• Things people have said...


    "...[Synapses] is a kind of play on sound and movement and light, and how they all can interact."
    Owen Underhill, quoted by Janet Smith , stir Arts & Culture ezine

    "teeming with fertile ideas"
    Mark Morris, Music Magazine

    "a cassette of sensations", "as brassy as a honky-tonk toccata"
    Ronald Hambleton, The Toronto Star

    "three well-contrasted and clever evocations"
    Stephen Pedersen, Halifax Chronicle Herald

    "...the ensuing evocation of New York in 1953 was trite, and somewhat chronologically dubious in its use of 1960s free-jazz clichés"
    Alex Varty, Georgia Straight

    "turned out to be more adventurous in its juxtaposition of spontaneous rhythmic gestures"
    William Littler, The Toronto Star

    "Bob Pritchard's Breathe on Me (Breath of God...) is an ethereal soundscape."
    Tiina Kiik The World of the Wholenote

    "Some attendees will be irritated by the rather progressive nature of the music performed"
    Anonymous reviewer for CHI conference proposals, Vancouver 2011

    "Image, sound and live performance earned enthusiastic applause and multiple curtain calls for the three well-contrasted and clever evocations of Tokyo 1969 (Ginza-gone-Reno glitz), Roma 1908 (Wistfully pastoral, with neo-Euro-industrial overtones) and New York 1953 (Real gone hep cats 2 a.m. Greenwich Village, yeah, man, go-go-go … )"
    Stephen Pedersen, Halifax Herald Ltd.

    "Pritchard’s Washed upped the ante by adding video to his amplified trio of horn, violin and percussion. Vertical explosions of ink unfurling in water filled the screen, gradually turning blood red with repetition, followed by vividly processed figurative imagery. Pritchard may have overplayed his hand with this stuff, which I found took a bit too much of my attention away from his gnarly resonant score"
    Robert Everett-Green, Toronto Globe and Mail

    "UBC music prof Robert Pritchard's computer-assisted Breathe on Me, replete with video close-ups of piercings, skin, and scar tissue..."
    Alexander Varty, Georgia Straight

    " 那Robert Pritchard作曲的《想家》(Homesick)帶出的則是在異鄉遭遇不平待遇的深刻處境,19世紀中國移民飽受人頭稅之苦,部分被關押在當時在維多利亞的監獄。作曲家多年前參觀時發現牆上刻滿了老移民留下的中國詩,透露了絕望、憤怒、和渴望獲得平等等心情。 作曲家在這些詩中獲得了靈感,希望透過二胡和鋼琴在文化及情感上的衝突有所發揮,在透過兩種弦樂器的擊、勾、拉等技法,表現出沉重黑暗,而非溫馨的思鄉之情。曲罷,聽眾彷彿更加進入了當年老移民遭不平等待遇處境的心情,震撼程度超過文字和言語。 "

    [Robert Pritchard’s Homesick is a composition that tells the tales of unfairness experienced by Chinese immigrants on a foreign land. In the 19th century, Chinese immigrants in Canada were forced to endure the bitterness and difficulties of head taxes payments. Some of these immigrants were even sent to the prison in Victoria. The ideas for this piece came to Dr. Pritchard many years ago, when he visited a historical museum themed on Chinese Immigrant, where Dr. Pritchard witnessed poems carved onto the walls by Chinese immigrants of their time. These poems deeply expressed the immigrants’ hopelessness, anger, and their thirst for equality. Inspired by these poems, and the selection of two culturally diverse instruments with intensely contrasting timbres - erhu and piano, through the use of hammering, pulling, and picking of the strings on these two instruments, Dr. Pritchard hoped to express the Chinese immigrants’ dark and bitter longing for their homeland through this composition. As the music ends, listeners would have experience once again, the bitter feeling of inequality once experienced by the Chinese immigrants, the emotions of which cannot be expressed on paper, nor in words.]

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