A rich day of music

[vaneramos]

Two world class music festivals take place within 15 minutes of Guelph, but until yesterday I never had occasion to attend either of them.

Hillside Festival, a five-stage folk camping blowout, runs during the last weekend of July. Past guests have included Bruce Cockburn, Sarah Harmer, Sarah McLachlan and Jane Siberry. This year's ultimate performances will be Ron Sexsmith and Ani DiFranco. Tickets were already sold out when I went shopping four months ago. Maybe next year.

Elora Festival, set in a stylishly rustic village through the month of July, features chamber, choral and jazz music. Yesterday Danny and I with some friends partook of two concerts by starkly different Canadian ensembles: Musica Intima, and The Marigolds.

Musica Intima is a Vancouver-based choral ensemble comprised of 12 professional singers who rehearse and perform a capella and without a conductor. Their style is fresh and insightful, and their harmonies rich and clear. Yesterday's performance began with a double circle, four singers facing outward to the other eight. They sang "You Have Ravished My Heart" by contemporary composer Stephen Chatman (play the audio track here), all the time devoting tender eye contact with one another (women with women, and men with men), until the last few bars when they turned and cast their intimacy into the audience. The Church of St. John the Evangelist provided remarkably resonant acoustics.

First half of the program presented contemporary sacred music, the second half was more folk-based. Their performance of the sacred was more vivid and intense (you might catch a dim sense of it from their video, "Chistus Vincit", on YouTube, though no recording could nearly evoke their live appeal). But during the second half a Canadian landscape piece, "Ice" by Bruce Sled, and two native songs arranged by Derek Healey broke past my defences and I wept throughout the rest of the concert. When they broke into their arrangement of Stan Rogers' "Northwest Passage" I could barely contain my sobs.

You do not need to be interested in choral music to find something deeply moving in Music Intima. Check out their website. You can launch Radio Intima or select entire tracks from four of their albums.

From this profound experience we progressed to a barbecue at Les's place with Bob, Brier and Bonnie. At 9 p.m. we attended Elora Centre for the Arts for a relaxing starlight concert given by The Marigolds.

This jazz and bluegrass band, the embodiment of cool, includes three female songwriters: Gwen Swick, Suzie Vinnick and Caitlin Hanford. Their songs are funky, warm and intelligent.

Haute couture, take a rest.
Basic strategies work the best.
There's simply no occasion won't meet with success,
When a woman walks in a room wearing a little black dress.

The band's name comes from the song "Inchworm"—yeah, that old children's song immortalized by Danny Kaye. Measuring the marigolds. I had never heard of them, but Brier and Bonnie brought us all along, and I found it equally exciting, in a different way, to the earlier concert. Visit the website, play the clip "The Hands That Rock the Cradle", and imagine sitting on a lawn under a chilly half moon, watching the little stars and fluttering bats come out.

All the ambiance of a folk festival, as I imagine it. For a moment I regretted spending so much of my life removed from this kind of sensual, vital experience. Then I remembered, this is now, I am here, and it is enough. I was too relaxed to applaud loudly, but came home with a copy of their CD, signed by all three women.