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KLAVIERKLANG, a cinematic tone poem, follows a young girl in post-war Germany who grows up loving the piano. She takes piano lessons—but instead of freeing the girl to play, the lessons make her frightened of making mistakes. The girl’s ears shut down, making music an uninspiring chore.
Later as a young woman, she travels to central British Columbia, to a ghost town and an abandoned house. There she spots a piano—perfectly ruined, a piano on which no note could be a mistake. She learns to listen again—and the girl and her music are free.
That girl went on to become celebrated soundscape composer / activist Hildegard Westerkamp. In this experimental music video, she joins forces with performer Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa, a renowned pianist who also performs Klavierklang’s text. Together, they explore the liminal space between music and sound.
In a celebration of the piano as an extraordinary instrument, Iwaasa plays both its keys and plucks its strings, as if exploring a sound sculpture. Her non-linear spoken narrative interacts with intricate soundscapes evoking Westerkamp’s childhood in Germany. These are layered and digitally manipulated with Iwaasa’s recorded reflections on the piano, “this creature, this instrument, that you think you know.”
Filmmakers and installation artists Nettie Wild (director) and Michael Brockington (editor) capture this performance, interpreting the composition’s drama with lyrical imagery coloured and shaped by the music itself.
Klavierklang which means “piano sounds” in German, is produced by Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa and Hildegard Westerkamp.
KLAVIERKLANG Creative Team Biographies
PIANIST / PRODUCER
Keyboard virtuoso and “avant-garde muse" (Georgia Straight), Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa is among Canada’s foremost contemporary music pianists. Known for her fearless
performative risk, Rachel’s art practice explodes expectations of what is possible at the piano, flowering in liminal collisions between artistic genres, and inspiring collaborations with luminaries including Hildegard Westerkamp, Rodney Sharman, Jocelyn Morlock, Cris Derksen, Leslie Uyeda, Nicole Lizée, artist SD Holman, film director Nettie Wild, and multi-media provocateur Paul Wong. Her album Known & Unknown was praised as exceptional, gripping and timeless (Tom Haugen, Take Effect), and listed in the Top 10 Modern Composition Albums of 2024 by The Wire Magazine (UK).
COMPOSER / PRODUCER
Hildegard Westerkamp is a prolific sound activist, composer and soundscape
educator, whose compositions are known internationally. With her expert ear carefully
attuned to the world around her, Westerkamp has become a household name for pioneering soundscape composition and the practice of “soundwalking”. Excerpts of her compositions appear in Gus van Sant’s films Elephant and Last Days and she co-created the soundtrack for Koneline by the acclaimed filmmaker Nettie Wild. Westerkamp’s composition Klavierklang for pianist Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa had its world premiere at ISCM’s World Music Days in Vancouver in 2017. The current film of the same title is based on this piece and is a collaboration between Westerkamp, Iwaasa and Nettie Wild.
DIRECTOR
Nettie Wild is one of Canada’s leading documentary filmmakers. Her highly charged and critically acclaimed films have brought her audiences behind the frontlines and headlines of revolutions and social change around the world. Her films have been distributed theatrically and been celebrated in festivals and broadcast internationally.
Her more recent work has gained recognition for forging new frontiers in documentary
story telling on the big screen, in new media including Virtual Reality and in large-scale public art installations. UNINTERRUPTED, using digital mapping to project images of migrating salmon onto Vancouver’s Cambie Bridge, was lauded by the international art magazine Wallflower* as one of 2017’s must-see public installations in the world.
Now, Klavierklang brings Nettie Wild into the world of New Music to work with renowned soundscape composer Hildegard Westerkamp, celebrated pianist, Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa and Wild’s long time collaborator, editor Michael Brockington. Together they have created a cinematic tone poem weaving improvised performance, pre-recorded soundscapes and the story of a young girl facing the fear of making mistakes and learning to take creative risks.
Nettie Wild has received the Women in Film Award at the Toronto International Film Festival (2018); and in 2023, she won Canada’s prestigious Governor General’s Award for her lifetime achievement in Media Arts.
EDITOR
Michael Brockington is an award-winning motion picture editor, cutting documentary,
drama and performance with keen attention to the interlocking rhythms of picture and
sound.He’s had the pleasure of working with Nettie in exploring unconventional
frames, including Go Fish (3 channel triptych), and UNINTERRUPTED (digital mapping,
virtual reality, and 5 channel installation.) More traditional collaborations have included the feature documentary Koneline and shorter pieces In Profile and Bevel Up.
Klavierklang is their most recent work together.
Other notable projects Michael has worked on include: Sundance Special Jury Award winner Eve & the Fire Horse; NFB documentaries Carts of Darkness and Everything Will Be; feature dramas On the Corner and Protection, and the TV series Alienated. Michael attended Simon Fraser University where he made short films and studied electroacoustic composition under Hildegard Westerkamp. Klavierklang has been an inspired way to revisit that connection. Outside of film, Michael has published fiction and articles in various magazines and newspapers. He has moonlighted as an organist, a juggler and as a software coder in the field of robot vision. In ordinary life, he rarely refers to himself in the third person.
Modulus Festival
www.musiconmain.ca/event/modulus-festival-2025
- November 7, 2025 - 7:30
