The Score: Ladner Clock Tower Carillon Performance

As The Score Research Cluster enters its second year, the Belkin and the School of Music are revisiting performances done as part of Soundings: An Exhibition in Five Parts from the fall of  2020.

Olivia Whetung’s Strata (2018), included in the Soundings exhibition, invited visitors to pour different coloured beads from individual small jars into a mason jar, creating a layering of sounds as each bead joined the growing pile. Once the container was filled, the artist turned the amalgam of beads into a new piece – a beadwork for each gallery the Soundings exhibition has presented at, each work hanging in succession. Building from the interactions of viewers and beaded by the artist herself, the work disrupts the notion of an artwork as a complete and finished product. Whetung forces us to question the temporality of the piece to insist upon its existence along a timeline outside of the traditional exhibition cycle. The creation of the beadwork, at first dictated by the random ordering of pours from visitors, is then reconfigured to encapsulate the traces of their divergent temporalities. Each beadwork is reordered into a unique visual network, its pattern appearing as a notation to be read, played and interpreted. In the fall of 2020, a series of performances by students from the UBC School of Music interpreted and activated Whetung’s beadworks as scores themselves. Sasha Kow, Athena Loredo and Joseph Stacey “played” these works through the Ladner Clock Tower’s carillon, the chiming mechanism that emulates the sounds of bells. To read more about this performance and listen to a recording, visit Soundings: Olivia Whetung and the Ladner Tower Carillon.

Athena Loredo’s Strata Tempora (2020) is an interpretation of Olivia Whetung’s Strata as a musical score, performed through the carillon and a brass ensemble at the Ladner Clock Tower. Initially performed when much of UBC campus was shut down or quieted due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the work will be performed again in October 2021, when the rhythms of more typical years at UBC are present on campus.

For more information, please visit the Belkin Event Page.