Contemporary composers, no less than Mozart or Beethoven or Brahms, work to craft sound into compositions to help us understand the world we live in and the inner workings of our lives. Though New Music is sometimes seen as frightening and unfamiliar by audiences, it is by crossing the bridge into the unknown that we often discover the most.

Last summer at ArtSpring we had a rare opportunity to witness one of Canada’s most important living composers, Linda Catlin Smith, in the process of working on a new solo piano work for one of Canada’s best pianists, Eve Egoyan. They were at ArtSpring for a week-long creative residency exploring, developing and refining the new work.

Now, Nocturnes and Chorales, which is what the new work came to be called, will be premiered in a concert on Friday, February 21 as the centrepiece in Eve Egoyan’s presentation of new music from four contemporary composers – American James Tenney, Britain’s Micheal Finnissy, Piers Hellawell from Northern Ireland, and Catlin Smith.

And if that weren’t exciting enough on its own, ArtSpring has added a special extra performance the following evening, Saturday, February 22. In this event Eve Egoyan will play a composition called Simple Lines of Enquiry by Ann Southam to accompany a video work by Toronto artist David Rockeby. The video, called Machine for Taking Time and compiled from 750,000 images taken of the changing seasons and weather over a Montreal cityscape during an entire year, is an extraordinary time-lapse meditation on the passage of time.

This Saturday showing/recital is our chance on Salt Spring to experience the quickly emerging new medium of video art. The evening is free to those who attend Eve’s Friday concert, or tickets can be purchased for $15 (or $5 for youth) from the ArtSpring Ticket Centre 537-2102 or online. Tickets for Eve Egoyan’s Friday evening concert are also available from the same sources.