Epiphanies (2017) by Douglas Finch (composer) and Sigi Torinus (visual artist) for piano, soundtrack, video and poetry by Alice Munro performed by Megumi Masaki

UBC Concert "Light and Perspective," Roy Barnett Recital Hall, Vancouver, BC. January 30, 2019

Performed by Megumi Masaki, piano, speaking pianist and Keith Hamel, electronics, video

Note on Epiphanies (2016-17) by Douglas Finch:

This piece has been developed in collaboration with pianist Megumi Masaki and new media artist Sigi Torinus, and it has provided an opportunity to reflect on Alice Munro’s writing, which has had a considerable influence on me over the last three decades. ‘Epiphany’ is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as: “sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature or meaning of something; an intuitive grasp of reality through something (as an event) usually simple and striking; an illuminating discovery, realisation, or disclosure; a revealing scene or moment”. In her masterful stories, Alice Munro’s writing seems so simple and unadorned that it is often difficult to understand why it has such a strong psychological effect. As with Paul Klee’s assertion that: “paintings look at us”, it seems to me that Munro’s stories invite us to open and reveal ourselves as we experience them. For me, this feels most striking in certain moments in between narrative - these moments of heightened perception that tend to come to characters in a state of solitude, fragility or vulnerability. In Epiphanies, a few of these moments have been strung together from different stories - transplanted out of their original context into a a dream-like collage of impressions, using words, music, images and sound.

The excerpts are from the following stories:

1. High ground - (from “Passion”, Runaway, 2004). Grace has gone off for a ride with her fiancé’s alcoholic older brother and stops at a ‘bootleg’ house: “She sat in the car, in the house’s shade. ……And now the car had stopped, the day filled up with an unusual silence. Unnatural because you could expect such a hot afternoon to be full of the buzzing and humming and chirping of insects in the grass, in the juniper bushes”. This is about memory, solitude, the absence of things and the feeling of time being frozen.

2. A moment of peace - (from “Post and Beam”, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, 2001). Lorna wants to sit on Lionel’s floor: “…in the middle of the square of linoleum. To sit for hours not so much looking at his room as sinking into it. To stay in this room where there was nobody who knew her or wanted a thing from her. To stay here for a long, long time, growing sharper and lighter, light as a needle.” This is about the need for escape, comfort, withdrawal.

3. Her surroundings - (from “Meneseteung”, Friend of my Youth, 1990). Nineteenth Century small-town Poetess Almeda Roth, after taking Laudenum for her nerves, imagines the objects in her dining room: “charged with life, ready to move and flow and alter. Or possibly to explode.” This movement ends with a song, set to one of Almeda’s poems, “White Roses”: about death. 4. Too much happiness - (from “Too much Happiness, Too much Happiness, 2009). The text here is a condensation of the last section of this longer story - almost a novelette - based on the real-life Russian novelist and mathematician Sophia Kovalevsky. It is a kind of ‘winter’s journey’, recounting Sophia’s final trip from Berlin to Stockholm (where she taught at the university, the only place in the late 1900’s that would employ a female mathematician). She is dying, but also experiencing an increasing euphoria and a deeper understanding of life: “Events and ideas now taking on a new shape, seen through sheets of clear intelligence, a transforming glass.”