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Audience at centre of vertical orchestra

What: Vertical Orchestra 2013: Transpondings Where: The Atrium, Blanshard at Yates When: Sunday, 8 p.m. Admission: Free Vancouver composer Jordan Nobles is giving high art new meaning, with an orchestra asking audiences to look up.
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The Blusson Spinal Cord Centre in Vancouver is one of three venues where a Ôvertical orchestraÕ comprising musicians from both Victoria and the Lower Mainland will play this week.

What: Vertical Orchestra 2013: Transpondings

Where: The Atrium, Blanshard at Yates

When: Sunday, 8 p.m.

Admission: Free

Vancouver composer Jordan Nobles is giving high art new meaning, with an orchestra asking audiences to look up.

Through what he calls a “vertical orchestra,” Nobles says he hopes to redefine the audience experience by making use of the unique architectural and acoustic qualities of multi-level buildings. On Sunday, players will scatter across storeys in the Atrium for a free concert.

“On a stage, music is projected at you. But I like the audience being at the centre, surrounded by music and immersed in the piece,” said Nobles, artistic director for the Redshift Music Society.

“It’s free of the normal sit-in-a-chair-and-be-quiet mode of a concert hall. You can walk around, whisper in your friend’s ear. … Wander near the flutes or near the percussion and kind of make your own mix of the piece just by moving around and standing in different places.”

Sunday’s performance is part of a trio of concerts this weekend presented in partnership with Victoria’s Open Space Arts Society, which also includes stops at the Blusson Centre in Vancouver and Lonsdale Quay in North Vancouver.

The program for each concert consists of 10 new works by B.C. composers — five from Victoria and five from Vancouver/ North Vancouver.

Nobles said the vertical-orchestra concept has grown since its debut in 2004, when he first saw potential in the seven storeys of balconies overlooking the promenade at the central branch of the Vancouver Public Library.

“Over the years, we’ve done it eight or nine times, so it gets bigger and better and crazier,” he said.

Most recently, the vertical orchestra more closely resembled a vertical choir, with 20 musicians accompanying 120 singers.

It only made sense this time around to expand geographically. This weekend will be the first year that the vertical orchestra moves beyond Vancouver.

But a concert like this presents unique challenges for its composers, according to Open Space new music co-ordinator Christopher Reiche.

“It poses all of these logistical problems because musicians can’t necessarily hear or even see the other musicians,” he said.

They also can’t necessarily see a conductor, so several composers have replaced them with stopwatches.

“There are a couple that kind of side-stepped that by writing pieces that were structured in a way that, as long as everybody is being true to their part, it will just fall together and sound beautiful,” Reiche said.

The unusual staging also means that audience members will hear the concert differently depending on where they stand. While they’ll hear the note played by a musician directly next to them immediately, there may be a half-second delay from a musician farther away who plays the note in sync. Nobles called that half second “an eternity, in musical terms.”

“We have to write something either slow or ambient or something that’s really busy so you don’t notice,” he said. “All these clever little tricks we use to get our piece across.”

Flutist Suzanne Snizek said that as a musician, it can be an isolating experience.

“A lot of times, you might only be able to hear one other person, so it feels a bit more isolated. As a performer, you’re not going to have the overall impression as clearly as the audience will, but it obviously comes across quite well because we’ve had positive reactions.”

Snizek is a visiting assistant professor at the University of Victoria’s School of Music and has participated in the vertical orchestra three or four times in Vancouver.

“The pleasure lies in the challenge,” she said.

This weekend’s series of concerts features 10 musicians, including four from Victoria.

The series fittingly takes the name from “Transponder,” the instrument that reads and transmits sound signals during sonar communications to navigate, measure distance and track positions.

Composers who have created works for the trio of concerts are: Victoria’s Daniel Brandes, Stefan Maier, Kristy Farkas, Lynne Penhale and Kimberley Shepherd; North Vancouver’s Kristopher Fulton and Jordan Nobles; and Vancouver’s Martin Ritter, Alyssa Aska and Stefan Kintersteininger.

asmart@timescolonist.com