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Hi, my name is Jennifer McLaren. I’m a chorister with the Vancouver Chamber Choir,
and I’m here today to talk about our upcoming REQUIEM FOR PEACE concert
which is being held on Saturday, November 19th at 8:00 p.m. at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts
at the University of British Columbia.
The concert is being presented in co-operation with a very special exhibit here at the beautiful Museum of Anthropology,
which is also on the UBC campus; it’s simply entitled hiroshima.
And I’m here today with Karen Duffek,
who is the curator of Contemporary Visual Art at the Museum of Anthropology
thank you very much for joining me today.
Karen: Thank you.
The MOA is the first North American museum, I believe, to host this exhibit.
Could you tell us a little bit about it?
Yeah, we were quite excited to show this work. It’s a body of work that has been shown -
different aspects of the work - in Japan in about nine different galleries there.
So it is the first showing of hiroshima by Ishiuchi Miyako in North America.
And generally speaking, what’s the content of the exhibit?
Ishiuchi went - she’s a photographer in Japan.
This work here, hiroshima, she photographed in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum
where they have a collection of 19,000 objects “left behind” by victims of the atomic bomb.
And so Ishiuchi first went there in 2007 when she was already about 60 years old
- it was the first time she’d ever been to Hiroshima
So in the exhibit, we have 48 photographs that she took of articles of clothing and other personal things
that “touched the bodies” in the sense of the people who were victims in the bomb.
What really strikes me about the exhibit is that they depict such a horrific part of world history
Japan’s history and of world history -
but yet they’re such ordinary items and so many of them, like this one, are just beautiful and very, very colourful.
Yeah, that’s very true,
it was very important to her to photograph in colour, and in so doing...
she feels that she’s been lifting some of the weight of that history off of these very everyday things.
On the MOA’s website, it mentions that the Museum
“is providing a forum for examining issues of war, trauma, and remembrance”
by presenting a series of public programming in conjunction with the exhibit
and I know our REQUIEM FOR PEACE concert is one of those
and I know that you have some other speakers and other events happening in conjunction as well.
Well, I think that it ties in very well, because the artist’s whole intention in doing this work
is to cast a new light on Hiroshima.
And so for this artist to take a new look at that history through “memory objects”,
I think invites others to do the same thing.
When is the exhibit running until?
It goes until February 12th, so it has quite a nice long run.
Wonderful. Well, thank you very much for spending your time with us today,
and we hope that people will be able to come and visit the exhibit over the next few months
and maybe possibly just before they come to our REQUIEM FOR PEACE concert!
Karen: (That’d be great!) Jennifer: Thank you once again.
Just a short walk away from the UBC’s Museum of Anthropology
lies the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts.
And it’s here that the Vancouver Chamber Choir will be premiering the new chamber version of REQUIEM FOR PEACE
by well-known B.C. composer - and member of the Vancouver Chamber Choir bass section - Larry Nickel.
We’ll catch up with Larry and speak to him a little bit about his work.
Larry, thank you very much for joining me today.
REQUIEM FOR PEACE was your doctoral composition at UBC;
it’s had several performances since that time,
but this is not only the first performance of the chamber version of your work -
we’re being joined by the Vancouver Chamber Ensemble -
but it’s also the first time that the choir you sing in, the Vancouver Chamber Choir,
has sung the work in its entirety.
In your dual roles as both a composer and as a chorister,
what is it like to be presenting this chamber premiere with your singing peers?
Well, until this time, I’ve gone to hear performances of REQUIEM FOR PEACE
and I sit in the audience and I listen to somebody else do it, and that’s really thrilling,
but this time I’m on the inside, and I actually - I’m discovering what it’s like to sing those bass parts,
and I’m surrounded by peers who are all experts in their own rights,
not only as singers, but some of them are experts at languages;
and so, many of them have had suggestions for me.
And so I’ve been able to go back and re-write certain sections of the, you know,
just small sections of the REQUIEM to make it better, and so that’s been a real privilege for me.
Your work includes poetry and texts in 11 different languages.
Why did you feel it was important to include a variety of different languages in this particular work?
In the UBC Choral Union, if you take a look at the make-up of that choir,
you see at least 12 different nationalities being represented there.
So I decided that the work - in order to make this work the most relevant to the people who were going to be premiering it,
it would be nice to include them, and their country, and poetry from their country.
So I was wondering, “I wonder if...surely people from China, surely there were pacifists from China,
and from Japan, and from Iran.” And, sure enough,
people were able to direct me to poetry, pacifist poetry, from their country.
And that’s how I incorporated it to make an international statement for peace.
So I tried to find famous poems from these countries.
So Larry, you and I both had the opportunity to visit Hiroshima with the Chamber Choir tour to Japan in 2009.
I know that visit was a very personal defining moment for many of us in the choir.
REQUIEM FOR PEACE includes a movement entitled Hiroshima lacrimosa, which means “Tears for Hiroshima”.
Why does an event like Hiroshima continue to captivate our attention?
The fear that people have today about the future is that a “dirty” bomb
- a nuclear bomb - is going to get into the wrong hands.
And so I think people realize that we have used that bomb in the past, and it could happen again.
It’s attached to a fear, I think, that we have.
So it’s really important to continue to speak to in an artistic work,
just to allow people to continue to understand the horrors of an event like that? Larry: That’s right.
Well, thank you very much for joining us today, Larry.
We will see everyone at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts on Saturday, November 19th at 8:00 p.m.
for our REQUIEM FOR PEACE concert. Thanks again.