The Muted Note: A Multifaceted Poetry + Music + Dance Project

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Thursday, October 23rd, 2014
7:30 PM

"The Muted Note is a striking accomplishment. It ultimately resonates like P.K. Page's galvanized language itself."  –Stuart Broomer, Musicworks

The Muted Note is a suite of songs composed by Scott Thomson, settings of poems by P.K. Page, for Susanna Hood's singing voice. As a duo, Susanna, in addition to singing the lyrics, improvises on the songs both vocally and in dance, a synthesis for which she is singularly acclaimed in Canada. Scott, on trombone, both underpins Susanna and solos on the songs in a wide-ranging style that reflects his broad experience as an improviser. Throughout, P.K. Page's stellar poems are at the core of the work and, in both dance and music, Scott and Susanna seek to animate and activate the verse as they play. Their extensive Canadian tour this autumn will help to promote their new duo disc on &records.This tour also serves to support their duo CD, also called The Muted Note (&records 2013).

Nanaimo’s Crimson Coast Dance Society hosts one performance of this work in a tour of 40 stops in 9 Canadian provinces in the autumn of 2014.

Susanna Hood is an award-winning dance artist renowned, especially, for her synthesis of dance and vocal improvisation, as well as her beautifully crafted choreography. In performance, she sings the song lyrics with tremendous poise and intention, and animates them with her singular improvisations characterized by both their focus and wild abandon. As part of their duo, Scott switches freely from accompanying Susanna to soloing in a vocal, extroverted style reminiscent of his teacher, the great American trombonist, Roswell Rudd.

Scott Thomson is a trombonist and composer who lives in Montréal, having moved from Toronto in 2010. He plays in established groups in many styles, and prizes ad hoc improvising as a way to meet many creative people. He has studied with Roswell Rudd, Jean Derome, Eddie Prévost, and John Oswald. Scott is one of the founders of the Association of Improvising Musicians in Toronto (AIMToronto), and co-directs the AIMToronto Orchestra, which was formed for a project with Anthony Braxton in September 2007. While in Toronto, Scott was the artistic director of Somewhere There, a venue for live creative music that he founded in 2007. Scott has composed a series of site-specific pieces that he calls ‘cartographic compositions’ for mobile musicians and audiences in unconventional performance contexts, including works for the galleries and corridors of the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Patricia Kathleen Page (1916-2010) is one of Canada's most celebrated literary figures, and wrote some of this nation's finest poems. She was also a visual artist, working as P.K. Irwin, whose artworks are in the collections of major museums including the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario.


Choreography by Susanna Hood
Songs by Scott Thomson
Based on poems by P.K. Page

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WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 22: Montreal dance artist and vocalist, Susanna Hood, and composer and trombonist, Scott Thomson are touring to perform Scott's suite of songs based on poems by long-time Victoria resident, P.K. Page. The songs are composed to be animated through improvisation, which Susanna executes both vocally and in dance. For their Nanaimo workshop, Susanna and Scott invite attendees –– dancers, musicians, or otherwise, at any level of expertise –– to explore the relationships between text, music, and dance through improvisation. It will be a participatory event where Susanna and Scott will share their experience and facilitate participants to explore these relationships in whatever styles of music, dance, and/or poetry resonate with them.