About Brian Current's Compositions

                    For the Time Being (1999)

                    Esprit Orchestra conducted by Alex Pauk performed for the time being by Brian Current, Friday, March 1, 2002, as part of The Weekend, New Wave Composers Festival.

                    Kazabazua (2003)

                    Esprit Orchestra conducted by Alex Pauk performed the World Premiere of Brian Current's Kazabazua, an Esprit commission, Sunday, May 20, 2003, as part of its Time Chant concert; the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts, Toronto, Ontario.

                     Kazabazua (2003)

                    Kazabazua (pronounced Kaja-BAjua) was commissioned by Alex Pauk and the Esprit Orchestra with funds from the Canada Council for the Arts. It is dedicated to Esprit on the occasion of their 20th anniversary.

                    Much of the music was written at a retreat in the Gatineau hills (a wilderness area north of Ottawa), near the town of Kazabazua, Quebec. I remember being struck by the sensuousness of the word 'Kazabazua,' as well as its Shazaam-like magic. It also had a remarkable meaning: On the town's site, the river vanishes underground for a spell and then re-emerges further along. 'Kazabazua' is an Algonquin word that means 'disappearing waters', or 'hidden waters'.

                    This had psychological connotations that I thought were appropriate to the piece, as well as captured a sense of its flow and restlessness, its play with levels of brightness and its various depictions of gravity.

                    The piece is made up of two parallel movements of roughly ten minutes each. The first movement is concerned with sustained energy, orchestrated shakers and large pin-wheeling arcs of colour.

                    Musicians perform "impossible" lines by alternating back and forth between interlocking scales, sharing the voice as one might in a relay race. The calmer second movement experiments with a technique of constant accelerando, or "slanted time". The idea is that for long periods, the music is always speeding up, as if written for a broken metronome.

                    Gestures continually accelerate into a blur and then disappear over the horizon, creating an environment of constant momentum and renewal.

                    Programme note by Brian Current

                     For the Time Being (1999)

                    For the Time Being was composed for the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne during the fall of 1999 with support from the Canada Council for the Arts. At the time I was interested in creating a piece that was very textural and goal-oriented, music that was always going somewhere.

                    There are three sections of roughly equal lengths. The first slows down, the second speeds up and the third remains steady.

                    At the end of each of these, there is a climactic area where a wash of ensemble-wide gestures lurch and drift in and out of major chords. Sometimes these are meant to sound mechanical, at other times they are meant to sound like music that wants to be alive, or breathing. The major triads are not there so much as functional harmony (although this inevitably occurs) but rather as familiar or comforting sonorities, causing the ear to relax slightly as if finding an old friend amidst a sea of changing textures and clusters.

                    For the Time Being seemed an appropriate title as it contains a nice triple-entendre that speaks of time and of being and of the present moment.

                    Programme note by Brian Current