Peter Hatch, Dulcian Patterns
premiere: Feb. 3, 2008
Commissioned with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts
Peter Hatch received a DMA degree from the University of British Columbia following MusBac and MusM degrees from the University of Toronto. His works have been performed at festivals such as the ISCM World Music Days, the Darmstadt Ferienkurse fur Neue Musik, the Angelica fesitval (Bologna), the Guelph Spring Festival, Scotiafest, the Vancouver New Music Festival, the Vancouver Early Music Festival and the International Computer Music Conference. His works have been recorded on numerous compact discs under the CBC Musica Viva, CMC Centrediscs, Conaccord, CBC and Artifact labels.
Theatrical and multi-media elements have been incorporated into many of his works and the writings of Gertrude Stein have also played an important role in his compositions.
As well as his compositional work, Peter has been very active as the artistic director of new music ensembles and festivals. In 1985 he founded NUMUS Concerts, a Waterloo based new music organization. Peter is currently Artistic Director of the Open Ears Festival of Music and is also Professor and coordinator of the composition programme at Wilfrid Laurier University.
Upcoming premieres include his new work The Call of Amber, which will be performed by the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony at Kitchener’s Centre in the Square and Reaching for Nothing, which will be presented at Waterloo’s Perimeter Institute on May 1st and 2nd, 2008.
Dulcian Patterns
The initial inspiration for Dulcian Patterns can be found in the sound colours of the bassoon, an instrument I spent many, many hours practicing and rehearsing in my performance career before my compositional interests prevented me from having the time to do so. The dulcian was the Renaissance predecessor to the bassoon. Until now, I have found it impossible to write for the bassoon in a solo context, as every musical imagining seemed haunted by others’ works that I knew so intimately. It is only recently that I have begun to feel that I might have enough distance from this material to pursue my own compositional ideas featuring this instrument and its gorgeous timbral world.
The three movements (slow, slower, fast) of this work are not a bassoon concerto per se, but they do frequently feature the varied ranges and timbres of the bassoon. A spatial arrangement of the players is meant to enrich the colour world of the piece. In recent works I have been investigating this kind of “acoustic Dolby 5.1” surround sound arrangement – designed with most of the acoustic “information” coming from the stage, while off-stage performers support it by immersing the audience in sound. In this case, this spatial arrangement also harkens back to the days of the Renaissance when the dulcian was in common use and composers such as Giovanni Gabrielli experimented with similarity.