“It’s just a question of simplifying, you know – of seeing how eloquent I can be in as simple a way as possible. I don’t want a billion notes!”

This disc presents the final two compositions of Ann Southam, who died in her Toronto home on November 25, 2010, at the age of 73. With Returnings I and II, a creative life that led from mesmerizing electronic compositions of the 1970s, through the ecstatic minimalism of instrumental works like Glass Houses and Rivers, to the sublime, spare piano music of Southam’s last decade, came to an end.

In the last year of her life, the composer chose the pieces for this CD, and suggested their ordering. The pianist was never in question: Southam wrote all the music on this disc, along with the magisterial Simple Lines of Enquiry (Centrediscs 2009), for Eve Egoyan, whose profound affinity for this music is audible in every note.

David Jaeger, senior new music producer for CBC Radio, brought Southam and Egoyan together around 1996, astutely predicting that the pianist, who was emerging as a new music specialist of exceptional sensitivity and integrity, would be a perfect fit for Southam’s music. In 1998, Jaeger commissioned the composer to write for Egoyan the piece that became Qualities of Consonance; over the ensuing years a deep musical connection and friendship developed between the composer and pianist. “This may sound like a funny thing to say, but I feel very safe with [Eve],” Southam told an interviewer in 2005.

Qualities of Consonance (1998) is the earliest work on this CD. It presents a world of extremes: dark, chaotic figures that convulse their way up the keyboard, and passages of quintessential Southam stillness – that peacefulness that seems continually to ask questions, within gentle eddies of sound. The contrasts bring to mind comments the composer made about enjoying having “something to push against” – the rigours of a minimalist process or a tone row. She likewise spoke of the tremendous energy she felt in the presence of mountains – “the sense of vast space, and of forces butting up against one another.”

Egoyan premièred Qualities of Consonance at the Sound Symposium in St. John’s, Newfoundland, on July 13, 1998. It is dedicated to Egoyan and Jaeger, “with thanks.”

With its breathtaking expansiveness of musical time and space, In Retrospect ushers in the mysterious, contemplative world of Simple Lines of Enquiry. Southam described it as “a simple, quiet revisiting of what has gone before.”

Ambiguous chords unfold like gentle questions, cradled by the highest and lowest C-sharps on the piano. Each new note teases the ear with concurrent possibilities: is it forming a consonance with a note close by, or clashing with a pitch lingering in the air, perhaps far away on the keyboard, and by now so faded that it exists mostly in memory? After a few minutes of this, you may find yourself letting go of the very notions of consonance and dissonance, and floating in the mysterious movement that Egoyan experiences as “common time and celestial time side by side.”

The musical ambiguities of the piece – its willingness to embrace instability on many levels – give Southam’s music its depth and humanity, and its enduring fascination. The composer meanwhile spoke of “a red dissonant line” running through the consonant elements of her music. “Isn’t that life, in a way: trying to accommodate dissonance?” she said.

In Retrospect is dated Jan. 2004; Egoyan premièred it at Toronto’s Glenn Gould Studio on March 26 the same year. The Toronto dancer-choreographer Julia Sasso has created a solo, accidental dances, to the piece.

In Returnings I and II (2010), Ann pares the minimalist process that underlies all the pieces on this disc down to utmost simplicity. She opens each Returnings by laying out a full 12-tone row in an expressive and expansively lyrical line. But as always, Southam lets inspiration trump method: in the opening of Returnings I, she mysteriously omits the eighth note of her pitch row – F-sharp – replacing it with an “extra,” deeply expressive A-flat. The piece then gently ruminates over each note of the row – Southam described each chord as asking, “Why?” Intriguing pauses and a rhythmic asymmetry give the flow a subtle and organic unpredictability. As Canadian choreographer Rachel Browne says, “even when [Southam’s] music is very minimal, and has lots of spaciousness, there’s a dance, always.”

Returnings I and II look so simple on paper: a 12-tone row gradually unfolds between two stable, tonal lines (a drone in the bass; chords in the upper voice). Yet as Egoyan says, “the emotional subtlety with which the ‘irrational’ tone row interacts with the consonant lines that embrace it is extremely sophisticated, conceptually and musically. It is the journey through something that never shifts. This is such a huge world concept.”

Egoyan premièred Returnings I in Brandon, Manitoba on May 1, 2010; Southam subsequently revised the piece. Returnings II received its première at the launch of this disc at Glenn Gould Studio on Dec. 2, 2011. Both pieces are dedicated to Egoyan.

Returnings I and II end precisely when the process of spooling and unspooling that Southam has set in motion is completed. Yet this completion leaves us midstream, feeling that the piece could go on forever.

That seems fitting, for composing was as essential to Southam as breathing. She was planning to write more pieces in the Returnings vein – enough to fill a CD with music. And three weeks before her death, during a brief stay in hospital, the composer came across the poem “Following a Stream” by David Wagoner, in a back issue of The New Yorker magazine. She excitedly told Egoyan and another friend that it had given her the idea for a new piece, the structure of which she saw within the poem.

In the end, time ran out for Southam, and she was unable to realize the piece she conceived that day. But it was uncanny, to say the least, that Wagoner’s poem found its way to her at that moment. No tribute or epitaph could so honour the spirit of this remarkable human being, who knew all about “taking whatever turn the earth told her to” – against the odds, and regardless of what the guidebooks said.

©Tamara Bernstein, 2011