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The theme of this 12th edition of the Montreal International New Musics Festival is “Music and Images.” Its program of 18 concerts will reopen a debate which has occupied the minds of composers even before the invention of cinema and which, in an increasingly digitized age, is becoming more and more relevant.
Today, there seems to be no limit to the potential for interaction between sound and image. This ranges from cinema and video animation, to digital music, as well as all that music itself contributes to visual mediums. We met with SMCQ Artistic Director Simon Bertrand to discuss this fabulous mosaic of artistic possibilities.
Kick-Off With a Bang
The two-week festival officially kicks off on Feb. 14 with an explosive program entitled Dynamite Barrel. Norwegian composer Kristine Tjøgersen, winner of the prestigious Ernst von Siemens 2025 Award, will present a work inspired by Bollywood cinema, including a dance scene from the film Gumnaam (1965). “Anyone familiar with this kind of cinema will know that there’s a lot of movement and dance numbers. It’s very lively. In the end, the music in We Should Get To Know Each Other is very precisely synchronized with the image. It’s a bit like what we call Mickey Mousing, where almost every musical gesture has a synchronous reaction on screen. Of course, this isn’t the only approach between music and image that we’ll be exploring during the festival, but in this context, it’s a lot of fun,” says Bertrand.
Francis Battah’s creation, Cyan Saturn, takes a completely different approach. The Quebec composer will take advantage of the instrumentation already in place that evening—notably drums, clarinet and saxophone—to explore the world of jazz. “It’s something he’s never done before,” says Bertrand. “It doesn’t sound like Gershwin, of course. It’s a blend of 20th-century music and certain elements of avant-garde jazz. It’s a very harmonically rich and colourful work with halftones.”
The next day, the mood changes with the concert, Machine for Taking Time – Palais de Mari, performed by Eve Egoyan and Isak Goldschneider. “Expect, among other things, an incredible video by David Rockeby. It was made with 750,000 images of the city of Montreal filmed according to the seasons and weather conditions. The accompanying music by Ann Southam is slow and contemplative, and will provide a huge contrast with the previous evening’s concert. Also on the program is a creation by Hans Martin and Morton Feldman’s Palais de Mari, with original visuals by Elysha Poirier.”
The third concert in this series at the Société d’arts technologiques (SAT) is ¡Némangerie mâchée! Another concert and another process, Bertrand notes. “The images were conceived at the same time as the music, which was itself the result of improvisation and collective composition by vocal ensemble Phth. Artist Beth Frey used artificial intelligence and digital technology to create a visual that captures the five singers, but alters their appearance—a bit like morphing. She transformed them into hybrid, animated creatures, often fused into a single character. It’s at once beautiful and ugly, funny and terrifying—qualities that Frey intends to make coexist. One of the most explosive concerts of the festival.”
An Increasingly Visual Society?
Kafka’s Insect, the last event to be highlighted at SAT, will provide the public with an immersive audiovisual experience under a 360-degree dome. For Bertrand, the artist must also be in tune with the spirit of his or her own era in order to form a critical eye, and even challenge the audience on societal issues. “Throughout the 18 concerts, we find ourselves exploring in much greater depth something that has been in the zeitgeist for several years now,” he says. “More than ever, we live in a visual world. People are becoming addicted to very short video sequences on social networks, sometimes without even needing sound. They watch it on public transport. Composers are also increasingly appropriating visual supports that come from outside and that are mixed with the music or conceived alongside it. This is the case of Nicole Lizée, a composer who will be the subject of a concert on Feb. 22, and whose catalogue includes a great deal of video creations. Many of these visuals have been created especially for the shows, and are an integral part of the whole thing. In some cases, they include drawing or calligraphy. So don’t always expect synchronicity, but rather a dialogue between music and image.”
At the Movies
In the 1950s and ’60s, it was often through horror and science-fiction films that the general public heard modern music for the first time, explains Bertrand. “People listened to this music on screen; they thought it was great, but then they’d get to the concerts and, next to a work by Beethoven, they wouldn’t understand it anymore. The visual has the power to make people understand the world of sound, and that’s something that can’t be denied. That’s the gamble I’m taking with this year’s theme.”
György Ligeti’s work, for example, served as the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). It gave this experimental film all the material it needed to express the profound unease of the crew, who were prisoners of an artificial intelligence. The Hungarian composer’s contribution to the film genre was also evident later in The Shining (1980) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999) by the same director. Bertrand admits that he could not help but pay tribute to Ligeti’s role in one of the leading fields of interaction between music and images. “This concert will take place at Maison symphonique with the McGill Symphony Orchestra. True to my style as an artistic director, I wanted to include a première. So we’ve included a work by a young composer, Liam Gibson, who was also inspired by Kubrick’s universe. The visuals will be prepared by Sylvain Marotte, a regular contributor with SMCQ. I won’t say anything more about it, so as not to spoil the surprise, but we won’t just be projecting film images. This concert will be one of the highlights of the festival, as will the one the following day at Saint Joseph’s Oratory, featuring Instruments of Happiness, West Island Youth Orchestra, Orchestre de la Montérégie and Sixtrum Ensemble, who will collaborate around a new creation by Tim Brady.”
Supporting the Next Generation
Projet 4:4 is the festival’s other event to present film music in the most literal sense of the term. “It’s a huge project we created with our principal co-partner, the Institut national de l’image et du son in a co-presentation with Rendez-vous Québec Cinéma. We put out a call for submissions, selected four directors and four composers, and paired them up like speed-dating. They were all asked to make a five-minute film. The result: four films to be screened at Salle Pierre-Mercure. Quatuor Mémoire, a fantastic ensemble of female musicians, will first play the music alone. Then we’ll see how the music will be featured in the world-première screenings of the four films.” The production of the films was sponsored by two renowned mentors, composer Philippe Brault and director Sébastien Pilote. Comedian Marc Béland will host the evening.
Other up-and-coming artists will be highlighted, sometimes even without the use of images. This is particularly true of Ensemble Éclat, which made big waves when it debuted at the MNM 2023 edition and returns this year with the concert À l’écoute du geste. “They are a formidable group of young musicians under the direction of Charles-Éric Fontaine,” says Bertrand. “Here, it’s more the choreographic element, the musical gesture, the movement of hands and bodies that will be explored. It’s a concert that will also feature a work with three Karlax, a hyper-sensitive digital instrument that allows us to program any sound and shape it to our liking.” Added to this is the participation of the duo Airs with their concert Delta(s). Bertrand continues: “These two ensembles had carte blanche to play whatever they wanted. Also, there isn’t always an image projected behind the scenes. The concept is broad, because we mustn’t forget that music is also suggestive of images.”
In giving these artists free rein, SMCQ’s artistic director is also seeking to respond to the aspirations of the younger generation of composers. “I think we experienced at the end of the 20th century what I call the end of superstitions—I’d even dare to say fetishisms—with regard to musical systems. It’s as though we’d understood that composing a work within a certain system didn’t necessarily ensure its relevance. The younger generation no longer thinks in this way. Composers now approach each new work as a new challenge—as if they were starting from scratch, with new material and new ideas. I find that fascinating.”
New Horizons
Emerging artists necessarily means new works and new venues. “Don’t look for the great contemporary music icons of the 1970s: Boulez, Stockhausen and company,” says Bertrand. “With the exception of Ligeti, they won’t be here. That’s a conscious decision. This in no way detracts from the value of their work, but my priority was to present premières, world premières, exclusives or new shows. I’m thinking of Il Teatro rosso and Mystery of Clock. These are two concerts presented at the Théâtre de la Plaza, a former cinema now transformed into a magnificent cabaret-style theatre. This is not where you normally hear contemporary music. Usually, it’s at Salle Pierre-Mercure or Salle Claude-Champagne, and Salle Bourgie to a lesser extent. Here, we wanted to explore an unusual venue. Audiences will be able to attend two major premières of a global show that has been in the making for several years. We owe them to No Hay Banda, on the one hand, and Mark Fewer and Aiyun Huang, on the other; two exclusives for the MNM festival.”
Visuality in Music
Musical scores sometimes provide visual material in their own right. For SMCQ, it was important to highlight this lesser-known branch of creation with the DigiScores and Nostalgic images events, presented at the Agora Hydro-Québec—Cœur des sciences as part of the La Grande écoute GRMS/Hexagram/ SMCQ series. The way music is notated is no longer limited to traditional solfeggio, staves and treble clefs. Composers like Nour Symon and many others today use graphic and/or animated scores, which are often works of art in themselves. Ensemble SuperMusique will be performing several of these. The New York-based vocal ensemble Ekmeles will perform a work by Zosha di Castri, inspired by papyri containing poetry fragments by ancient Greek poetess Sappho.
The event Le son de l’encre will also focus on the links between graphic design and music. It will feature live calligraphy alongside contemporary music, including a creation by François Déry performed by Trio d’argent.
Perspectives
The programming of the MNM festival reflects what contemporary music has become: a world populated by multiple languages that coexist and interrelate. SMCQ Artistic Director Simon Bertrand insists on this diversity of approaches, which it is his duty to represent. “Today’s composers no longer function by excluding one musical language, one way of notating music or expressing themselves,” he says. “They’re completely into the idea of using various techniques to express themselves musically. It’s fascinating. In the 1960s and ’70s, there was undoubtedly more homogeneity, with major currents such as serial, spectral, etc. Now we’ve entered an era of heterogeneity. The artist integrates many different techniques and mediums, from sound to visual to digital. It’s a kind of Tower of Babel. Nobody has to like everything about it, but this balance is certainly a representation of the world we live in today.”
The audience for creative music is also showing signs of change, says Bertrand. “In the 1970s, we tried desperately to explain composers’ approaches to the public. I’m no longer convinced that this is in anyone’s interest today. Audiences want to taste, not know the recipe. We live in a society where people no longer want to be told what to feel, hence the challenges of cultural mediation today. Because of social networks and the way they communicate, people want to understand and appreciate music immediately. Musically, the multiplicity of approaches is also there to take account of a society that is becoming increasingly ADHD (Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder).”
What do composers aspire to these days, given the profound societal changes they have to endure? Bertrand’s answer: “They’re looking for their own identity; they no longer want to be part of a dogma or a sect, but to explore for themselves. This quest is reflected in the fact that new music is being invented in the world every day, and new languages are being created. Behind this, there is the desire of composers to represent this world and combine different languages. As Edgar Varèse said: ‘To be modern is to be natural, to be an interpreter of the spirit of the age’.”
The MNM festival closes on March 1 with a concert at the crossroads of cultures, co-produced with the Centre des musiciens du monde and called Mig’maq / Basques. It will be followed by La Grande Nuit 2025, an event that will run until the early morning as part of La Grande Écoute series in collaboration with GRMS. www.smcq.qc.ca
Translation: Heather Weinreb
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