Bursting the Bubble: The Parkdale Revolutionary Orchestra

At Dilettante, we like pretty much anything that has the word ‘revolution’ in it, so we were pleasantly surprised to stumble upon the Parkdale Revolutionary Orchestra. Named after a super-cool neighbourhood in the western end of Toronto, the orchestra was formed four years ago by composer Benjamin Mueller-Heaslip who’s a composition graduate from the University of Toronto’s music faculty.

The revolution is (more or less) musical, the concept is a mash-up of genres, styles and sounds, and the mission is to ‘break through the invisible barrier around contemporary classical music,’ as critic John Terauds put it in the Toronto Star.

‘All classical music happens in a bubble,’ Mueller-Heaslip told the Calgary Herald newspaper. ‘What I do now means putting this music outside the bubble and – this is important – running a massive risk of failure or rejection.’

And since this particular musical enterprise doesn’t chase arts grants, there’s a lot at stake. Instead, Mueller-Heaslip’s holy grail is a record deal, and his attitude is pugilistic. There’s talk of ‘winning’ ‘confrontations’ with audiences. ‘We’re in a place where every show we do is either a success, or a failure’, he says.

So what tactics do they deploy? ‘Keeping the musical and technical materials of classical music, while dropping the cultural conventions,’ Mueller-Heaslip explained. To that end, he’s assembled a crew of six musicians including ‘a mousy string section, a couple of ex-punk percussionists’ and his soprano wife, all classically-trained.

The resulting music reminds us of a Danish art installation at the Venice Biennale a few years back which consisted of a group of performance artists standing on top of a building, randomly picking up instruments to play for a few minutes before pausing to chuck rubber fish at passers by. (At least we think they were rubber…) Sounds odd, but it was still compelling. For his part, Terauds describes their music as ‘an engaging, wonky mix of classical minimalism, art punk and early Brian Eno-inspired electronica translated into an acoustic medium.’

Not surprisingly, perhaps, the ensemble’s revolutionary appetite extends beyond a rousing challenge to classical norms, and into the heart of sometimes-fierce political debate.

For instance, on 4th June the PRO premiered 'The Torture Memos' at a small club in Toronto, featuring lyrics by John C Woo, Steven Bradbury and Jay Bybee. If those names don’t ring the right bells, here’s why: they’re not lyricists at all. Instead they’re the authors of the Bush Whitehouse’s infamous torture memos - ‘arguments to keep United States officials from being charged with war crimes for the way prisoners [from the war in Afghanistan] were detained and interrogated’, as the New York Times explained.

More specifically, the memos provided the Bush administration with a detailed legal work-around of the pesky Geneva Convention which governs the treatment of prisoners of war. The memos were released in April.

‘Torture Memos’ tracks bear chillingly neutral names like ‘this sensation is based upon a deeply rooted physiological response’ and ‘technique’. Here’s No 9, ‘self defense’

The PRO were last seen live on 27 June at a fundraiser for a Parkdale foodbank, where the genre-bending line-up included Big Rude Jake and The Gypsy Rebels.