Purveyors of: musical smoothie as antidote to pap art.

The Parkdale Revolutionary Orchestra is something of an anomaly; classical music that's inspired as much by David Byrne and Wire as Schubert. Also: they hate classical music crowds and shows.  Composer Ben Mueller-Heaslip explained to Ryan McLaren why "high art" sucks and playing it safe is bullshit.

Can you tell us a little bit about your music?  What makes it "revolutionary"?

That's a tough question because there are so few points of reference to what we do: I've haven't really listened to much music myself, so when I started making music it was largely invention.  I have an ongoing issue with people telling me that I must've been influenced by this or that band and being offended when I tell them I haven't ever heard of them.  At a recent show, the editor of a major minor Canadian magazine told me that I was "very confused" because I hadn't heard of any of the bands that have shaped my life in music.  It's very hard. 

I typically describe our music as "aggressive minimalism," which I've found very effective because it doesn't actually mean very much and so it can't be wrong.  The recent NOW Magazine review of our new record described us as "a challenging brew of classical, art rock, opera and punk" -- I consider this pretty accurate.  It definitely describes the members of the band: we have a classically-trained string section, a punk drum and bass section, an opera singer, and I suppose our sax player can be slotted into the art rock slot without putting up too much fuss.

The "revolutionary" nature of what we do is less difficult to describe.  Revolution, as a basic definition, is the redistribution of social and economic factors.  The music we make exists outside the division between "high-art" and "low-art."  This is an irrelevant and destructive division which exists to ensure the stagnation of "high-art" music (a process which has been a complete success in Toronto) and to encourage the anti-intellectual limitations in "low-art" music (a process which has been successfully been disrupted by the mass of groundbreaking work done by to many Toronto artists over the past decade).  By playing in the most diverse range of circumstances possible -- as opposed to the safety of venues where people's expectations are pre-established and generally satisfied -- we demand that people respond to what we're doing with autonomous opinions of what they've just experienced. 

In terms of social / economic revolution, it's been my intention to prove the invalidity of the established "high-art" ensembles in Toronto by doing much better work and establishing a broader audience for complex music with absolutely no resources.  By projecting this music as far as it can reach I try to provoke reaction against the artificial constructs of the economic interests of pap culture:  I consider this a revolutionary pursuit.

Do you have a modus operandi?

I think your asking about my modus operandi as a composer?

I work in an absolutely terrible way -- sporadically and intensely -- but it seems to be the only way I've ever been able to function.  Usually this process begins by me saying to the band: "I'll give you a new song for the next rehearsal -- today's Tuesday and we're rehearsing on the following Monday and so I'll get you guys charts on Saturday."

But at that point I have no idea what I'm going to do.  Kristin writes the lyrics -- well, she writes poetry and I go through it and cut lines and take lines from different poems, and stitch them together into a form that I can work with as lyrics.  I usually do that right away because I like try to fool myself into believing that I'll work steadily.

Then on Wednesday Kristin will ask me "How's that new song coming along?" and I say "Damn good!  Going to be the best song we've ever done, for sure."  But I haven't written a note of it and I don't start writing until Friday afternoon.  When I start writing I stay awake until Sunday morning, locked in my little office drinking coffee all night, beer all day, smoking and singing off-key incessantly.  On Sunday I bike around to all my player's houses, sick and exhausted, to drop off their charts.  Then go home, take a bath, and fall asleep for the rest of the day.  I'm pretty sure this is how all the great composers throughout history have operated and I'm coming to accept it as inevitable.

I saw you play in an art space on Carlaw a couple months ago with some performance artists.  Are you a fan of alternative spaces?
 
I ask because it's not typical to see anything "orchestral" in a bar concert environment, but I imagine you'd want to play to as wide an audience as possible.  Do you challenge yourselves to play with different groups and different venues to different audiences?  Are there places (or contexts) you find you typically enjoy or prefer to play?

That show was at Labspace Studio -- seems like it was years ago, but I think it was in April.

I'm definitely a fan of alternative spaces.  We live in an extremely conservative culture, and the associations between space and expectations are really tight.  People like to be comfortable and safe -- they like to know that in Context A they can anticipate Stimulus B.  In a culture where individuals capable of making independent value-judgments on their personal experiences are rare, people tend to want to know in advance precisely what to expect so they can research it and decide whether they ought to like it or not -- and thereby avoiding the embarrassment of having to think for themselves and potentially disagreeing with their friends.

Alternative spaces, where there isn't such a strong tie between context and expectation, break people's defences down.  Events like the Labspace Studio party bring out people who share my contempt for boredom and who demand to be shocked and challenged -- we like playing for those people.

As for more specific performance scenarios we enjoy, we're still exploring.  For the coming year we've booked the usual set of monthly shows and I'm concentrating our booking energy on finding more dramatic settings -- that's always really worked for us.  In February we're playing The Box Salon at the Rivoli, which is as much of a literary as it is a musical event... since the beginning I've found that our music is really appreciated by non-musical artists, people who don't have the investment in the standard genres and music history trivia that a lot of purely musical people do.  We're also looking to book some sporadic small-scale tours, but it's complicated with a large band and no money.

How did you get involved with the P.R.O.?

I used to write concert music for some of the contemporary classical groups around Toronto.  Eventually I realized that the performers are almost unanimously cynical and obscenely mercenary, the ensembles were culturally and artistically stagnant, the concerts boring, and that the fifteen tweed-wearing droolers who'd show up to them weren't the ideal audience for my music.  So I gave that up and formed the Parkdale Revolutionary Orchestra.

What's your musical background?

When I was very young, my family moved to the Middle East, to Saudi Arabia which is a very quiet place.  I had no contact with or interest in music until several years after moving back to Canada I injured my knee quite badly and -- being unable to walk -- took up the piano too obsessively.  This in turn led me to injure my right hand very badly which redirected my creativity to composition.  I've had some formal training -- I studied composition at Queen's and U of T, but was not a very successful student and dropped out when I began to explore the possibility of having my music performed outside of the University.

As I assume you know, bar crowds are notorious for talking over performers (something people were careful not to do during the art space performance of yours I saw).  Is that ever a problem for you guys?  What are your feelings about it?

We've played in a huge range of circumstances -- we're constantly playing venues where the audience is mostly people who listen to rock or folk or hip-hop: generally, anything but what they're about to see.  We don't ask our audience to indulge us with their polite attention -- if we had to ask, what we're doing would be a waste of time.

I'm not saying that everyone who sees the Parkdale Revolutionary Orchestra perform loves us: we make music that's unlike anything they've heard and some people aren't comfortable with that.  But as imaginatively-dulled as our society is, it hasn't quite reached the point where talent, commitment, and genius can trumped by stupidity.  People recognize a unique experience when it happens to them and whether they like it or not there's no choice but to digest it.

By Ryan McLaren