Yeah, let's actually go right back to the beginning. Would you just talk to us about how your relationship with Push began?

Owen Underhill 02:50

Well, I've known Norman for many years and so witnessed the start of the push and from the beginning with Turning Point Ensemble we really wanted to be more than just a chamber ensemble and to also explore interdisciplinary work with theater and dance and with film and so we started looking at the work that Push was doing and thinking that it would be fit in very well some of the projects we had in mind to propose them through Norman.

Gabrielle Martin 03:34

And you knew Norman very well from the 80s.

Owen Underhill 03:39

Yeah, from the 80s. Yeah, Norman came to the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, and I just come there also as a faculty member, as a composer, and we were starting a composition -based music program there.

Owen Underhill 03:58

And...

Gabrielle Martin 04:00

my dad went to.

Owen Underhill 04:01

which your dad went to, yes. And my colleagues, Mark Diamond and Penelope Stella were great in theater. They were great colleagues to also collaborate with. So from when I first started going to, or being part of faculty there, I started working on projects, including plays like Sam Shepard's Suicide and B -flat, which I wrote music for.

Owen Underhill 04:37

And Norman was lead actor in that. And so, and he was already doing fantastic work there. So I got to know him as kind of a partner in productions rather than as a teacher, because I was teaching primarily in music.

Gabrielle Martin 04:58

And so the first well actually when was when did you co -found turning point ensemble at your site?

Owen Underhill 05:06

We co -founded in 2002 and our first concert was in 2003.

Gabrielle Martin 05:11

OK. And then in 2008, Push presented Dual Eclipse Orchestra of Two Worlds. And then, you know, in 2012, presented Trené Point Ensemble's Colorful World. In 2013, Cinema Musica. The Zappa meets Verraz and Oswald in 2017.

Gabrielle Martin 05:31

Radio Rewrite in 2018 and Flying White, which was also a project with One Way Dance in 2020. But how did the conversation, how did Dual Eclipse end up being part of Push 2008? Why was it such a great fit?

Gabrielle Martin 05:46

How did that come about?

Owen Underhill 05:49

Well, the Dual Eclipse project was with Balinese Ensemble, which they had at UBC. And we were doing works with dance. Jennifer Mascow was choreographing some works for that production. So it was, first of all, a cross -cultural project.

Owen Underhill 06:14

And secondly, it involved dance. So those were the kind of productions we worked with, with Norman, tended to be the ones that were more interdisciplinary and also included original work.

Gabrielle Martin 06:32

than Colorful World, how did that, you know, did Norman just kind of invite the next project that was interdisciplinary, or did you end up kind of pitching that work? How did Colorful World end up being part of?

Owen Underhill 06:47

The Colorful World project was more of a concert that included some new commissions. I know we did a piece of Rodney Sharmn there. So we tended to, I tended to pitch projects to Norman every couple of years that I thought would be of interest to them and also, you know, we're a large chamber ensemble, I should say.

Owen Underhill 07:14

So we're in between a small chamber ensemble and an orchestra. We usually have at least 15 players. So they were, you know, we tend to do quite major works, major scale. And so those that were a good fit for push were a lot of those projects that involved other disciplines.

Gabrielle Martin 07:46

Talk to us about what was Zappa, Mitzvahrez, and Oswald, the present -day composer refuses to die. I mean, first of all, it has an incredible title. Can you just explain this project a bit?

Owen Underhill 07:59

Yeah, sure. Well, the present -day composer refuses to die, I remember, as being written on a Frank Zappa Mothers of Invention album. It's written there. And then I found out that that was a quote from the avant -garde composer, Edgard Varese, who was active in, originally from France, but active from the 1920s in New York and in the US.

Owen Underhill 08:32

And Frank Zappa, even as a teenager, was really interested in contemporary music and he really appreciated Edgard Varese, who was really an adventurer in sound. And so that quote always stuck in my head and so because Turning Point Ensemble works towards making connections with the past to the present day, we often would like to pair maybe a composer or some innovative music of the first half of the 20th century with something much more recent.

Owen Underhill 09:16

So that was an idea we had and actually started talking with Norman about that in 2014. So we worked on that one for a while together. And is that...

Gabrielle Martin 09:29

because Push was involved as a co -producer or because you were just like developing the concept and keeping Norman in the loop.

Owen Underhill 09:37

Push was, well Norman really liked the idea of Res from the start, but he was very interested in getting a new work written for that show by a Canadian composer, and so we developed that one actually as a co -commission project.

Owen Underhill 10:01

So we discussed who to include in that, and eventually proposed John Oswald to him from Toronto, who worked a lot on his plunder phonics, where he sort of plundered the work of Michael Jackson even, he had to withdraw that because Michael Jackson thought about him, and he did Grateful Dead, so he was very involved in pop music as well as contemporary music, and when I threw that out to Norman, he said,

Owen Underhill 10:49

ah, killer suggestion, and John Oswald, so it was a go, so that became a really exciting program for us and for Push, and we also commissioned some dance for a couple of those pieces because we did the sort of large arrangements of Zappa that were done by Ensemble Muldern in Munich while Zappa was still alive, like in the last years before he passed away, and Edward Locke, the dancer, had actually done some dance,

Owen Underhill 11:35

which they did on those productions, so we decided that we would also bring some dance element to it, and so that's what we did also.

Gabrielle Martin 11:50

Do you remember who were the dancers or who supported choreography?

Owen Underhill 11:55

Yeah, it was Rob at my colleague at SFU. Oh yeah, okay, Rob Kitsos? Rob Kitsos, yes. And so he did, you know, it was sort of set up as a concert, but he had the dancers in the front, which is the way Edward Locke had done it, and they were actually right behind me and going very quickly, and right, I could feel the wind of them when they were performing.

Owen Underhill 12:22

So we did that as well, and that was a very popular show. It brought out all the Zappa fanatics, which there are many. Okay. So we did three shows, and I don't know what it was. What venue was this? You're right.

Owen Underhill 12:40

It was in the Wong Theatre at SFU Woodward, so there were about 350 people at each of those shows, but it was a good show for Bush, and it was certainly a good show for us.

Gabrielle Martin 12:54

Great, and did you, um, did Question, Turning Point, Ensemble, Commission, other projects of all the ones that were presented in the push years? No.

Owen Underhill 13:03

We talked about it, but that was, I think, the one time that Norman really wanted to get involved with a sort of commission that we would jointly do.

Gabrielle Martin 13:16

Great. And then, yeah, as mentioned there, after that project, Radio Rewrite was presented Flying White with One Way Dance. How would you reflect on the evolution of the company, like let's say from Dual Eclipse in 2008 right up to Flying White in 2020?

Gabrielle Martin 13:38

And then now, has there been an evolution in terms of process, practice, points of interest for projects?

Owen Underhill 13:49

Yes, I mean, we got more and more adventurous over the years in doing ambitious interdisciplinary projects, for one thing, and so Push certainly helped us with that because we always knew that if we were part of the Push Festival that it was a great way to bring in theater, dance, film, you know, a much more diverse audience, I guess.

Owen Underhill 14:27

And another thing we did, which was in the Flying White Project, was we worked with Chinese traditional instruments, and so some of the performers that are here in Vancouver. So we also became a little more cross -cultural in the projects that we have done, you know, when we saw the opportunity and the partners approached us as well.

Owen Underhill 14:59

So those were some of the things that we were able to explore more fully with the support of Push.

Gabrielle Martin 15:08

And your role in the projects, is it, are you sometimes composer, sometimes more producer? Does your role shift across these projects?

Owen Underhill 15:20

Well, I'm the conductor of the ensemble, so I am a member of the ensemble, but I did compose Flying White.

Speaker 3 15:29

project because I'm a personal and pristine body for Chinese traditional instruments and

Owen Underhill 15:36

And so I was, and also Dorothy Chang was involved with that as a composer. So sometimes I'm involved as a creator as well, but the projects that we've done like that are tend to be so original that, you know, you feel a little bit like an artistic director of the project as a whole.

Gabrielle Martin 16:02

Yeah, yeah. And so you kind of mentioned that one of the benefits of partnering with Push was to bring in different audiences and that it was kind of a good home for those more interdisciplinary projects.

Gabrielle Martin 16:20

Yeah, how do you see, I'm curious, you know, having had a relationship with the festival since the early days, how you see the cultural context of the festival and its significance in Vancouver.

Owen Underhill 16:31

Yeah, well I mean push brought in from around the world like leading innovative cutting -edge projects that otherwise would never have come to Vancouver. But they also had a role with local artists and helped, you know, integrate them with other artists from around the world.

Owen Underhill 16:58

So it was, push has definitely had a fantastic impact over the

Speaker 3 17:08

you know, past 20 years or so.

Gabrielle Martin 17:11

What are you what are you excited about now with a turning point ensemble?

Owen Underhill 17:15

Working next year, we're doing a production of Kaya Sarajajo's music. She just passed away of a Finnish composer and her music is so colorful and beautiful and hardly ever done in Vancouver because it's for very large ensembles and so that's the kind of thing we'd like to present up close to Vancouver audiences and we're always working on recording projects so we just did a recording project of Nova Han who's a local composer of some large work she wrote for us and so that's just been released and we're trying to dream up some more dance projects but usually those take two or three years to

Gabrielle Martin 18:13

Okay.

Owen Underhill 18:14

put in the hopper. Yeah.

Gabrielle Martin 18:16

It sounds like you're very busy, which is exciting, working on all sorts of collaborations and new projects. Of all the projects that were train point ensemble projects that were presented at Push, what would you say is like your most dear project, the one that you have the fondest memories of?

Owen Underhill 18:38

Well, I have fond memories of several of them. Definitely the Zappa, Varese, and John Oswald projects, one of them. The Radio Rewrite was some ways a similar project because it involved the music of Johnny Greenwood from Radiohead, who most people know that he's written for film and so on.

Owen Underhill 19:03

But he also is interested in unusual instruments like the And Martineau. It's a bit like the Theremin and the music of Olivier Messiaen. The similar way that Zappa was interested in Varese, so that Radio Rewrite project included Johnny Greenwood's music and so we were able to have a bit of a connection with him through his publisher and also we had on that program a couple of newer works involving And Martineau and a big piece by Steve Reich.

Owen Underhill 19:50

Which is called Radio Rewrite, which is actually based on a couple of Radio Ants songs. And I guess the sort of genre busting, if you could say, projects like that, where it seemed a really natural ones to do with Push.

Owen Underhill 20:14

And those generally did very well also with audience and interest, local interest.

Gabrielle Martin 20:24

Thanks so much, Ellen. Oh, you're welcome.

Ben Charland 20:30

That was a special episode of Push Play in honor of our 20th Push International Performing Arts Festival, which will run January 23rd to February 9th, 2025 in Vancouver, British Columbia. To stay up to date on Push 20 and the 2025 Festival, visit pushfestival .ca and follow us on social media at Push Festival.

Ben Charland 20:51

And if you've enjoyed this episode, please spread the word and take a moment to leave a review. Push Play is produced by myself, Trisha Knowles, and Ben Charlin. A new episode of our 20th Festival series with Gabriel Martin will be released every Tuesday, wherever you get your podcasts.