What is Intersections, anyway?
It’s Sunday afternoon, and I’m decompressing. It was a busy week.
We had TIME FOR THREE here this week, who played in our Intersections series. They got a good REVIEW in our local paper, The Record. The end of the review is really funny to me though. The reviewer comments that the orchestra didn’t have enough to do during the concert:
“Perhaps this show belonged with the symphony’s Pops series (where I would probably go see Tf3 again for all the froth and fun). While applauding Outwater’s efforts to challenge the boundaries of symphonic music in this series, I vote for more intersection and less wallpaper.”
Now I happen to agree strongly with the reviewer that the orchestra didn’t do enough. It’s a problem with Time for Three … they don’t have enough charts yet. They’re working on it. Even so, I couldn’t resist bringing them to KW asap., despite the fact that the orchestra would be sitting most of the time. In an ideal situation, the orchestra should have had more to do. No doubt.
But what’s funny to me is that he’s suggesting what does and doesn’t belong in the INTERSECTIONS series, a format I INVENTED only four concerts ago! That’s kind of cool — it must mean that the four shows that we’ve done already have a common vibe …
The real intention is that INTERSECTIONS is a completely flexible format, and that includes some concerts where the orchestra plays a lot (like the electronica show earlier this year) and sometimes not so much. It’s about whatever is new, interesting. In the case of Time for Three, the music they play is an intersection: it’s impossible to categorize as bluegrass, classical, country, hip-hop, etc. That’s why I think they belong in this series.
At any rate, this particular critical response shows the human need to categorize art, which is not what art is about, ultimately. But that tension has been around since the beginning of criticism.
There were some extra events around this concert, including an apres-concert gathering at the Jane Bond in Waterloo. Good turnout of musicians, staff, and audience. And we had a party at my place earlier in the week to attract new folks to the KWS. It was a younger crowd, and they got to hear Time for Three up close. Here’s a video of them playing for the party. It was their first time as a group in Canada, but they chose the right music to impress the Canadians! Soon they’ll figure out it’s not “Tom Horton’s” and then they’ll really be in business.