A fond farewell to Fisher

Music department honours professor

Bruce Vogt will speak in honour of Alfred Fisher’s 17 years with the music department this Friday and Saturday.
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Bruce Vogt will speak in honour of Alfred Fisher’s 17 years with the music department this Friday and Saturday.

The more Alfred Fisher talks about his art, the more I realize how irrelevant it is to categorize it, to place it under the banner of “avant-garde” simply because it’s challenging.

“Music in the university is supposed to be a challenge,” he said. “Just because this may be the case does not mean that it is avant-garde. Frankly, the very purpose of a university is to deliver that challenge, to create literacy, independence and a commitment to ideas.” “The gift of music, all art, is change, not confirmation. One brings to it focus, concentration and, ideally, leaves the concert hall as not quite the same person who entered.

Fisher, who is retiring, has just completed his final term in the Queen’s School of Music as professor of theory and composition. This weekend, the Queen’s Music department is hosting a colloquium and a series of talks entitled The Avant-Garde and the Future of Art Music to honour his 17 years at the school. 

Bruce Vogt will be speaking at today’s colloquium, as well as presenting a talk and performing at Saturday’s symposium. He praised Fisher’s music.

“Alfred is, in a very contemporary, in a very individualistic way, part of a romantic tradition that seeks to make sense of existence, the kind of humanistic tradition that has to do with questions of mortality… how to make sense of life itself,” Vogt said. “I would say it’s intensely personal, not at all … art for art’s sake.”

 Fisher is uninterested in defining and attaching specific value to the avant-garde simply because it is untraditional, Vogt said—he deals in creativity.

“The most avant-garde thing a person can do is to take that walk around Walden, like Thoreau did, to see the newness in everything and the variety in everything,” he said. “What [Thoreau] responded to was the infinite creativity, the infinite creative potential of what we do. … He was a kind of ultimate inclusivist. He honoured the unbroken continuity between himself and his natural environment and, particularly exciting for me, realized that it was nature itself that provides the underlying model for human creativity.”

“In the case of Dr. Fisher, not only literature and the arts but culture in general, and even politics and morality and more, are grist for the mill. He is—in the old-fashioned sense—an artist, someone who resonates with his time.”

 An open mind is crucial for appreciating Fisher’s music, Vogt said.

“Being open means you can often say and do foolish things and be taken in by foolish things,” Vogt said. “But it is much preferable to be made a fool of than become an old codger, a crank, at any age. It is one of the risks one takes in loving art, to be made a fool of sometimes, because you have to be open. You have to let it happen. Eliminating some things, deciding that some things aren’t for you, should be the last step.”

Yet, like many great composers, Fisher has more than respect for the composers that came before him, using their creativity as a crucial element to the creation of his own music.

“[He] can speak just as passionately about a Chopin Mazurka, a Scriabin Sonata, or a Bach Cantata as anything contemporary,” Vogt said.

One of the aspects of Fisher’s approach that surely characterizes his music is his refusal to partake in what Vogt calls “the partitioning” between avant-garde art music and classical art music. He recognizes that, to make it challenging, serious music in a contemporary context does not mean blindly ignoring the art of the past, nor does it mean to imitate it mindlessly. This creative synthesis is one of the things that have made the composer such an inspiring figure for the Queen’s community.

“The body of music that [Fisher] continues to produce is of considerable weight and is very, very important,” Vogt said. “I hope and trust it will be recognized all the more in these next few years, I hope he’ll continue to add to it. I’m very pleased to be a part of this. There’s a real sense that this is a special event. One of the things I’m going to talk about [with him] is the importance of conversation … about anything and everything, the way he engages ideas in such a wide way. Those of us who are friends and colleagues are really inspired by that.”

“The Avant-Garde and the Future of Art Music” is today at 12:30 p.m.

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