As a part of ARTIVISM 2025’s lineup, the Hatch Art Gallery hosted a performance by the UBC Contemporary Players Ensemble on Oct. 24. Two of the four pieces played by the ensemble were original compositions by student composers Rebecca Adams and Kelk Jeffery. The student composers — both completing their masters of composition at the school of music — were each tasked with creating a graphic score in response to one of the visual artworks on display at the Hatch’s current exhibition, Monsters and Other(ed) Bodies.
Graphic scoring is a form of musical notation that forgoes traditional scales and clefs in favour of abstract visual representation of sound. In the case of Jeffery and Adams’ scores, this process resulted in flowing shapes and parallel lines that looked as much like abstract expressionist sketches as sheet music.
The composers agreed that their scores ride the line between visual art and musical notation. “I do a lot of visual art for fun,” said Adams, “and I write music. [The score] was an exciting way to bring those two interests together.”
Adams chose Naomi Dayell’s piece, Hysteria, to inspire their score. Hysteria is a set of three large ink drawings depicting dogs barking, raging and lying on the floor against backdrops of cell-like patterns. “It really did resonate with me on the theme of women’s health and how that’s been an overlooked area,” they said. “As someone with a chronic illness who’s dealt with a lot of that in particular, I think it’s such an important topic that isn’t spoken about enough.”
Jeffery was immediately drawn to Ethan White’s What Have You Done, an edited black and white photograph depicting a multi-armed human figure shot from a low angle. Depending on interpretation, its pose can be read as a graceful dance or painful writhing. To Jeffery, the piece “suggested this play with the masculine and feminine sides” and spoke to the painful experience of cathartic transformation familiar to many queer people like herself.
Adams had never tried their hand at this kind of experimental composition before, but said they enjoyed the challenge. Jeffery had dabbled with it in a first-year composition class, but said the piece she’d written at the time was “standard notation, just maybe written in a funny way … Ultimately it was still structured like a normal piece of music.”
It’s immediately obvious that this is not the case for Jeffery’s “Hatching / What Have You Done.” The score is circular with sets of staff-like parallel lines intersecting sketched curves, reminiscent of the Kandinsky paintings Jeffery consulted while working on it. Its two titles are written on opposite sides of the sheet, and Jeffery said the piece can be played in either orientation.
The open-endedness of these pieces — and of graphic scores in general — shifts the traditional balance of control in composer-musician relationships. Standard notation offers the composer near-complete control over the final product’s sound, down to the strength with which a violinist draws their bow across the strings. Graphic notation, on the other hand, asks the composer to take a step back and places the interpretive work of reading the score onto the conductor and musicians.
This was a daunting prospect for Adams and Jeffery, both of whom were accustomed to traditional methods of composition. At times, it was difficult for Adams to imagine how the contemporary players would “[make] some music out of [their] beautiful squiggly lines on a paper.” Jeffery was more confident that the instrumentalists would be able to read her score, though perhaps in a way she didn’t intend. The challenge and excitement for her was in relinquishing interpretation — neither she nor Adams were even informed which instruments they were writing their scores for.
“I control my music a lot,” Jeffery said. “A lot of what I write is very carefully planned out, and I think about all of the details. This was an exercise in letting go and letting other people have their way with [the score].”
Jeffery and Adams had input on the ensemble’s interpretation — Jeffery in particular wrote a one-sheet interpretative aid — but both took a step back once the musicians began rehearsing in earnest over the two-week period before the show. Due to the short rehearsal window and the free-form nature of graphic scores, both pieces rode the line between discipline and improvisation — Jeffery said that the event at the Hatch was the first time she had heard that version of her piece performed.
The exhibition itself — the centrepiece of this year’s ARTIVISM festival — is relatively sparse with around a dozen pieces lining the walls. Most deal with bodily distortion or dysmorphia, and the collective effect is one of juxtaposed unease and catharsis. The Contemporary Players Ensemble complemented and elevated this sense with their performances.
Jeffery’s piece — played by a quartet of bass flute, oboe, clarinet and guitar — was mournful and meandering. The bass flute and guitar held down lumbering rhythms while the oboe and clarinet alternated melodic lines, as if conversing. Adams’s piece incorporated a soprano vocalist alongside a piano, violin and clarinet. After a slow instrumental prelude, the soprano began to sing what Adams said were real quotations from women on their experiences attempting to receive medical treatment. As the vocalist’s pitch and intensity rose, the instrumentalists followed — the pianist’s chords grew louder and more dissonant, the clarinet matched the vocalist’s keening cries of “liar, liar.”
Both composers enjoyed the new challenge that composing in graphic notation offered and hope to write more pieces in the mode. For now, though, their plans take them back to standard composition — Adams is working on a solo piano piece to be performed in February as well as their first large-scale orchestral composition. Jeffery is writing a choir piece for Musica Intima set to be performed in March. She’s also working on having some of her compositions recorded.
The Contemporary Players closed the event with the first, second and fourth movements of Lore by composer Taylor Brook, showing off the instrumentalists’ abilities to switch smoothly between loosely structured improvisation and the tightly drilled performance of a more traditional piece. The ensemble is set for another performance on Dec. 3, this time inspired by Abbas Akhavan's One Hundred Years exhibition at the Belkin, where the show will take place.
“A lot of instrumentalists are very uncomfortable with improvisation,” said Adams, “so I wasn't totally sure going in, but I was honestly so impressed with [the ensemble] throughout the whole process. They were super on top of it and seemed very comfortable experimenting.”
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