MIRROR-STAGE
Year of composition: 2017
Instrumentation: string ensemble
Duration: 8′
Commissioned by Lisgar Collegiate Institute (Ottawa)
Premiere: the string ensemble of Lisgar Collegiate Institute, Richard Arrigo, dir.
Lisgar Collegiate Institute, Ottawa, ON
May 17, 2018
PROGRAMME NOTE
Mirror-Stage is a work for string orchestra written in commemoration of the 175th anniversary of Lisgar Collegiate Institute in Ottawa, which I attended from 2000-2004. The piece is an attempt to express, in a sweeping way, a particular experience I had attending a spellbinding performance of the Bach double violin concerto early in my time at the school. This moment took on special meaning for me as it seemed to crystallize so vividly both my exhilaration and my apprehension in those first days as a Lisgar student. In recalling the occasion now from many years’ distance and projecting it across the 8-minute duration of Mirror-Stage, I hope to capture some of the more universal complexity – the ambiguity, passion, reflection and agitation – of adolescent life. The work’s title refers in a literal sense to the symmetrical stage placement of the two soloists in Bach’s concerto, though also conjures the psychoanalytic concept of “mirror stage” put forth by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the developmental moment at which an infant first recognizes itself in a mirror. Thus Lisgar represented to me, in a sense, a place where this self-recognition began to take place.