Kevin Lau started playing piano as a child, and grew up in a house filled with classical music. But it was film soundtracks that really ignited the Ottawa composer’s musical passion. “That was my first exposure to music that incorporates traditional classical instruments, but is written by people who are still alive,” he says. “I remember seeing Jurassic Park at 13 and being blown away by the orchestral sonorities coming at me.”
Select the image to access the YouTube video of the Kevin Lau composition The Infinite Reaches, performed by the National Arts Centre Orchestra
Inspired, Lau studied composition at the University of Toronto, where he became immersed in contemporary music. Those influences have contributed to his marvellously eclectic and prolific repertoire, which includes works for large and small ensembles as well as ballets, opera, movies – even a book.
At first Lau composed on the piano, but his process has evolved. “As I became more composer than performer, I found the piano limiting, because what emerges has a pianistic quality that’s not optimal for anything else,” he says. “It was challenging to get rid of that and imagine the orchestra in my head, like removing a safety net and diving into the different sound. I’d go to a coffee shop and attempt to transcribe what I was hearing on paper, and when I had a sense of it, I’d go to the computer and put things together. I’d never start a piece without that incubation process.”
Of course, collaborating on soundtracks is more complicated. “In film it’s a lot about timing,” he says. “It’s challenging to set an atmosphere for 27 seconds in a way that brings out the emotion the filmmaker wants to express. You’re working with people who have a vision of what the music should be, so you need a degree of trust.”
Ballet music incorporates another aspect of timing. “The physicality of dance has a rhythmic element that allows you to think in terms of tempo and pacing in a way you don’t in other music,” Lau says. “It’s non-verbal but very expressive. The intersection between the physical movement and the musical movement is interesting, and working with a choreographer who’s sensitive to that can be really fulfilling.”
And writing music for a book tapped a different skill. The Nightingale began as a piece for violin, clarinet, piano and narrator commissioned by Houston’s River Oaks Chamber Orchestra and based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. “It started small and kept growing other dimensions,” Lau says. “ROCO’s concert master, Scott St. John, and I had the idea of adapting a fairytale that hadn’t been done by Disney, and it’s a music-focused story set in ancient China.”
ROCO commissioned illustrations to be projected during the performances, and, drawing on his “deep interest” in fiction writing, Lau incorporated them and the original text into a storybook with QR codes for people to listen to his music as they read. “Writing the music went well, and it was fun to condense the story into a narration,” he says. “I was lucky to work with collaborators with lots of imagination.”
“It was challenging to imagine the orchestra in my head”
Some of Lau’s works, like Kimiko’s Pearl, a ballet about the internment of Japanese-Canadians during World War II, and The Spirit Horse Returns, an orchestral concert featuring Indigenous artists and storytellers, address histories that aren’t his own, but the collaborations are inspiring.
“Part of the heart and soul and authenticity of the collaboration is in the willingness to listen and adopt the perspective of the story you haven’t experienced,” he says. “And that’s what these stories are about. They’re not meant to be only digested by a certain community; they’re meant to be part of the universal human experience.
“For Kimiko’s Pearl I had wonderful discussions with the creators of that story, who are descended from survivors of the internment,” he adds. “It has no words whatsoever, and yet it tells a deeply personal story of individuals who experienced this really difficult period. I approached the music as a way of allowing the people involved to heal.”
Select the image to access the YouTube video of the Kevin Lau composition The Nightingale, performed by The River Oaks Chamber Orchestra
Lau’s recent works include a symphonic suite based on Kimiko’s Pearl for the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and Across the Jade Sea, a concerto for violin and narrator with an original story by Lau inspired by Chinese mythology. He wrote the piece during a stressful period when his infant son was recovering from a liver transplant.
“It’s a fable where this boy goes on a journey to save his village, and I thought of him as a representation of my son going through the transplant journey,” he says. “It was easy to write, maybe because what we were going through took away certain hang-ups associated with the creative process.”
Whether musical or fictional, storytelling is key to Lau’s work. “Both story and music unfold over time, and there’s a journey experience,” he says. “A profound musical experience is one where you have a transformation over time with an emotional effect, and stories do that as well. I’m interested in the worlds they conjure.”