Composer Lisa Bielawa will see her Chance Encounter performed outdoors.

Inspired by the fiction writer’s maxim “Show, don’t tell,” we’d like to invite you to a private screening of an award-winning short film. Head to the computer, go to the Chance Encounter website, and take in Lisa Guidetti’s delightfully dreamy documentary as it explores an alfresco performance of American composer Lisa Bielawa’s Chance Encounter, using the banks of Rome’s river, the Tiber, as its set.

And now here’s your assignment: imagine this otherworldly event transplanted to the shores of False Creek, as part of Music on Main’s new, chamber-music oriented Modulus Festival, which runs at Heritage Hall and the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre from Thursday to Sunday (September 30 to October 3). Chance Encounter, featuring soprano Susan Narucki and an all-star cast of local musicians, will be staged outside the Roundhouse on Sunday afternoon. It’s a fantastic gift to our city—and that, says Music on Main artistic director David Pay, is what working in the nonprofit sector is all about.

“You ask someone why she goes to a concert, and she’ll tell you she goes to a concert to be uplifted,” he explains, in a telephone interview from the organization’s East Vancouver headquarters. “Whether that’s energetically, whether that’s spiritually, whether that’s transcendentally, it’s about being uplifted. And music at its greatest—whether it’s Jimi Hendrix or a Beethoven symphony or something from right now—really does that for us.”

Earlier Music on Main undertakings have celebrated pioneering minimalists Steve Reich and Louis Andriessen, and relative newcomer Bielawa fits right in. Although increasingly recognized as a composer, she pays her rent singing with another of minimalism’s godfathers, Philip Glass, and his band. But the 41-year-old musician is a natural in other regards: like Pay, she sees music as a vehicle for personal transformation, and Chance Encounter is designed to deliver just that.

Bielawa grew up in a classical-music household: her father was a composer, while her mother specialized in early music. Just because it was preordained that she would go into that field, though, doesn’t mean that she liked its concert trappings.

“I always felt like I wanted to open the windows and get some air,” she explains, on the line from New York City. “Often you’re in a sort of institution where it’s the same group of people all the time, who already know what they’re going to hear and already have decided what they think about it. Plus, they perhaps are the kind of people who can afford tickets that cost a certain amount of money, and they’re sitting in chairs that are bolted to the ground—there’s this whole sort of inflexibility to the concert-music setting, and that’s not the way I’d like my music to be discovered by people. And not even my music, just music in general. I’d love to see if I can participate, through my work, in some kind of furtherance of the transformative energy of new music, and getting that to happen in ways that are also new.”

Chance Encounter, then, is intended to bring new music to new—and often inadvertent—audiences. It’s also a way of liberating the musicians from concert-hall etiquette.

“It’s a very joyful experience, doing this piece,” says Bielawa. “So in a way it kind of doesn’t matter whether you’re playing it or whether you’re stumbling on it as a bicyclist or whatever. It’s kind of all the same, once you actually get to the performance itself. There’s a magical thing that happens as a result of the work that the musicians do.”

Other Modulus Festival participants are hoping to achieve something similar. Vancouver musician Laura Barron, whose 10-piece Flauto Perpetuo ensemble opens proceedings at Heritage Hall on Thursday night (September 30), wants to redefine audience perception of the flute by tackling a program of bold and unconventional sounds, running from Reich’s Vermont Counterpoint to Derek Charke’s percussive Raga Cha to arrangements of songs by Radiohead and Imogen Heap.

“This is music that I think belongs together,” says Barron, by phone from her home. “I’m excited to demonstrate to audiences the classical and substantial qualities of Radiohead and also the very inclusive and catchy and popular qualities that something like the Reich might have.

“We also wanted to truly exploit the timbres that are available from the flute,” she adds. “That’s always a challenge for those of us that play monochromatic treble instruments—but by including bass and alto flutes, and piccolo, we can get that full, orchestrated effect.”

A similarly adventurous spirit animates teatro dell’udito XV: ricercare for prepared ukulele, cello & live electronics, written by Vancouver New Music artistic director Giorgio Magnanensi for ukulele virtuoso James Hill and his cello-playing partner, Anne Davison. Although Hill studied under Magnanensi at UBC, the piece—which debuts at Heritage Hall on Saturday (October 2)—simply wouldn’t have happened without Pay and the Modulus Festival.

“Dave is basically part of the iPod generation, where, for better or for worse, the genre boundaries have been forever eroded,” the Nova Scotia–based Hill says, referring to Pay’s ability to make musical connections. “So we can either sit around and moan about that, or we can do what Dave does: he just jumps in with both feet and says, ”˜Well, this is the way the world is, so let’s do it!’ ”

As for Pay, the rewards of putting together a festival that runs from the iconic (Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations) to the innovative (the improv-heavy music of Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq) have little to do with its economic potential. “We could have pulled out, for sure,” he says, musing on Music on Main’s recent loss of gaming-fund support. “But when something like this pays off with great musicians making great music, and you see people being filled with rapture and engagement, that makes it all worthwhile”¦.That’s when you think ”˜This is why I run a social-profit and not a money-profit organization.’”