- Martin Ritter, Western Front Society, March 21 at 7: 30 p.m. Tickets $25 (discounts for students, seniors and artists), available at the door.
THE MUSIC IS OVER . . . ALMOST.
The soprano has sung and the pianist is still but the last chord is still resonating, lingering before the audience like an obstinate houseguest.
Welcome to the musical world of Martin Ritter.
Currently preparing to take the stage at the Western Front on March 21 to debut his newest composition as part of the Sonic Boom festival, Ritter can write programming code as easily as a sonata.
The North Vancouver composer represents a new breed of classically trained musicians whose creativity stretches between traditional instruments and cutting-edge computer software like the hand of a young pianist reaching to cover an octave.
"I'm the first musician or artist in the family," he says, recounting his childhood in Bregenz, Austria.
The son of a mechanic and a nurse, Ritter, 29, says his devotion to art and expression has sometimes confused his family.
"My family, they are supportive. They don't quite understand what I'm doing or why I'm doing it, but they are trying hard to be supportive," he says
That support included his father taking him to see Franz Schubert's Unfinished Symphony when he was a child.
The excitement and drive of Schubert's work stayed with Ritter as he worked his way through music school in Austria.
While he showed prodigious musical talent, Ritter needed help with another subject.
"In high school I was failing English, or I was close to failing English, so I did ESL studies in Canada," Ritter says.
Following consecutive summers in Vancouver, Ritter opted to move.
"After graduation I decided to come here and try and live here because it's just a beautiful city and I love it."
While he was computer-literate, it wasn't until Ritter's third year at the University of British Columbia that he began to see the possibilities inherent in electronic music.
"There was a course offered for introduction to electronic music and I just wanted to see if that's something I'd be interested in," Ritter says. "I liked it and I stuck to it ever since."
Besides the mixture of artistry and technical skill required for electronic music, Ritter says programming unlocked another side of his creativity.
Ritter has been part of a burgeoning UBC research project called Integrated Multi-Modal Score-Following Enhancement, or IMuSE.
The music project, which borders on artificial intelligence, allows a single musician to play in tune with a completely adaptable orchestra, albeit a recorded one.
"The score needs to be able to follow the performer and if the performer decides on the fly that the section should be a little bit slower, a little bit softer, then the software needs to be able to adapt to that," Ritter says.
Ritter says he hopes to use the marriage of live music and live electronics quite soon.
"My piece for Sonic Boom is a piano solo piece with the IMuSE system. If all goes well," he adds, laughing.
While many artists wait for great ideas to come to them in dreams, Ritter's latest inspiration hit him while sleep eluded him.
"I'm an insomniac. I've struggled with this for quite some time and during a bad spell I thought, 'Well, might as well write a piece about it,'" Ritter says.
Insomniac's Musings is an eight-minute exploration of sleeplessness featuring Ritter accompanying a pianist with his IMuSE software.
"It's just meant to be the experience of not sleeping or not being able to get a restful sleep for quite some time and the sounds and sights that go with it," he says.
Besides being the product of a decade of bleary eyes, the piece is also the result of a new way of working on music.
"It's not so much the composing as it is how you listen to things," Ritter says, discussing the impact of technology on his work.
The Austrian-born composer says he frequently spends hours working with recorded examples, trying to deduce what makes a certain sound interesting or boring, as well as experimenting with counterintuitive ways to augment a sound.
"That's something really interesting and really useful to the interactive computer music composers once we get it all sorted out," he says of IMuSE.
Insomniac's Musings is Ritter's follow-up to his 2011 piece, Crescend, which contains a specific instruction from Ritter on how the end of the piece should be played: "Hold pedal until resonance has faded away; should border on the uncomfortable."
That ending left the audience uncertain if the piece was over and hesitant to applaud, according to Ritter, but he says he has no regrets.
"That whole piece is about finding oneself," Ritter says, explaining his notation. "It's a very uncomfortable piece on many levels. . . . It isn't meant to be done, it's just meant to end."
While Ritter is willing to write difficult and complex pieces, he says he's always aiming to connect to an audience on a visceral level.
"I would also hope that it's not just a challenge, that there's always something in the music that connects on some level," he says. "I'm always trying to find some core . . . of familiarity"
Running from March 20-25, the Sonic Boom festival is an annual celebration of B.C. composers. This year's festival opens with a Tuesday night panel discussion at the Canadian Music Centre on Davie Street and features concerts at the Western Front and St. Philip's Anglican Church on West 27th Avenue in Vancouver. Tickets are $25, with discounts available for students, seniors, and artists. A festival pass is available for $60.
Tickets are sold at the door.
