notations
SPRING 2016
W ish you were here Postcards for James Tenney Something to do with mushrooms The adventures of Cage at Emma Lake G enerations/Conversations Features Omar Daniel & Michael Colgrass A s well as CMC project updates, composer news and more
in this issue
EQ: Women in Electronic Music, underway this season at the CMC in Ontario. Left to Right: EQ founder and facilitator Rose Bolton, Amanda Lowry, Laura Dickens, Emily Milling, Maggie McLean. (Photo: Matthew Fava)
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Mushrooms by Chance Generations/ “Cage went mushroom hunting and got Conversations lost—not once, but twice.”
“I look upon creating a life as the biggest creative act of all.”
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Having Never Written a Note for Kacapi
“….Tenney’s works can be a template for a possible way forward for sonically adventurous music, serving as a sort of meeting place for musicians from various disciplines…”
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Internet Mountains
“I’m interested in this dichotomy that seems so 21st-Century: that the form we’re looking at, that registers as “mountain” has in fact been dissolved into math and reconstituted into a digital image.”
table of contents
spring, VOL. 23, NO. 1
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Letter from the Editors
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A Message from Regional Council
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Ontario Project Updates
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Mushrooms by Chance
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New Associate Composers
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Having Never Written a Note for Kacapi: Revisiting The Postal Pieces of James Tenney
Design
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In Focus: My Postal Piece
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Generations/Conversations: Omar Daniel, Michael Colgrass
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Internet Mountains
Kyle Brenders, Martin Chandler, Stephen Chase, Matthew Fava, Aubrey Kelly, Chris Lortie, Christopher Mayo, Christopher Meyer, Elma Miller, Michael Purves-Smith, Michael Schulman, Andrew Timar, Sarah Westwood, Alexa Woloshyn
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Album Reviews
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Noteworthy
The Canadian Music Centre, Ontario Region. The opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of the Canadian Music Centre.
Editorial Collective Matthew Fava, Jeremy Strachan, Alexa Woloshyn
Jennifer Chan
Contributors
CANADIAN MUSIC CENTRE --ONTARIO REGION 20 St. Joseph Street, Toronto ON, M4Y 1J9 416.961.6601 x 207 ontario@musiccentre.ca www.musiccentre.ca
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Letter from the Editors
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We’ve been doing some thinking. A lot of the time we are thinking about music, often leading to a point that many people encounter wherein music, sound, and noise become highly arbitrary terms. It becomes a challenge to represent the breadth of meaning that each word encompasses for an individual, let alone arrive at a consensus. We like to complicate things by adding the descriptor “Canadian” before music—a word with an equally tenuous claim to any unified meaning.
letter from the editors
J
ames Tenney was a composer. James Tenney was an American composer. James Tenney was a Canadian composer. It is perhaps safest to say that James Tenney was a creative and influential artist with a close connection to musical activity in Ontario due to his tenure at York University. One of the many artists who developed a connection to Tenney was Andrew Timar who contributes our main article this issue. Timar provides a summary of Tenney’s career during his time in Canada, and delves into one particular area of Tenney’s output: his Postal Pieces. These compact scores speak to Tenney’s artistic values, and Timar discusses his relationship to one piece in particular, August Harp, which Timar arranged as part of a Music Gallery presentation in the Summer of 2015. Our In Focus section offers another indication of Tenney’s influence as we share four works submitted through our recent call for Postal Pieces. We received a variety of postcard sized scores, and selected four unique examples that take inspiration from Tenney’s approach. Thinking about an approach to composition, this issue also spotlights a collaboration between composerimproviser Deb Sinha and visual artist Clive Holden. A recent presentation of their piece INTERNET MOUNTAINS demonstrated their exploration of an improvisatory system that blends Holden’s visual curiosities with Sinha’s pulsing sound world. We also feature an extended reflection from Associate Composer Michael Purves-Smith who has spent the last 30 years exploring the world of mushrooms, motivated by another composer/ mushroom expert, John Cage.
Music, animation, mushrooms. You know it will be a good read! Two new entries from the Generations/ Conversations series appear in this issue, featuring discussions with Michael Colgrass and Omar Daniel. While the series usually focuses on composers from an older generation than Daniel, our inter-generational approach inspired one of our contributors, Michael Schulman, to revisit a once familiar format. Schulman had previously conducted numerous interviews with Composers—many of whom were Canadian—for various print publications. In his case, the generational tables have been turned in his chat with Daniel. Our winter issue also includes music reviews, and CMC Ontario project updates such as the ongoing library residency program. In our Noteworthy section we hear from various Ontario composers regarding recent and upcoming activities, and we also get to meet new Associate Composers who have joined the CMC in Ontario.
We encourage you to forage through the pages that follow, and let us know what you think, and what you might like to see covered in future issues. Just contact the Ontario region of the CMC. Notations editorial collective, Matthew Fava Jeremy Strachan Alexa Woloshyn (Bottom image: L to R, Jeremy, Alexa, Matthew)
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A message from the Regional Council
2016 will be an exciting year for the Canadian Music Centre. As you will read in the pages that follow, there are several programs that we have initiated in the Ontario region that strengthen our connections with the communities we serve.
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e are also interested in the conversations taking place within those communities. The Canadian New Music Network hosted the most recent edition of its biannual Forum in Ottawa in January. The Forum is a rare opportunity for artists and organizations who exist in and around the intersection of contemporary classical and experimental music-making to network and learn from one another. Threads that ran through many of the discussions were access and representation.
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Keynote speaker Pauline Oliveros recollected early experiences of being the only female student at San Francisco State College in the 1960s in the composition program, and having her fellow male students walk out of the classroom during her pieces— she speculates that this may have resulted from her musical aesthetic. Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa, pianist and staff with the Vancouver-based Queer Arts Festival, took part in a panel titled New Music and its “Others.� The panel, and follow-up activities, were moderated by Juliet Palmer, and
involved contributions from musicologist Mary Ingraham, and Dylan Robinson, Stó:lō scholar who holds the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts at Queen’s University. As part of her comments, Iwaasa reflected on the sense of alienation that individuals and communities feel when their experiences and voices are not reflected in an artform. Later in the Forum Iwaasa commented that we cannot speak of an “other” in new music without acknowledging that “they” are already “here.” Former Notations contributor Melody McKiver was another panel participant at the Forum and she echoed some of the concerns raised in her article from our Summer 2015 issue: when are First Nations artists given the resources and creative authority to produce new works, and when are they being required to yield to a dominant narrative (Truth and Reconciliation for instance) by other institutions who have greater access to arts funding? As we explore the historical, and ongoing challenges in contemporary music, what is the role for the CMC? Through mentorships, residency activities, and creative collaborations, we are asking this question, testing our findings, and challenging ourselves to grow alongside music makers in this country.
We encourage you to participate in CMC programs, contact the regional office, and be involved in the conversations that are taking place. As we ask ourselves what we can offer to this process, we hope that you consider the skills and experiences that you can bring to bear. Until next time. Matthew Fava
Director, Ontario Region of the CMC Andrea Warren
Chair, Ontario Regional Council
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project updates 10 | musiccentre.ca
CMC fundraiser
spring 2016
CMC Fundraiser
The new music community in Toronto would be drastically different if not for the influence of composer-broadcaster Harry Freedman and soprano Mary Morrison. The two formed a musical power couple that helped to set the tone for the vibrant collaboration between composers and interpreters in a burgeoning Toronto community. Mary Morrison and her children joined the CMC on November 9, 2015 to celebrate this legacy, and the ongoing impact of the Harry Freedman Recording Award. Measha Brueggergosman emceed the event and offered a number of fond memories of her studies with Mary, and her impressions of Mary and Harry’s deep partnership. Brueggergosman also delighted in introducing composer-improviser Lori Freedman, one of the Freedman children, who performed an improvised piece. True to form, Lori’s set delivered unparalleled
sensitivity and control, moving swiftly between dense passages threatening unraveled chaos. It was hard not to be rattled when Lori cried out in the midst of her piece, “...this is the hardest thing I’ve ever done!” Lori was not the only performer feeling the weight of history. Elizabeth Polese, one of Morrison’s many vocal students, took part in the event and performed Toccata, a playful piece that Harry wrote for Mary and flutist Robert Aitken. Polese had the amazing opportunity to perform this piece with Aitken for Mary and other CMC guests. The event also included an immersive outdoor installation by Freedman Award winner Darren Copeland, a vivid realization of Harry Freedman’s Bones for marimba by Jonny Smith, and two sets of music by guitarist-composer David Occhipinti alongside Soren Nissen (bass) and Aline Homzy (violin). Thanks to all of our supporters who made this event a success!
Photos of Mary Morrison (on the right in both) posing with her students, Elizabeth Polese and Measha Brueggergosman. Photos: Cyndie Jacobs
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ontario project updates
Going Home Star Release
Going Home Star Release
Representatives from the Royal Winnipeg Ballet joined the CMC to celebrate the launch of Going Home Star: Truth and Reconciliation, a recent Centrediscs release featuring music from the ballet by CMC Associate Composer Christos Hatzis. The music includes performances by Tanya Tagaq, Steve Wood, and the Northern Cree Singers.
Top: Tanya Tagaq performs a solo piece at the CMC during the album launch. Right: Christos Hatzis describes his relationship to the project. Photos: Gary Beechy
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Top: Justice Murray Sinclair introduces the project and the objectives of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in supporting the Ballet.
spring 2016
Wrapping up a fifth year of collaborative programming, the CMC and members of the Toronto New Music Alliance presented a series of presentations and performances at various branches of the Toronto Public Library. New Music 101 gives audiences a chance to interact with exciting local artists while exploring various creative directions in contemporary music. Highlights from the series included a remounting of Musica Reflecta’s Opus: Testing workshop featuring fables set for narrator and wind quintet by five Toronto-based composers. The Blythwood Winds and narrator Alex Eddington performed the pieces and discussed their moral centres with the audience at the Lillian H. Smith branch—among other things, this branch contains a collection of children’s literature, and librarians curated a display of fables from around the world.
that were broadcasting back into the Palmerston theatre space where sound artist Dafydd Hughes was sampling and processing the audio for a live improvised piece. Hughes had an unsuspecting duet with the TTC as subway trains rattling through adjacent tunnels resonated in the theatre. Adam Tindale concluded the session with a participatory improvisation wherein audience members recreated their soundwalk by generating an inventory of sounds using the theatre chairs as instruments. If you want to connect with the TNMA and learn about networking and community-building opportunities, visit the TNMA Facebook Page.
A session devoted to sound art took place in the basement theatre at Palmerston Library. Jessica Thompson described her practice by discussing how our understanding of and relationship to space are constituted by sound. Thompson led the audience through a soundwalk in the neighbourhood and had audience members wear wireless microphone units
Top: Jessica Thompson gets audience volunteers set up with wireless microphones. Left : Members of Continuum perform Linda Smith’s Moi Qui Tremblais at Northern District. Photos: Matthew Fava
New Music 101
New Music 101 in Circulation
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ontario project updates
Left: Dafydd Hughes doing lots with a laptop. Right: Pianist Dr. RĂŠa Beaumont discussing her relationship with composer Barbara Pentland during her presentation at Northern District Library. Photos: Matthew Fava
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spring 2016
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1 Adam Tindale (rear, centre) coaxes the audience onto the stage to play their chairs. 2 Brooke Dufton performs Linda Smith’s Hieroglyphs along with Arraymusic. 3 The Blythwood Winds summon their animal instincts for the Fables presentation. 4 The members of junctQín dig in for Tomi Räisänen’s Insiders.
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Class Axe Volume II
The world of classical guitar is not often travelled by contemporary composers. For one thing, the mechanics of the instrument offer an abundance of notation options, but the physical requirements of the instrument are not immediately intuitive to someone without practical experience. The Class Axe workshop is designed to give composers an opportunity to work with guitarists over a four-month period to explore the instrument, and collaborate with guitarist Rob MacDonald to develop a new piece. On December 17, guitarists Rob MacDonald, Adam Batstone, and Graham Banfield performed seven works developed during the 2015 edition of Class Axe by composers Maxime Daigneault, Cory Latkovich, Kristopher Magnuson, August Murphy-King, William Peltier, Saman Shahi, and Wang Xintong.
class axe volume ii
ontario project updates
Class Axe 2015 participants from L to R: (back row) William Peltier, Adam Batstone, Maxime Daigneault, August Murphy-King, Kristopher Magnuson, Cory Latkovich, Saman Shahi, Graham Banfield, Stephen Wingfield, (front row) Wang Xintong, Matthew Fava, Rob MacDonald.
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spring 2016
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1 Composer William Peltier during rehearsals for Class Axe. 2 Maxime Daigneault going over his score with Rob MacDonald. 3 Rob prepares his guitar for Cory Latkovich’s piece. 4 Wang Xintong (L) shares her sketches with Rob MacDonald. Photos: Matthew Fava
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ontario project updates
TSO Orchestral Reading CMC Ontario was thrilled to collaborate with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and RBC affiliate composer Jordan Pal for the annual TSO Orchestral Reading Session. The orchestra read through pieces by Alfredo Santaana, Kamyar Mohajer, Riho Esko Maimets, and CMC Associate Composer Chris Meyer. Meyer shared this reflection with Notations. This past October the Toronto Symphony selected four compositions from emerging Canadian composers to be read by the orchestra. It was a wonderful experience for all four of us and a real thrill to hear the TSO play our works.
TSO orcchestral reading
The whole day was thoughtfully organized to help nurture and support us young composers, providing us with much insight into the practicalities of working with a professional orchestra. Jordan Pal, the RBC affiliate composer, was our intrepid guide through the entire process. We began the morning with a masterclass from librarian Kim Gilmore who generously presented helpful examples of good score and part preparation along with a few bad ones! She gave us a clear picture of the nuts-and-bolts workings of the orchestra and kindly offered individual feedback on the materials we had prepared. The reading session itself was lead by Gary Kulesha: we were all somewhat agog at what he was able to do with the musicians in such a short period of time. Afterwards, both Gary and Peter Oundjian sat down with us and provided helpful feedback on our compositions and their performances. Next was a working lunch with four principal players from the orchestra who gave the musicians’ perspective on our music. Capping off the day, the TSO arranged video interviews to help promote the event and the composers. This day was extraordinarily rich in learning experiences and I am very grateful for the many efforts that were put in on our behalf. Every possible support for young composers was provided, all in one whirlwind day. This was an experience we will long remember and benefit from. Chris Meyer
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spring 2016
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1 At the front of the stage (L to R) Gary Kulesha at the podium alongside three of the participating composers Maimets, Mohojer, and Meyer. 2 TSO RBC affiliate composer Jordan Pal helps to oversee the reading. 3 CMC Associate Composer Chris Meyer reviewing a score during the TSO reading at Roy Thomson Hall. Photos: Josh Clavir
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ontario project updates
OSA String Reading Session
OSA String Reading Session
William Rowson conducts a group of educators, students, and other string players as they read through scores by various Canadian composers including Alan Torok, Allison Cameron, Allan Bevan, and other composers whose names do not begin with the letters “A” and “L..” The session took place in late September.
Photo: Matthew Fava
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spring 2016
Regional Mentorship Network
As we begin an evaluation of the first round of the mentorship network, we also celebrate the experiences of the participants. You can learn more about the mentorship network by clicking here!
Regional Mentorship Network
Finding your way in the field of composition has unique challenges, and while an artist commits to honing their craft the realities of freelance composition often complicate artistic aspirations. The CMC regional mentorship network supports early and mid-career composers through self-directed mentorship with experienced composers. This past fall, we established five mentorship pairs and were pleased to see how the artists interacted and supported one another through career advice, artistic feedback, and goal-setting.
“ William [Beauvais] has some experience collaborating with other artists in different media—poets in particular. We discussed the benefits of collaborating with another artist type both as a performer and as a composer. William suggested that by getting out of the classical guitar bubble, you are forced to be open to another artist’s sensibilities and respond in a way that’s going to serve the work as a whole. —— Ottawa-based guitarist-composer Craig Visser on his mentorship with CMC Associate Composer and guitarist WIlliam Beauvais
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ontario project updates
“I wish we had time to meet more...” Afarin Mansouri “We became friends in the course of our meetings and are planning to continue the correspondence.” Elizabeth Raum CMC Associate Composers Afarin and Elizabeth reflecting on their mentorship experience
“My interactions with my mentor were very informal and down-to-earth, something which I liked about the meeting. I have had previous opportunities to network with senior composers through other forums, and this was a similar experience where I can just talk to him about whatever I had questions with.” Sean Goldman “I didn’t really have any expectations … it was just nice to meet Sean and learn about him, his music, and his outlook.” Jason Doell Sean and CMC Associate Composer Jason reflecting on their mentorship experience
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“The meetings gave me a good idea of what it is to be a contemporary art music composer in the Toronto music scene and what is to be expected in this niche industry.” Roydon Tse reflecting on his mentorship with CMC Associate Composer Chris Mayo
spring 2016
The CMC hosted the most recent installment of Musica Reflecta’s creative workshop series, Opus: Testing on Sunday, January 24 featuring Hybridity Ensemble. Hybridity consists of four musicians with multiple specializations: Shaelyn Archibald (soprano, flute, piano), Michael Bridge (accordion, piano), Emily Hill (flute, celtic harp, piano), and Daniel Wheeler (tenor, bass). Participating composers were encouraged to explore the ideas of collage and decollage while writing for the group. The public session included five new pieces, and a fascinating discussion of the challenges and opportunities available to the composers. The next edition of Opus: Testing features TorQ Percussion Quartet! Join us at the Canadian Music Centre, 20 St. Joseph Street, at 3pm on Sunday, March 13.
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Hybridity Ensemble
Hybridity Ensemble takes part in Opus:Testing
1 Zach Clarke demonstrates his score inspired by his study of I Ching 2 Left to Right, Shaelyn Archibald, Emily Hill, Michael Bridge, Daniel Wheeler. 3 Composer Menon Dwarka discusses the structure of his piece. Photos: Matthew Fava, Amy Gottung
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ontario project updates
Library Residency: Another Look at Knotted Silk From Chris Mayo Linda Catlin Smith’s Knotted Silk was composed for Arraymusic for their collaboration with Dancemakers called “Chemin de Ronde.” It is scored for clarinet, trumpet, two percussionists, piano, violin, and double bass. In the composer’s programme note, she writes that “…the melody is shared by all of the instruments creating a line of continuously changing colour. The instruments also combine in irregularly spaced chords (or knots).” Included here is a selection of visual representations of various parameters of Knotted Silk. They are not analyses of the piece and are certainly not intended as an exhaustive catalogue of the subtle manipulation of materials Smith carries out in the work. They are, instead, an attempt to provide visual summaries of a few pertinent aspects of this superb work.
This past fall, CMC Associate Composer Chris Mayo served as the artist-in-residence for the CMC Library. Mayo highlighted several pieces from the CMC collection including Eldon Rathburn’s The Rise and Fall of the Steam Railroad, …comme un silène entr’ouvert… by Denys Bouliane, Micheline Coulombe Saint-Marcoux’s Alchèra, and Knotted Silk by Linda C. Smith. In his exploration of Smith’s piece, Mayo took a rather unexpected approach employing data visualization to represent aspects of the score. Here is a look at some of what Mayo produced.
KNOTTED SILK by Linda Catlin Smith
CL
6m 11s
Part A
Part B
5m 8s
Part A
for seven players seven players
Part A
122 piano chords 89 total chords
chord orchestration
Part A
TPT
1m 7s
PER
Part B VIB
two players
PN
Part B 33 total chords
VN
DB
49 unique chords
1 = short notes
27 pitches
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10 pitches
= sustained notes = melodic interjections
Click here to listen to the piece, and view Chris’ full post
spring 2016
chords per pitch
Part A D6 C#6 C6 B5 Bb5 A5 G#5 G5 F#5 F5 E5 Eb5 D5 C#5 C5 B4 Bb4 A4 G#4 G4 F#4 F4 E4 Eb4 D4 C#4 C4 B3 Bb3 A3 G#3 G3 F#3 F3
0
1 1 9(6) 3(3) 18(4) 3(3) 38(9) 20(4) 46(3) 35(1) 35(2) 77(11) 1
77(21) 83(16)
4(2)
84(8)
0 79(7)
2 62(1) 2 43(2) 0 0 0
2 2
0 0
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Mushrooms by Chance Michael Purves-Smith
This little account springs from a conversation with Notations editor Matthew Fava, during which the subjects of mushroom hunting and music making came up together, leading inevitably to the name of John Cage. I recalled that Cage had visited Wilfrid Laurier University in 1986 to take part in the annual university-wide Symposium as one of the scheduled lecturers. I remember mostly my long-standing regret that I didn’t know then about mushrooms what I do now.
mushrooms by chance M
Cage had asked if there was anyone to take him on a mushroom hunt; another, more naturally qualified colleague was assigned the task. I had been part of a Cage event as a student at UBC, and I remember that quite well, but I’m sketchy about his visit to WLU. Therefore, I turned to CMC Associate Composer Boyd McDonald for help. We reminisced a little about the WLU visit, and then Boyd told me about Emma Lake—now there was a “one-better story” to top any that I have ever experienced!
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Michael Purves-Smith
Aborted tricholoma portentosum. Photo by Michael Purves-Smith.
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n 1955 Emma Lake, 50 kms north of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, was just about the last thing you reached before the North Pole, a little over 4000 kms farther north. The Emma Lake Artist Colony had been established in that year, and ten years later CMC Associate Composer Jack Behrens asked Cage to attend as the workshop leader for a week in August— prime time for mushrooms. Cage went mushroom hunting and got lost—not once, but twice. The first time he missed lunch, but the second time he spent a night in the woods and was the object of a massive search. For warmth and protection from the mosquitoes, Cage lit a fire and passed the night smoking cigarettes, surrounded by muskeg, on what he called a squirrel hummock. The only other thing he records about his adventure is that his yelling startled a moose. He describes all this in the second chapter of A Year from Monday, telling us how angry he was with himself when he discovered that he couldn’t help but walk in circles.
Withal, he doesn’t appear to have been overly disturbed and still managed to keep a record of the mushrooms he turned up as he wandered about trying to find his way back to camp. By the time he was found later in the next morning, he had collected enough tooth mushrooms (the reason for getting lost in the first place) to cook some for any among his rescuers who would risk eating them. He writes that he did this out of contrition for all the trouble and worry the search had caused. There were around fifty searchers, mostly aspiring composers, artists, and poets, along with police, search lights, a helicopter, a dog, and a jeep. More likely he made the offer because he loved to cook. Almost the only physical description that he gives of the camp is that it had a piano (the last before the North Pole) and an oven for drying fungi. Some of his mushroom recipes were published by Vogue magazine, which leads me to wonder if a CMC/mushroom/Cage event might be fun.
Cage may have been unconcerned, but others were quite upset. There was speculation that there would be a damper on the rest of the workshop. McDonald remembers that quite the contrary happened, with some of the most stimulating artistic sessions he has ever experienced, ending with a concert with music by Cage, Behrens, McDonald, and Ted Bourré, and a setting by CMC Associate Composer Martin Bartlett of a poem by one of the poets in attendance. In truth, the concert was not perfect artistic bliss: it was interrupted by the RCMP, who then arrested a recently escaped felon who was in the audience with his wife, an artist participating in the colony. When you couple this with the fact that the cottage of one of the colony founders burnt down, even while everyone was searching for the lost Cage, and with the further extraordinary coincidence of a mysterious on-site robbery at the same time, it is not difficult to imagine that Cage must have viewed
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mushrooms by chance M
Truffles and agaricus. Photo by Michael Purves-Smith.
his sojourn at Emma Lake as perfect aleatoric bliss. To us, the week seems more like a promising comic opera libretto in the tradition of Georges Feydeau—but that would be an imitation of aleatorism. Legend has it that Cage became interested in mushrooms because the word is found next to music in the dictionary, with only mushy in between. However, as the apologist for things random in music, Cage may have felt the appeal of mushrooms as being among the best representatives of the unaccountable in nature. A few years ago I came across a fairy ring of which the largest cap was nearly two feet across. One could almost have
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used it as a toadstool, and it provided enough shade for a legion of fairies. My best efforts to identify the species led nowhere, even after I consulted specialists. While I have made a few trips to the same spot every year since, I have never seen it again. Where did it come from; where did it go? Cage would have liked that mushroom, but he might have been yet more stimulated by the recent findings of science suggesting that mushrooms grow a communication network disturbingly close in structure to the neurology of the human brain, prefiguring, as with music, an unfathomable intelligence.
Michael Purves-Smith
Truffles. Photo by Michael Purves-Smith.
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new associate composers
Welcome New Associate Composers In this section we hear from the composers who recently joined the Canadian Music Centre in the Ontario region.
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ontario region
Ronald Beckett What got you excited about music at a young age?
Growing up in Simcoe, Ontario, I felt as though there was something missing. I was passionate about sports (and still am) but school offered little stimulation. My parents were thoughtful enough to provide me with piano lessons. One day, my teacher, Raymond Daniels, sent me home with a book on Mozart. The next week, it was one on Bach, followed by Beethoven, Debussy, etc. The more I read, the more I craved information about composers, wanting to know everything they did, what excited them about music at a young age, what inspired them, what they ate for breakfast, everything! I then started bringing a new composition to my lesson each week. My teacher was kind enough to make constructive suggestions on what truly interested his young student. Most of all, from that point on, I knew that all I wanted was to be a composer. What was the most important music concert/event you attended?
Some of my most inspiring moments occurred during my conversations with tenor Carl Duggan, listening to him recount his days with the English Opera Group and realizing that he was living the summit of what music can be when everything is functioning perfectly. Here was a group of supremely talented, supremely committed individuals rehearsing and performing the works of the supreme composer every day of their lives. When I finally heard Peter Grimes performed live at Detroit Opera House, I hearkened back to what Britten had said—that “our job as composers is to be useful.” I had written three operas of my own prior to this and Britten had been my primary inspiration for doing so. Hearing this great work live reaffirmed what a positive vehicle for social change music can and should be.
How is the field of composition changing, and (how) do you fit in?
Not long ago, I stumbled upon a very nice review from the American Record Guide that stated that my CD A Beckett Miscellany “makes one realize just how far the neo-tonal counterrevolution has come.” Wow! I would be naïve to think that I have had this much influence! All I’ve ever tried to do was to entertain people and keep my musicians happy. Pretty much all the music I have written during the past few years has been for shows put on by my ensemble Arcady. I write the music for them and direct them, and I realize that in order to maintain an audience’s interest for an entire evening, a composer today cannot become predictable or locked into a single compositional style. In the years since graduation, I’ve become acutely aware that the modern audience requires much more visual and auditory stimulation than it used to. We live in an impatient society where everything is at our command and can be brought forth in seconds: information, correspondence, and of course, music. I’m certainly part of that, and I can’t expect my musicians and audiences to be any more patient than I am. When I was in university, composers were pressured to experiment. Today, I don’t see that happening. Everyone is doing something completely different and influenced by a variety of musical ideas beyond those of just the western concert tradition. Our modern audiences appear to welcome this diversity.
What is on your personal playlist?
As a student I was a compulsive album collector, and having a father in the record business made that all the easier. I listened to everything, certainly all of Bach and most of Handel and Beethoven. As I’ve become busier with conducting and composing, I find myself listening less and less to music that I’m not actually preparing for performance. When I do have the time, I love listening to anything with imaginative orchestration and contrapuntal complexity.
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new associate composers
Spy Dénommé-Welch
→ To learn more about Spy Dénommé-Welch, click here.
What got you excited about music at a young age?
Music has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. I grew up with all types of music in the house—from blues/jazz/ swing to rock to opera—and listened to just about anything and everything I could access, be it tape cassettes, records, or CDs. I credit my mother for this, as she would often sit me down, play music, and engage me in a conversation about the content and context of the piece. This gave me a deeper appreciation of the social and political aspects of music-making. What was the most important music concert/event you attended?
I wish I could say Woodstock, but I wasn’t around then. I think it would have been really amazing to witness the first big Pow-Wow back in the 1950s after the Canadian Government unofficially lifted its ban on First Nations’ (Aboriginal) musical and cultural practice. What is on your personal playlist?
I’m always rotating my playlist as a means to widen my musical tastes and knowledge, but there are always my go-to albums and artists, such as Billie Holiday, Johnny Cash, Leadbelly, Nirvana, Freddie King, Beethoven, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and Mahler. I also like to take chances on different artists when I’m in the record shop, and I’ll often buy a record without any previous knowledge about it … so it’s always interesting. Sometimes I come upon a real gem this way.
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How is the field of composition changing, and (how) do you fit in?
I guess you could say it’s always been changing… just as it should really. I think this is largely reflective of the type of world we live in today, which is giving us different ideas and definitions of music. The influences of grassroots musical practices (stemming from 1960s and 1970s civil rights), digital technologies, and sociocultural issues most certainly have played a part in (re)shaping and (re)envisioning a range of musical expressions that we get to see and hear today. For instance, I think artists and groups like A Tribe Called Red, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, or Supaman, among many others, are bridging all kinds of musical forms and genres, oftentimes drawing on Indigenous oral histories and vocal experimentations or hip hop fusion and Western music art forms. I’m interested in these modes of musical exploration given these are some topics I grapple with in my own practice, which redresses a long history of Indigenous voices and sounds being silenced (literally and figuratively).
ontario region
Hilario Durán What got you excited about music at a young age?
As far back as I can remember, I always got excited about music. While I was attending Catholic school at age 5, I started to reproduce the songs I heard using a little keyboard with just seven keys. Later on my parents bought a piano for my sister, and I started to spend long hours playing the instrument. My father exposed me to a wide spectrum of music at a young age. My grandfather was a huge record collector and I grew up listening to many recordings from jazz to classic music, soundtracks of movies, and also great Cuban classics by Ernesto Lecuona and Amadeo Roldan, and Cuban jazz pianists such as Frank Emilio Flynn. I was listening to American jazz from Stan Kenton, Errol Garner, and Harry James—those were the jazz records that I heard first in my life. I also used to listen to classical music from Jachaturian to Tchaikovsky and American composers like George Gershwin.
I am always revising and studying music from Cuban composers such as Garcia Caturla, Ignacio Cervantes, Ernesto Lecuona, and Amadeo Roldan, but I can mention some of my all-time favorites: Stan Kenton (Cuban Fire); Chick Corea (My Spanish Heart album); Heitor Villa-Lobos (Piano Works Vol. 2); Maria Schneider Jazz Orchestra (Coming About album); Herbie Hancock (New Standard album), and Pedro “Peruchín” Justiz (Piano con Moña album) How is the field of composition changing, and (how) do you fit in?
Music is one of the major triumphs of human creativity, often moving us in a way that can be universal across cultures. Regardless of the musical influences that I brought from my country, since I arrived in Canada I have been exposed to a lot of influences that help to extend my music and creativity in new directions. I have enriched my knowledge and developed new musical ideas.
What was the most important music concert/event you attended?
I used to attend concerts as often as possible at a very young age, but the most important one I remember was the concert that Chucho Valdes and Paquito D’Rivera performed with the Orquesta Cubana de Música Moderna in 1968 at the Amadeo Roldan Theatre in Havana. This concert was directed by Armando Romeu, one of the greatest Cuban directors. Years later, I had the great opportunity to fill the chair left by Chucho Valdes when he went on to create the group Irakere, one of the best-known Latin jazz bands from Cuba. What is on your personal playlist?
I have no specific playlist as my listening depends on the work I am doing as a composer at a given time, and I need to hear different musical styles and genres.
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new associate composers
Frank Horvat
→ To learn more about Frank Horvat, click here.
What got you excited about music at a young age?
Loved the energy of it. It was invigorating as a child, drumming to my parents’ records. I just liked it, it sort of happened naturally. There was a sense of accomplishment and a marveling that you could create something out of nothing. What was the most important music concert/event you attended?
Now that I look back on it, it seems the concerts I attended at the National Arts Centre had a big impact on me. When I was a kid I saw Jerry Lee Lewis there. I was mesmerized by the amount of energy and the lack of inhibition that goes into a musical performance. When I was sixteen, I saw Astor Piazzolla at the NAC—the year before he died. I was struck by the originality and creativity along with the combining of genres of music. Those two concerts were definitely turning points for me. What is on your personal playlist?
My main playlist holds over 10,000 tracks and counting, which I listen to religiously in alphabetical order. So, when I get to ‘Symph…’, it takes a long, long time to get to the ‘Ts’. Here’s a brief synopsis of what I listen to representing some of the styles and eras in my playlist. A small sampling includes: Radiohead, Brian Eno, Frank Zappa, Marjan Mozetich, Christos Hatzis, Alison Krauss, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, John Adams, Kanye, Rush, Scott Walker, Arvo Pärt, Ann Southam, just to name a few. Basically, anything and everything of critical acclaim or that captures my attention.
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How is the field of composition changing, and (how) do you fit in?
If composers have any aspirations of a significant audience hearing their music, they have no choice but to consider how an audience might react or what impact the music might make on their audience when they are composing. I consider my quest in composing a piece as twofold: producing a piece of music that I have never heard before that intrigues me, and trying to make the maximum emotional or cerebral impact on an audience. Gone are the days where composers don’t have to care about what an audience thinks (or feels) about their music. In essence if a composer can’t have a vision of what impact a piece might make on an audience they will struggle on what impact that piece will have on themselves. What’s the point of composing if it is just an exercise in notes rather than emotion?
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Catherine Magowan What got you excited about music at a young age?
For me it was the social interaction, being part of a team. Practicing on my own wasn’t as gratifying as rehearsing with others. As an adult I value my alone-practice time much more, but nothing beats creating as a team. This has spilled over into composing too, which is more often a collaborative activity for me. What was the most important music concert/event you attended?
This past September I was invited (with Spy Dénommé-Welch who is also a new Associate Composer) to present at the Performing Turtle Island conference (University of Regina/First Nations University), where top Indigenous artists from all over the world converged to have important (and sometimes difficult) discussions, share and create new work. As a first-generation Canadian I was honoured to have been so warmly welcomed into these conversations, and I was able to see some important work being done by Canada’s First Nations artists. What is on your personal playlist?
can have more views than concerts in famous halls. The result is that more artists are getting their work out there, and a greater musical variety is available to the consumer. There is much concern about where this leaves artists in terms of compensation, and sadly, arts and culture continue to be grossly undervalued for their contribution to the economy. It’s unlikely I’ll ever get rich from composing or performing, but at least I have more tools available than my predecessors, and more options to create work that’s artistically satisfying. I’d also like to think that accompanying the destruction of barriers to artistic creation is an increasing discussion of ethics in art, where we as artists have the responsibility to ask ourselves who is benefiting, and who is being potentially harmed by what we are creating and producing. Spy’s research often speaks to these issues, and we try to address them in our own collaborations and workshops. Attention is being drawn to examples of appropriation in today’s “call out” culture, especially online, and I feel it would be prudent for artists and organizations to take notice and examine their own activities.
Right now it’s mostly pieces that I’m performing in the near future. That of course includes some more classical works, but because of my electric-bassoon cover-band there’s a fair share of Michael Jackson, Nirvana, Queen, Pink Floyd and the like. I read recently that once you’ve hit your 20s you become less adventurous in seeking out new music, so I’m deliberately trying to counter that. I’ve gotten into Alabama Shakes recently, and love Tanya Tagaq’s latest album (Animism). How is the field of composition changing, and (how) do you fit in?
Technology is making artistic creation and distribution easier, and breaking down barriers of who can and can’t make music. The difference between music created in a high-tech studio vs. a bedroom setup, or by a highly trained or self-taught artist is becoming less important. Open mic performance videos
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new associate composers
Bekah Simms
→ To learn more about Bekah Simms, click here.
What got you excited about music at a young age?
What is on your personal playlist?
I grew up in Newfoundland, so there was always traditional music around me: my uncle played accordion, my mom played guitar, everyone sang. Because it was so normalized, it didn’t excite me as much as it could have. I was more interested in the music in the video games my brothers and I played—eight bar modal ostinati that changed at every level or new town. I still have a great fondness for old video game music but its influence has long since passed from my own music.
On one front, it’s a mix of chamber music by Fausto Romitelli and Reiko Füting, and large ensemble pieces by Iannis Xenakis and Joseph Schwantner. On the other front, I haven’t been able to stop spinning Joanna Newsom’s Divers—I just saw her in concert and was totally blown away. That’s been supplemented with albums by Deerhunter, Nick Drake, Grizzly Bear, Owen Pallett, and Magma. And tons of Michael Jackson.
What was the most important music concert/event you attended?
This is such a tough question because different concerts were extremely important to me for different reasons. The first all-ages show I ever attended was headlined by this Albertan death metal band called Dead Jesus, and their over-the-top stage antics and super heavy music ignited a long fascination with melodrama and an earnest fierceness. A “reimagined” Pierrot Lunaire with dancers totally changed my perception of the presentation of music at a time when I really needed it. But I think the longest lasting impact was from the 2013 HighSCORE Music Festival in Pavia, Italy. I was just about to enter my Master’s degree with relatively little experience, and in Pavia I heard the music of about 40 young composers all studying in different conservatories across the world. It was totally varied, but it was also really freakin’ good. I knew I had to step up my game and listen voraciously to not only the emerging “canon” of contemporary works, but the amazing and underrepresented music that is being presented by my peers around the world.
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How is the field of composition changing, and (how) do you fit in?
I think when you’re studying it’s really too insular to tell what’s happening in the wider world. There’s a lot of populism and audience pandering that I feel happens with developing composers that is relatively new, and I’m not sure that’s something I feel too comfortable with as a listener or as a creator. I think there’s a real DIY vibe that I’ve also been swept up in, but it’s exhausting to try to focus on your craft while also being a producer. I guess we’re all trying to find our way in a field where even pop stars aren’t making huge money without touring. The world consumes a lot of music and art without economically valuing it, and that’s scary and a little hard.
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Welcome to the new Associate Composers from Across Canada! Atlantic Region Christopher Palmer
Quebec Region Adam Basanta Beavan Flanagan David Alexandre Duncan Schouten François Bourassa Henri Oppenheim
Jan Jarczyk Robert Ingari Uriel Vanchestein
Prairie Sean Clarke George Fenwick Andrew Stewart
Ontario Eleanor Daley
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Having Never Written a Note * for Kacapi Revisiting The Postal Pieces of James Tenney By Andrew Timar INTERsection, Toronto’s largest public space contemporary music event, is billed by its producer Contact Contemporary Music as a “New Music Marathon and Musicircus!” Held annually at Yonge-Dundas Square, it places contemporary music in the noisy heart of downtown Toronto, and I was there to perform at INTERsection 2014 on a warm September day. Around 5:30pm the entire concrete-surfaced Square was dotted with musicians who began a focused rendering of James Tenney’s Having Never Written a Note for Percussion (1971). Some of the audience sat while others milled among the scattered musicians. 40 | musiccentre.ca
Performing August Harp (Tenney, arr. Timar) left to right: Jessika Kenney (voice), Bill Parsons (kacapi), Andrew Timar (kacapi), Eyvind Kang (viola), Jam Factory, Toronto, July 22, 2015. Photo: Claire Harvie. *not to be taken literally, both Timar and Tenney have written notes for kacapi
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Having Never Written a Note for Kacapi
A
s Toronto percussionist and INTERsection Musicircus organizer David Schotzko puts it, the work is “simply a single roll on a resonant instrument, from as soft as possible to as loud as possible and back down. Simple and really, really, beautiful.” He prepared the participants by adding, “we’ll be doing a 30 minute performance, peaking [the dynamics of] the roll at 15 min. In addition to mallets and earplugs, if everyone could bring a time keeping device (stopwatch, cell phone timer, wristwatch, whatever you’ve got), that would be great.” And that cumulatively rolled percussion sound building to ffff and back down to pppp certainly was sonically beautiful that evening. It culminated in a memorable massive cloud of sound which magically merged with the sounds of the surrounding city, seemingly creating shifting echoes off the hard surfaces of neighbouring buildings. Taking Having Never Written a Note for Percussion out of its typical concert hall habitat and into the vernacular wild proved to be a prescient decision by Schotzko. Having Never Written a Note for Percussion is one of eleven works, seven of which Tenney composed in 1971, on postcards dedicated and sent to composer and musician friends during the brief period he taught at California Institute of the Arts. Commonly known as Postal Pieces (1965-1971), Tenney called these eleven works “scorecards” since these epigrammatic scores were printed on postcards and mailed to their dedicatees. Inscribed on each card is a complete—though rather minimally stated—score to be performed by instrumentalists and perhaps vocalists. Far from being ephemeral musical
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James Tenney’s Having Never Written a Note for Percussion performed at INTERsection, Toronto, Sept. 6, 2014 (Bill Parsons, foreground, David Schotzko, middle ground, Mark Duggan sitting on the ground, distant. Photo c/o David Schotzko.
greeting cards, however, the Postal Pieces still resonate almost half a century later as remarkable minimalistic scores. They remain of interest to musicians today, each, what Larry Polansky calls a “kind of meditation on acoustics, form, or hyper-attention to a single performance gesture.” Given their openness as graphic scores, the Postal Pieces rely to a considerable extent on the performance expertise of their performers, as well as on their interpretive insight and musical discipline. Each score is designed as a kind of collaboration between the composer and performer.
When Tenney arrived in Toronto to teach at York University in 1976 he quickly became one of my formative music teachers and later a mentor. In the early- to mid-1990s I had further opportunities to better know Tenney and his growing family at a series of open Sunday afternoon music listening, sharing, discussion and analysis sessions. Hosted by Tenney and his wife Lauren Pratt at their unassuming midtown Toronto home, local students, friends, and sometimes visitors from the USA and Europe congregated in the living room, kitchen, and when the weather cooperated in the yard.
andrew timar
It was in Canada that Tenney’s career shifted into high professional gear, after years of teaching and composing in the United States. “You know, I had never had a [concert] commission before I came to Canada,” he confided to Gayle Young in a MUSICWORKS interview from 2000. “I was very obscure. My reputation has developed mostly since I got here,” he continued. “None of my music was recorded and no scores or articles were published [while I lived in the USA].” After retiring from York University in 2000, Tenney returned to the USA, accepting the position of Roy E. Disney Family Chair in composition at the California Institute of the Arts. The case study of one particular piece illustrates how one of Tenney’s works can be a template for a possible way forward for sonically adventurous music, serving as a sort of meeting place for musicians
from various disciplines, genres and cultural backgrounds. In the summer of 2015, I and Bill Parsons (guitar, and kacapi kawih, a plucked West Javanese zither) were approached to perform with the celebrated Seattle-based duo of singer-composer Jessika Kenney and violist-composer Eyvind Kang in The Music Gallery’s Departures series. Parsons and I have both composed for and performed with Toronto’s Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan—the first such Canadian ensemble—for 32 years. Yet I was puzzled about what repertoire we would choose for our unorthodox quartet concert. In an email, Kenney proposed that we jointly tackle some of Tenney’s Postal Pieces which they had recently discovered. Imagine my surprise: it was about the furthest possibility from my mind. How would we go about adapting them for our unconventional group?
Score of Having Never Written a Note for Percussion (1971). James Tenney
Helping us in this unusual project were the following features in our favour. Several Postals employed open form, plus they possessed the possibility of flexible instrumentation, both of which qualities could allow the entry of hybrid WesternSundanese instrumentation and vocalism into their essentially Euro-American framework. Moreover, while littlecommented upon, Tenney had engaged with Indigenous and vernacular music in his compositions throughout his career. A special case in his oeuvre was the explicit use of non-Western musical forces and tuning systems in the works he composed on commission for the Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan: The Road to Ubud (1986) and Last Spring in Toronto (2000). Both incorporate an entire nonWestern instrumental ensemble, the (gamelan) degung, including the kacapi. In his liner notes to ECCG’s 1998 CD The Road to Ubud Tenney describes his methodology for forging both acoustic and tuning links and establishing common ground between the prepared Western piano and the Sundanese degung. Tenney’s strategy inspired me as I set upon the collaboration with Jessika and Eyvind. The last but not the least factor here was Tenney’s long-held practice of the privileging of the homage in his works. Our quartet felt that by arranging, performing and recording a few Postal Pieces our efforts would prove a fitting homage to his pioneering legacy, as well as an affirmation of our own lineage. After closely examining and assessing all the Postal Pieces, through a process of elimination I settled on August Harp (1971), dedicated to the harpist Susan Allen). The score, appearing on the
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Having Never Written a Note for Kacapi
Left to Right: Toronto composers Nic Gotham, Linda Catlin Smith, John Gzowski (closest to camera) listen intently at a Tenney and Pratt open house, 1995. Photo: Ciarán ó Meachair, then a Tenney student.
next page, is as it appears on Tenney’s scorecard. Originally scored on treble and bass staves for concert harp using pedals, I knew the sound of the harp resembled that of the Sundanese kacapi, an instrument from West Java Indonesia I have performed on since 1988. The fingernail-plucked steel-stringed kacapi has a harp-like sustain and resonance. There are however also profound morphological differences distinguishing the harp from the kacapi, and differences as well in the manner in which the two instruments are typically tuned, held and played. The kacapi’s 20 strings are usually tuned to one of several Sundanese laras, a term encompassing notions of tuning, tonal scale and modality. The three most common laras are: pelog (degung), sorog aka madenda, and salendro. All three tunings possess five tones per octave, the intervallic footprint of which creates five intervals per octave, the tonal signature 44 | musiccentre.ca
of much Sundanese music, though each laras has a different sequence of intervals. The kacapi’s five tone/interval tonal layout however considerably complicates the mapping of Tenney’s August Harp, given that the latter is based on the 12tone per octave tuning. Struggling with this challenge, I nevertheless found a way to arrange August Harp for two kacapis (in a “bespoke” tablature (as depicted on page 46), viola and voice, yet entirely relying on the process-like textural instructions of the original. While our quartet’s approach implemented a Southeast Asian instrument and its performance techniques, in our conversations we agreed to avoid obvious “folkloricisms” in our renderings. We were careful not to colour too much outside Tenney’s postmodernist minimalist Postal Pieces strategies. To prepare for our only quartet rehearsal, I drafted a worksheet on
paper focusing on first generating a kacapi part from the original score, then finding realisations for the other voices. As sketchy as it may appear, my worksheet illustrates solutions to the problems posited by my arrangement. First, I wanted to incorporate what Larry Polansky calls the “direct mapping of a mathematical concept to a musical one,” reflecting an aesthetic I associated closely with Tenney. Second, I intended to retain the composer’s approach to the harp’s pedal changes in my kacapibased arrangement of August Harp. Third, rather than the original solo harp voice, my arrangement uses four voices, two plucked strings (kacapis), a bowed string (viola) and a treble vocalist, each musician proceeding through the score according to their individual breath-directed tempo. Compared to the monophonic original, the four parts produce a denser texture since each musician is essentially performing from the same written part. The quartet version’s heterophonic texture sharply contrasts with the rather austere, “august,” sound of the solo harp part. Fourth, and perhaps most central to my arrangement (or was it turning out to be more of a transcription?) was my concern to maintain the sequence of the three structurally significant intervals in the original score: a major 9th, followed by a minor 9th, and then by a major 9th. Tenney notates the notes as A – B – C – D in four successive octaves. I was constrained by the laras pelog degungbased tuning of the kacapis we play are usually in, typically B – C – D – F# – G (Parsons usually keeps his tuned a semitone higher), however I had to find other solutions since that tuning would not allow the specified starting intervals. For my arrangement I graphically
andrew timar
Top: August Harp (1971) James Tenney. Bottom: The author, Andrew Timar, demonstrates the kacapi at Allen Gardens, Toronto, April 15, 2015. Photo: Josef Timar.
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Having Never Written a Note for Kacapi
1
2
3
4
5
1 August Harp (Tenney 1971, arr. Timar 2015), worksheet prepared by Andrew Timar, July 21, 2015. 2 August Harp (arr. Andrew Timar, July 21-22, 2015). Kacapi performance score in an idiosyncratic tablature. 3 “August Kacapi” performance part for August Harp (arr. 2015). Bill Parsons, July 22, 2015. 4 Three states of August Harp ready for performance, left to right: Tenney (1971), Parsons’ cipher kacapi part (July 22, 2015) and the Timar tablature (July 21-22, 2015), with Parsons’ annotations. Photo: Bill Parsons. 5 August Harp notes by Andrew Timar July 22, 2015: comparative analysis of intervals, Sundanese and international notation, and performance “realisation notes.”
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andrew timar
mapped the intervallic values of Tenney’s beginning chord onto the kacapi— but explaining this process in its entirety would be an article unto itself. Overall, my version of August Harp (arr. 2015) is more prescriptive and less tonally exploratory than Tenney’s August Harp (1971). It also illustrates how his works can accommodate transcultural interpretations, despite their Euro-centric origins. At our one and only rehearsal I presented my worksheet and tablature for what we dubbed “August Kacapi” to our quartet. We tried out various Postal Pieces we had prepared including A Rose Is A Rose Is A Round [for voice(s)] for Philip Corner, but my arrangement of August Harp seemed the best fit for our nonstandard ensemble. While I played strictly from my tablature, Parsons created his own part based on it. The two other musicians used both versions as starting points. The next evening, July 22, 2015 at the Jam Factory, a second floor brick-and-
beam loft that served as the venue for our concert, we performed August Harp and the Story of Iceland / Kidung (a work by Kang), along with a set by Parsons and I, a set by Kenney and Kang, and a set by Toronto duo Manticore. The afternoon following our concert we regrouped to the cooler and quieter environs of the historic church of St. Georgie the Martyr, the home of the Music Gallery to record two of Tenney’s Postal Pieces. I believe our arrangement, concert and recording project, focused on selections from Tenney’s Postal Pieces, underscore the continued value of these significant yet under-explored compositions. Tenney’s significant work in music theory, which I have not touched on here, as well as his composition and mentoring many younger composers, intersects so many threads of 20th-century art music—and earlier eras—that it is proving an invaluable lens through which to understand that tradition. By the end of
our quartet’s three-day exploration of the Postal Pieces they proved to be musical platforms with strong identities, yet also ones flexible enough to contain our multiple, multifaceted and transcultural interpretive notions. And we preserved our unique performances of August Harp and Swell Piece (1967) in a recording which we hope to commercially release in the near future. I believe my teacher, colleague and friend James Tenney would find my arrangement and the quartet’s performance a worthy 21st-century homage to his enduring postmodernist legacy. We will be releasig an extended version of the article through a series of blog posts.
→Y ou can read an extended version
of this article through a series of blog posts that we will share on the community page at musiccentre.ca
Tenney recording session: mics set by recording engineer Paul Hodge (another Tenney student), The Music Gallery, Toronto, July 23, 2015. Photo: Bill Parsons.
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IN FOCUS
My Postal Piece Notations invited composers to send us Postal Pieces for this issue! Here are a few of the pieces we received, with introductions from the composers—a reflection on the piece, James Tenney, or both!
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elma miller
Ecological Sounds for Orchestra Years ago, James and I were part of a radio show interview. Along with us were Ann Southam, Udo Kasemets, and a few other composers. We were individually interviewed and between takes we chatted and laughed about how nice it was to see one another again. We lamented the isolation of composers who now worked at home on their computers and communicated via e-mail—there were no face to face meetings. So here we all were, catching up. Years went by. When Udo fell ill and was in the hospital, artists gathered at James’s place and planned how best to help Udo. It was a time when health and care concerns were more important than composition. I remember the worry and thoughtfulness that James brought to the meeting. All of us present that day agreed to keep in touch more. James had a great sense of humour and this showed up in his music. I miss that humour and wanted to best portray his thoughtfulness, irony and playfulness in notation.
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Ecological Sounds for orchestra Saving a few trees by keeping everything to one measure and on the same page in memory of James Tenney
© Elma Miller 2015
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Kyle Brenders
A difference, to be a difference, must make a difference (2006) for two tenor saxophones This piece was written very soon after Tenney’s death. I was a student at Wesleyan and Alvin Lucier thought we should do something in memoriam to Tenney’s work. The graduate composition students did two concerts: one of our own “postcard” pieces inspired by Tenney and a second of Tenney’s own pieces. This piece takes a number of Tenney’s interests to heart: the round, tuning, and pieces that are stable in their dynamic intent. The piece came off as a moving tribute as part of the concert. The two players (I was one of them) entered from the rear of Wesleyan’s Memorial Chapel. We walked slowly up the two aisles of the room pausing and manipulating the alternate fingering as the score suggests. We crossed at the front of the room and then reversed down the aisles. We exited the chapel and continued to perform the piece well onto the lawn outside. This slow exit created a natural decrescendo as a moving completion to our concert in honour of Tenney. Click here to play A difference, to be a difference, must make a difference
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Stephen Chase
Rayuela
Rayuela is for any group of people who can whistle, hum or sing, or play an instrument whilst walking. It comes from a series of pieces (out-of-doors suite) which deal with the relationship between sound and physical action (usually walking) and the movement of sound and people in outdoor spaces. Click here to listen to an excerpt of Rayuela from a performance in Bologna
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RAYUELA
Stephen Chase with every step you take whistle, hum, sing or play a pitched sound for each step with your left foot the pitch is higher than the preceding pitch for each step with your right foot the pitch is lower than the preceding pitch if stepping with both feet simultaneously the pitch is the same as the preceding pitch [Manchester Piccadilly, 4-iv-12]
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Sarah Westwood
Of Minerals and Ventricles paper and ink on postcard
Of Minerals and Ventricles is a graphic score for solo/multiple instruments. Themes encompass the abstraction of dance movement, ritual and throwing clay in a potters’ wheel. Click here to listen to Of Minerals and Ventricles
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Generations Conversations Generations/Conversations is an intergenerational interview series that pairs artists with Ontario composers in order to share experiences, and document the various histories of composition in Ontario. This issue of Notations features interviews with two composers: Omar Daniel and Michael Colgrass.
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a conversation with
Omar Daniel
By Michael Schulman
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generations/conversations
Omar Daniel (b.1960) has produced a large body of work encompassing orchestral, chamber, vocal and electronic music. His Zwei Lieder nach Rilke was awarded the 1997 Jules Léger Prize for New Chamber Music and he won the K.M. Hunter Award in 2007. Daniel received his PhD from the University of Toronto and is currently Associate Professor at the University of Western Ontario.
H
e has also been active in UWO’s Composition, ElectroAcoustic Research and Performance facility (CEARP), serving for a time as its Co-Director. Daniel is married to violinist Erika Raum. He was interviewed this past September by music journalist Michael Schulman. MS: In preparing for this interview, I was unable to find any reference to your early years. You seem to have arrived at the U of T out of nowhere! OD: Well, I was born at Toronto General Hospital and grew up in Don Mills. My parents left Estonia at the end of the war, spent three years in an American-run Displaced Persons camp in Germany, before arriving in Canada in 1949. Eventually, my father got a position at the U of T as a Physical and Health Education prof. We spoke Estonian at home. My parents still live in the same house—they’re 92 years old. They weren’t musical—our interests at home were academic: mathematics and science and also athletic. So my youth was spent that way, but also dabbling in music. We had a piano in the home, a great Heintzman upright grand that occupied almost an entire room in this small house. I played when I was little and started lessons at the Conservatory. The decision to have a career in music? I really didn’t think about it until the end of high school. It was sort of this weird lightning bolt that struck me and I decided that I was going to pursue that.
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I had a Grade 10 level piano but very little music history and sketchy theory. MS: You’ve drawn on your Estonian roots for several works, including arrangements of Estonian folk songs as well as in your Violin Concerto, a work I found very dynamic and expressive. Have you been to Estonia? OD: I have, a few times, with my father. I’ll be going in about a year again to work at the Folklore Institute specifically on documentation of folk music. When I’m over there it’s like a family reunion; I have many relatives there. MS: In an interview that was filmed in 2012—it’s available on YouTube—discussing your Prologue, Entr’acte and Postlude for voice and live interactive electronics, you said, “My compositional style is based fundamentally on the concept of drama.” How do you go about creating “drama”? OD: I meant “drama” in the larger sense of that word, which always involves the interaction of elements, conflict and resolution. I try to set up some sort of opposing forces within a piece, through certain “characters” in a work that are contrasting in some way and move through the “narrative” through time and we discover how each one affects the other. The idea of
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cause and effect is very important—the basis of the way things work through a lot of classical musical history. Musical ideas are presented and they can never be the same again when they interact with other ideas. MS: And that keeps listeners involved, wondering what’s going to happen next and caring about what happens next. OD: Indeed. You give them familiar materials but then there’s constant transformation. MS: Prologue, Entr’acte and Postlude was a commission from Soundstreams and your Sinfonia Concertante, which will have its world premiere next month, is a commission from Esprit Orchestra. You’ve received multiple commissions from both organizations. OD: Yes, there are a group of musicians and presenters that I’m so indebted to for my career. MS: Music lovers of my generation—and I’m 20 years older than you—would seek out LPs and then CDs if they wanted to familiarize themselves with the music of a particular composer. That’s changed. You’re hardly represented on CD but anyone who wants to hear your music can listen to a great deal of it on the CMC website. Do you care about not having much of your stuff on CD?
OD: They call it “chirp,” like a bird. I didn’t write much electronic music until I started working at Western in 2000 and it’s a great electronic music studio. Every one of my electroacoustic works is in some way involved with this fantastic resource. I still do some teaching there. MS: What’s coming up for you compositionally in the next year or so—works in progress or outstanding commissions? OD: In the new year there are two commissions—one for a piano trio from Calgary called the Land’s End Ensemble. They commissioned me for a second piano trio—I wrote my first Piano Trio for the Gryphon Trio back in 1997 and now I’ve got another crack at it. And a piano quartet, another piece of chamber music, for the Ensemble Made in Canada resident at Western; they’re very fine players. In the spring of this coming year a work for the Perimeter Institute chamber music series in Kitchener-Waterloo; this one for string quartet, theremin, Hammond organ and Tesla coil, a crazy idea! It’s on the books so I’ve got to write it! And Lawrence Cherney at Soundstreams has been in touch with me about a work for the Estonian Chamber Choir for two years from now, which has always been an interest of mine—I would love to write for them! → You can learn more about Omar Daniel by clicking here!
OD: The short answer is no. You’re right, the last CD that had anything of mine on it was four years ago, but for me, it’s accessibility. I’ve had works come out on CD and I know what that process is like, how difficult it was and how expensive to create a hard copy of something, distribution and all that sort of thing. Yes, there’s a certain sense of accomplishment when you have a CD, you go to HMV and look in the bins and it’s there, right? But it’s similar to music publishing, the publishing of scores, now that they exist in electronic fashion and it’s more accessible to people—I think it’s fantastic! Anyone can go on the CMC website and they can download a score of mine and there it is! It’s changed quickly. Even at the university, four years ago, when I was teaching, I would go to the library and get a CD and go to my class and play it. Now it’s all online. It’s totally changed. MS: Yes, I go back to 78s—I remember the first LPs! At Western in addition to your regular teaching, you’ve been involved with CEARP—do you pronounce it “see-arp” or “seer-pee”?
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a conversation with
Michael Colgrass By Aubrey Kelly
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generations/conversations
Over green tea and homemade baking, in the comfortable surroundings of CMC Associate Composer Michael Colgrass’s elegant Toronto condo, I was delighted to speak with him about his remarkable life in music.
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is career began as a jazz drummer in Chicago in the 1940s, which led to performance and composition studies. Colgrass has worked extensively as a composer, and received a Pulitzer Prize in 1978 for his piece Déjà Vu, premiered by the New York Philharmonic. His creative output has been matched by his work in music education and performance psychology.
some of the kids do their own composing? Graphic notation of course has been around a long time, but it was my idea to use it to explain the process of so-called “serious composition,” because that’s a mystery to most people. And I’ve done this with adults, like the board of directors of a symphony orchestra, for example. You don’t need musical knowledge to do it. It’s just kind of a sound game.
I first became aware of Colgrass’s work in each field while I was a student at the University of Victoria. This winter, I enjoyed reading his memoir, in which he describes as anecdotes from his “mischievous life.” Our conversations have been fascinating, fun, and enlightening, as he recounted some stories from the memoir and shared related artifacts. Here are a few truncated excerpts from our conversations.
I’ll tell you about the very first time I ever did it at all: I was at Tanglewood. I was visiting in ’65 or ’66 for a performance of mine, and a composer, Paul Chihara, who was in charge of activities at that time, asked me to give a talk to the Boston Symphony Orchestra Chorus. I told him, “You’ve got the wrong idea—I don’t know anything about writing for choir.” But he tried to talk me into it. Every time I saw him he asked, “Have you thought more about my idea?” So, this one day I was walking across the lawn, and here comes Paul. I’d been avoiding him, because I didn’t want to say no to him again. So as I was walking towards him, I was talking to myself, constructing an argument. And I said, “Paul, if I were to go and work with a choir, I’d be there under false pretenses. They could teach me something!” And as I was saying this to myself, I liked it. And when I got to him, I said “I’ll do it!”
AK: We’ve conversed over email about one of the many hats that you wear: teaching children and music teachers how to compose music using graphics. Did you start composing with graphic notation when you were commissioned to write a piece for Grade 8 school band? MC: Well, that’s when I started doing it. It was taking me a while to write my first piece that could be played by a middle school band that I could have any pride in. And I figured, why not have
So I met with the chorus, and somehow—I don’t know if I came up with the idea of making abstract marks, or they did—but we
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generations/conversations M
came up with a kind of graphics, for singers. I’d never written using graphics, because I always like being specific with all the measurements. I’d write down exactly what I heard in my head. So, it was a happy accident.
what goes wrong when people fail, and said, “Why don’t we look at what goes right when people succeed?” They modelled the best golfer they could find, California’s fastest speed reader, a martial arts expert, a successful person in business, and so forth and so on.
And then years later, it struck me “Hm! That’s something I could do with kids”, because you can avoid music theory.
So, when they found out I was a composer, they wanted to model me for creativity, and said “Would you mind if we modelled you in a workshop this weekend in San Francisco?” I said, “No, fine,” so I got to take this workshop for free, and they put me under the videotape, and asked me a thousand questions, and then wrote a book that included that modelling. The book was called Tools for Dreamers, where they modelled a scientist, an inventor, and me. They kept inviting me to their workshops, to kind of show me off as an example of creativity, and through that process, I learned NLP. They started to use me as a trainer, even. I studied it, and learned it very well. And so, in my own creativity workshops, I began to employ NLP techniques.
AK: Have you ever written any choral music? MC: Mainly with orchestra. My first one was called The Earth’s A Baked Apple for teenage chorus and orchestra. It was commissioned by the Boston Symphony for their Young People’s Concerts. That was 1969. And I wrote the poetry. The lead poem was: The Earth’s a baked apple Circling on a stick of sunlight For best results, add patience and let cool. Serves: three and half billion That was the population of the world then. If you were to perform it now, it would have to be six and a half billion. AK: My trombone teacher at the University of Victoria was strongly influenced by your performance coaching philosophies, which you present in your book My Lessons With Kumi. Can you tell me about how you got into coaching performers? MC: I started giving creativity workshops around 1967, after studying acting, theatre directing, mime, dance and ballet, and all that. So I thought it would be fun to give workshops on performing at universities. One day, someone came into one of the workshops and said, “Have you ever heard of NLP?” I said, “No,” and he said, “Well you should, because you use a lot of it.” And I said “Well, then I guess I should.” So he gave me a book, and I liked the book. And I went off to California next, which is where the heart of NLP (NeuroLinguistic Programming) is. I went to their division of training and research, and met them, and witnessed the workshop, and I got very interested. What the Neuro-Linguistic people do is model people’s skills. It was started by two psychologists who got tired of looking at
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AK: You mentioned you’ve always had multiple interests, and have always been creative. What prompted you to first get into acting? MC: I was extremely busy freelancing in New York for almost two decades, in the 60s and 70s, and I got to the point where I was a little disoriented. I felt I was on a treadmill. I was playing morning, noon, and night. You know, recordings, ballet, concerts at Carnegie Hall, all kinds of things. And I got to the point where I was just running around, and I wasn’t even thinking about it, or thinking, any more. Percussion is my instrument, and I was just carrying my briefcase full of sticks from gig to gig, and no longer relating closely to what I was doing. I wrote in my book a piece about how I was walking down 57th Street one night, and suddenly I thought, “Am I going to the concert, or coming from the concert?” And then I realized Carnegie Hall was behind me, and I was walking the opposite direction. And I thought, “Wow, that’s really something,” and for a minute I thought it was funny, but then I thought, “What’s going on with you that you could play with a great orchestra and then forget about it 10 minutes later? You’ve lost the flair for what you’re doing.” It had become routine. So I thought, “I gotta do something about this. What am I going to do?” And the little voice inside me—I always listen to these little voices—said, “Study acting.” And I thought, “What? That’s really weird.”
Michael Colgrass
My girlfriend at the time was a professional actor. I went to her and I said, “You know, I have a curious desire to study acting.” So, what I was seeking was to renew the creative spark, in some way. I hardly realized that’s what it was. And I said, “I want to study with the best teacher. But, why would they take me? I have no experience.” And she said, “Well, I know someone named Bill Hickey at the Hagen-Berhoff Studio who is experimental. I think you should go to Bill; he’ll probably take you.” And I did, and he accepted me into a class. He liked my attitude. So I did an eightweek improvisation course, and then a course in scene study, and then I took a course in theatre directing, and mime, and even fencing. I was feeling that original creative spark again, by doing something new.
and I think you can help me fix it.” And often I did, because my approach was usually pragmatic. A lot of people have come to me when they’re about to audition for a symphony orchestra, and they’re uneasy about it. And I have a way of working with them. It takes about three or four hours, and that’s all they need. They’ll feel ready. And I love to do it, because that’s a creative thing, too. Working with a human being, and helping them do things better, and function with their instrument better. I think I mentioned in that explanation of my Kumi book: I look upon creating a life as the biggest creative act of all. I’ve always thought, “What kind of a life do you have?” And that incident on 57th Street was part of that. And that’s all part of the idea of creative living; living a creative life. That’s paramount to me.
AK: Did your freelancing take a backseat at this point? → You can learn more about Michael Colgrass by clicking here!
MC: I kept freelancing. But psychologically, it was taking a backseat, yes. I was paying the bills with it, and making my living at it, so I had to pay attention to it. And I was one of the inside 35 doing the top work in New York at the time. So I was on-call all the time, along with some of the best musicians of all time. It was very inspiring. But even that, when you do it a lot, especially with symphony orchestra concerts—you know, where it’s kind of the same thing—it gets to be kind of routine. Playing with someone like Dizzy Gillespie or the Modern Jazz Quartet, that was never routine—that was always special. Or Stravinsky at Columbia Records. I did recordings with him there. But a lot of the things were flat, just a repeat, kind of—yet one more Brahms symphony, or yet another same opera. So the excitement had gone off the edge of it. I wanted to put the excitement back into creativity.
For an extended version of the Colgrass interview, click here!
AK: And discovering this excitement for creativity again, was it easily transferred back to playing music? MC: Well, it revived me. I felt like a new person. I was having a hell of a lot of fun. I even got a couple of offers for jobs as an actor. (chuckling) AK: From there, was it natural to get into teaching and coaching? MC: Well, yeah. I was giving workshops a lot. And people would even come see me privately, and say, “I have a problem,
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ENLIVEN THE MA
JAPAN: NEXT
MAY 24, 2016, 8 PM
MAY 26, 2016, 8 PM
PRE-CONCERT FILM 7:30 PM
PRE-CONCERT CHAT 7:15 PM
Gallery 345, Toronto Members of Continuum & Okeanos
Mazzoleni Hall The Royal Conservatory, Toronto As part of the 21C Festival Members of Continuum & Okeanos
Works by de Wardener / Satoh / Skempton / Suzuki Tickets $25
Works by Fujikura / Kiyama / Mochizuki World premieres by Michael Oesterle & Hiroki Tsurumoto Tickets $21
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Internet Mountains
A shot from INTERNET MOUNTAINS by Clive Holden
In November the CMC showcased a recent collaboration between composer-improviser Debashis Sinha and visual artist Clive Holden. After their initial meeting, Deb and Clive recognized similarities in their respective creative work: both artists are using the computer as an actor on a field of data. Clive’s visuals include sets of digital image files and rules governing how those images are displayed—these include chance-based elements such as randomization algorithms. Deb improvises in response using soundproducing objects, principally prepared guitar, feeding into a software environment and building layers that develop over the course of a performance. The resulting first performance of INTERNET MOUNTAINS took place at the CMC on November 12, 2015. Clive Holden offers a summary of the project.
From the Clive mind… INTERNET MOUNTAINS is about the conversation between artworks that have physical mass, versus mediums that are ephemeral. The most timeless of art categories that can’t be held or weighed is music. Cinema has deepened this age-old exchange in the last century, and now new art mediums coming from digital technology are adding their voices to the mix.
All of the mountains were originally analog photographs. Many were taken over a century ago and the physicality of the photographer’s task is part of their buzz for me—the fact that they hiked to remote places with very heavy cameras is part of their images’ power. The images’ interplay with all of the purely digital visual illustration then shows the concepts at the heart of the project.
I’ve chosen to work with mountains because they’re the ultimate physical object, both in their physical presence and in their archetypal role as a symbol of stability and long duration. They buzz with this ancient power in our minds. And for many people today, the main way they experience mountains is via the Internet, which is ironic.
The most basic connection between my work and music is rhythm. You don’t need to hear a rhythm to experience it—you can see it, or simply think of it. I’ve also borrowed the concept of the musical gesture for use in the making of time-based visual art.
I’m interested in this dichotomy that seems so 21st-Century: that the form we’re looking at, that registers as “mountain” has in fact been dissolved into math and reconstituted into a digital image. It doesn’t even have the mass of a piece of photographic paper, yet we see permanence. Today, we still have to live on terra firma, but we increasingly live an existence that’s as weightless as music.
The majority of the mountain images I’m working with are sourced from the Internet. First I carve them up, in a sense, dividing the mountains from the sky, for example. Then I place them in a digital context (various softwares) where they form part of the backdrop. This is somewhat like the ‘skybox’ 3D environments where games are often made and played, but it also evokes the natural history museum diorama and its roots in 19th-Century moving image entertainment. Next I begin to draw and paint, adding digital forms and effects from there. So again there’s this conversation between forms.
One of the repeated strategies in my work is repetition itself. I’m often thinking about the fulcrum between time-based visual mediums (especially the cinematic idea of montage) and nontime-based forms (where rhythm is created through motif), and on either side, I focus on the structuring of repetition.
It was extremely helpful to see this in performance for the first time, to see that the concept is strong and works in practice with a live audience. Subsequent performances will draw heavily from our experience at the CMC.
Images from Clive’s animations and reflections from Deb follow.
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Deb Sinha mid-performance at the CMC in Toronto.
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Photo credit: Matthew Fava
“There is a relationship, but the strength of it and the points of intersection are fluid. To me, ideally a concert would be kind of like an everchanging Venn diagram of sound and vision and idea.” — Deb Sinha
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“The visual artworks certainly colour the decisions I make and the strategies I activate in accompanying them—the sound palette and effects chains I lean towards, as an example—but mostly I am interested in the connections the viewer/listener/myself are making in the immediate moment.” — Deb Sinha
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Shots from EXPOSED by Clive Holden
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A shot from MOUNTAINS, REPETITION by Clive Holden
“The gestures that unfolded, both physical and aural, as a result of my seated position were somehow deeper, and in fact I became quite emotionally tied to the audio I was creating.”
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“It was becoming more and more clear that we were, in many ways, doing the same things—but in music and visual art.”
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A shot from INTERNET MOUNTAINS by Clive Holden
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Album Reviews
Diálogos Dúo Lisus
by Martin Chandler The saxophone is an instrument of many faces: the poster horn of jazz, a je ne sais quoi in an orchestra, or a needed spanner in the works of an avant-garde piece. This versatility is on display in Dúo Lisus’ premiere album, Diálogos, released on the FonoSax label. Dúo Lisus here presents a mix of saxophone duets, from two altos to soprano and baritone. The opening piece is something of a sampler: Comala Koan by José del Valle ranges from frenetic slaps and pops to plaintive screams; friendly dialogues to the verbal one-upmanship of a political debate.
Deuce is the farthest departure in stylistic and technical eccentricity, and the classical violin-like tone and chainsaw flutter tongues are not for the faint of heart. Moving from subtone to slap tongue to key clicks, Lemay explores some of the extended techniques of the instrument. Even so, there is a clear direction, with an obfuscated opening leading to a defined climax, and ending with a denouement of whispering air and pops. A difficult piece, Dúo Lisus brings a refined clarity to it in their interpretation.
The album steps back from sonic experimentalism with Eliza Brown’s Apart Together, which is exactly as the name describes: two instruments simultaneously playing similar lyrical material. Lidehir by David Segui Gironés follows, beginning with a confused intermix of melodic ideas and culminating in a quiet, comedic ending. Stylistic range is explored in the next two pieces. Manuel Bernal’s Poema desde el vértice eléctrico del eco is, like a poem, difficult to parse in one sitting, and requires a few repetitions. This is juxtaposed with Beatybop, a more beat-driven, bebop-like contemporary classical piece by Jordi Orts.
An album of duets is a challenge to pull off, especially for an instrument like the saxophone. Dúo Lisus have taken on that challenge with gusto, embracing the instrument’s versatility to skillfully display a range of compositional and sonic styles. I look forward to further offerings from these two.
Prolongaciones, by Antonio J. Flores, the final piece on the album, brings live computer processing into the mix to create a futuristic, unsettling sound, rather like prepared piano in a dystopian world. The penultimate piece, and the album’s climax, is CMC Associate Composer Robert Lemay’s Deuce. Lemay, currently a professor of composition at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, is particularly noted for his writing for winds, and especially the saxophone. Where Marcel Mule once complained of a dearth of interesting music for the saxophone, Lemay has answered the call.
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Click here to purchase the album!
Voices of Earth Amadeus Choir, Lydia Adams (conductor), Bach Children’s Chorus, Linda Beaupré (conductor) by Alexa Woloshyn Voices of Earth is an exquisite choral album released in 2015 on Centrediscs. And this should come as no surprise, given the performers: Amadeus Choir, under Lydia Adams, and Bach Children’s Chorus, under Linda Beaupré. The beauty of this album lies not only in the high quality choral writing and excellent performances but also in the plaintive, spiritual texts.
persistently optimistic. Daley’s setting of the fourth-century Sanskrit text keeps returning to “listen.” Which is exactly what I did—with a careful ear to catch the expressive subtleties.
The most dramatic and lengthy work on the album is both its opening and namesake. Voices of Earth by Ruth Watson Henderson begins with a colouristic introduction of piano, percussion, and celeste before the choir sings out triumphantly “O most high, almighty, good Lord God, to Thee belong praise, glory, honour, and all blessing.” Throughout the twelve sections, the choir and especially percussion capture the various moods and images of the texts that alternate between a translated Canticle by St. Francis of Assisi and poetry by Archibald Lampman. Of particular note are the quieter moments, with soft unison voices that break off into perfectly tuned crunch chords. The delicacy of Voices of Earth’s ending anticipates the predominantly tender second half of the album.
While the whole album sounds as a sort of liturgy, with the many spiritually-infused texts, Imant Raminsh’s “I Will Sing Unto the Lord” intensifies this association with a text from Psalm 104 and a simple step-wise recurring phrase Bless the Lord, O my soul. The combination of the Amadeus Choir and the Bach Children’s Chorus allows for a wide range of vocal timbres and textures, from the tender reiterations of “Bless the Lord” to the sublime “face of the earth.”
Of Heart and Tide by Sid Robinovitch opens with an ethereal phrygian piano passage, but soon the timpani creates a stormy atmosphere from which the male voices effectively emerge. In this opening section entitled “Newfoundland,” the imagery of tides, red sea-kelp, and the pungent sea air is perfectly captured through the balance of unison and chordal sections, alternating men only and mixed voices. Christopher Lee (flute), Ed Reifel (percussion), and Samuel Morgenstein (percussion) are crucial to the effective mood-setting of the texts that talk of the ancient sea. However, in two extended a cappella sections, the mixed choir more than sufficiently expresses a hymn-like simplicity. The album’s third selection, “Salutation of the Dawn” by Eleanor Daley, is the only a cappella work, and this is one of the many reasons why it stands out. A salutation—an evocation: intoned by unison children’s voices on “listen.” The adult Amadeus Choir acts as echo and reinforcement for the Bach Children’s Chorus, which soars clean and clear, as if the sun really could rise through the call of these voices. The writing is predominantly consonant and
The modest yet moving Peace Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi is the text for the album’s final work, “Prayer for Peace” by Eleanor Daley. The work opens austerely, with a single organ note and repeated statements of “Lord, make me an instrument” before a series of slow chords in the female voices. As befits the text, the piece is rather subdued, but frequently includes some harmonic surprises. The austerity of the opening is soon forgotten in the warm organ tone and robust choral sections. And even in the final moments when the opening returns, the piece ultimately concludes with choirs and organ on an encouraging major chord. This album presents five great choral works as they should be heard, with all but the last piece having been commissioned for the Amadeus Choir. Furthermore, Ruth Watson Henderson and Eleanor Daley both accompanied the choirs for their respective works. Though all of the works all are English, the unfamiliar texts sometimes prove difficult to discern. However, this does not prevent enjoyment, as the mood of the texts is always clear. Listen and enjoy this musical treasure that points to Canada’s impressive choral legacy. Click here to purchase the album! ontario notations – spring 2016 | 81
Album Reviews
Spin James Harley (electronics, diffusion), Ellen Waterman (flute)
by Chris Lortie Spin – like a ragged flock is the captivating electroacoustic album by the combined talents of composer James Harley and performer Ellen Waterman. Produced in 5.1 surround on a DVD disc (stereo mixdowns of the tracks are provided as files as well), the 50-minute album allows a stunning collaboration of Waterman’s flute playing and vocal effects with Harley’s improvised electronics and spatial diffusion. Two of the compositions are presented in multiple takes due to their improvisatory nature, allowing Waterman and Harley to give contrasting variations on a theme; this speaks well to the two as a serious musical force, as they form new and engaging perspectives on the same formal material. The opening tracks, Birding I and II, showcase Harley’s electroacoustic prowess, providing a natural environment of insects and bird calls to accompany Waterman’s effortless piccolo playing. The sounds gradually morph towards a processed distortion of earlier material, providing a subtle commentary on bird calls as they are associated with classical music history. The duo write in their programmatic notes that this track “references the long association of bird sounds (from Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony to the works of Olivier Messiaen to Disney’s Sleeping Beauty).” Conceptually, this holds true: Harley reflects Waterman’s flute playing in the form of shimmering delays and granulation, granting the proverbial avian call-and-response function to the piccolo. Fluting I and II seem to aim towards a different goal entirely: using only the improvised virtuosity of Waterman’s c-flute, piccolo, and bass-flute input, Harley demonstrates an incredible palette of live electronic manipulation and 5-channel diffusion. As the duo puts it, the track can only be described as effectively “a single flutist becoming a rich choir of flute voices.” Waterman’s personality is at the forefront here; utilizing Berberian-esque vocal techniques, head-joint glissandi, tongue stops, overblowing, and the
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occasional jet whistle, she gives near the full extent of colours accessible in contemporary flute playing. This is well-matched with Harley’s careful selection of processing: an equally-stimulating lineup of harmonization, granular synthesis, and a huge-but-convincing imaginary space for reverberation. The following composition, Gating, is an intriguing exploration of the electroacoustic process it is named after. The effect is essentially a triggering of musical material when the input sound rises in dynamic above a certain threshold. Here, Harley takes to the theremin (!) alongside Waterman’s flute and vocal improvisation. The exploitation of this “gating” relationship with the electronics is made clear early on; however, the computer did not always seem to match the delicacy of the performers in its onset, but rather acted on its own musical accord. This was recovered later on as the electronic background became increasingly denser with Harley’s ominous low-frequencies. Wild Fruits 2: Like a Ragged Flock, Like Pulverized Jade begins with a weightless introduction of whistle tones by Waterman on the alto flute, a rare treat. The piece stands alone as an acousmatic composition, but is used here as a “vehicle for improvisation” in respect to a guiding text by Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek. The final product is a fitting ending to the disc, with its textual basis by Henry David Thoreau and Pilgrim offering a conceptual binding to themes of the natural environment, and—as the group poignantly writes—“the micro-ecology of specific moments in time and space.” Click here to purchase the album!
Toronto 2016 Creative Music Lab
June 19 - June 24
Visit tcml.ca to learn more
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new associate composers
noteworthy Here are updates from CMC Associate Composers in Ontario!
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noteworthy
Gordon Williamson Gordon Williamson has been appointed Guest Professor of Composition at the Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien in Hannover, Germany. He and American composer Ming Tsao are leading the Institute for New Music, replacing Rebecca Saunders (on leave) and Oliver Schneller (recently appointed to the Eastman School of Music) for the 2015-16 academic year. While in Germany, on March 29th the Asian Art Ensemble is premiering Williamson’s new work for Koto, Gayageum, Cello and Contrabass in the Konzerthaus in Berlin, Germany, commissioned by the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung.
Robert Rival Over the summer Rival completed two commissions, Badinerie for trumpet and piano, for Robin Doyon, the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra’s Principal Trumpet, funded by the Edmonton Arts Council, and a three-movement Sonata for Viola and Piano for Charles Pilon, the ESO’s Assistant Principal Viola, funded by the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. The latter received its world premiere in Edmonton in November 2015.
Rival is currently juggling two commissions, both funded by Queen’s University: a piece for double choir—for Pro Coro Canada and Toronto’s Opus 8—to be premiered at Podium 2016 in Edmonton in May; and a piece for solo kantele (chromatic zither). Other
performances in spring 2016 include Northwest Passage Variations (after Stan Rogers) with the Sudbury Symphony and the premiere of Connie Kaldor’s The Duck Goes to the Symphony with the Regina Symphony for which Rival wrote original music and arrangements.
In September 2015 Bernhard Gueller led the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra in a performance of Rival’s Spring for strings, a piece commissioned through the CMC’s Norman Burgess Fund. Symphony Nova Scotia will present the piece in April 2016. Listen to the HPO’s complete performance: Rival (left) and John Gomez, Ottawa Youth Orchestra Music Director, at the dress rehearsal of The Great Northern Diver. St. Brigid’s Centre for the Arts, Ottawa, November 28, 2015. Photo credit: Han Shen.
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noteworthy
Maria Molinari
Evelyn Stroobach
End of Days, Inc. scored by Maria Molinari with Rohan Staton opened theatrically in Toronto at the Carlton Cinema on February 18th, 2016. This feature directorial debut from Jennifer Liao is currently finishing its run of the film festivals and stars Mark O’Brien (“Republic of Doyle,” “Halt and Catch Fire”), Paulino Nunes (“Shadowhunters,” Brooklyn) and Anna Ferguson (“Heartland,” “Anne of Green Gables”). You can learn more by visiting Molinari’s website!
Stroobach received a request from Anna Rijk from the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, to be the Dutch representative at a concert entitled Women’s Composer Festival at a conference organized by the European Union. The concert will take place at the Schenkman Arts Centre in Ottawa on March 19th, 2016. Stroobach will attend alongside representatives from Austria, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Slovakia. Stroobach’s Into the Wind for solo violin and Fire Dance composed for flute, viola and drum will be performed. Stroobach’s composition Fire Dance received a live concert performance at the Wabano Centre in Ottawa as part of the Aboriginal celebration “Harvest Moon Extravaganza” on October 27th, 2015. The performance included choreography and dance by Lisa Odjig, an internationally known Ojibwe hoop dancer. Stroobach’s work has also been broadcast in recent months. Her work composed for SATB chorus and cello entitled O Come, O Come, Emmanuel was played on Women in Music at CKWR radio (Waterloo, Ontario) on December 21, 2015, and on The Latest Score at WOMR radio (Provincetown, Massachusetts) on December 22.
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Elizabeth Raum Elizabeth Raum’s new opera, Time of Trouble, was workshopped in three performances in Halifax and Lunenburg on October 23 and 24. The cast included Nina Scott-Stoddart, Maureen Batt, Andrew Pickett, Rob O’Quinn, Mary Knickle, and Eva Ernst with music direction by Tara Scott and chorus director, Jane Kristenson. Raum’s concerto for alto trombone, Olmütz Concerto, has been selected by the International Trombone Association as their test piece for the final round of the 2016 Alto Trombone Competition. Colour Code, her work for horn, bass trombone, and tuba, is being recorded by the Eastern Standard Brass Trio made up of faculty members of Indiana University
of Pennsylvania. This piece has already been recorded by John Ericson, Douglas Yeo, and Deanna Swoboda—brass faculty at Arizona State University—for their CD, Table for Three. Her Bushwakker Six Pack, version for piano, trumpet and trombone, was just recorded by the Balaton Chamber Brass on their CD Changing Times and Colors. “Banquet Hall” from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was performed by the Etobicoke Philharmonic Orchestra on October 23, 2015, and her Concerto for Violin was performed by her daughter, Erika Raum, with the Peterborough Symphony Orchestra on February 6, 2016.
Jana Skarecky Jana Skarecky’s choral Magdalene Mass was premiered on November 15 by the Gallery Choir of the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Toronto. She was very happy to hear it sound just the way she had hoped it would in the magnificent acoustic of that building—always a treat for a composer! In October Skarecky performed her new piano piece Weave and Mend at the book launch of Ann E. Carson’s new book of short stories, for which it was commissioned. The literary audience was especially appreciative of the way the music expressed the emotional journey of the story. Earlier in 2015, cellist Maksim
Velichkin premiered Skarecky’s solo cello work From Fear to Courage in Los Angeles. Based on the 15th-century Hussite chorale “Kdož jste boží bojovníci,” the music explores our inner battles to overcome fear. Skarecky has recently finished The Elves and the Shoemaker, a musical play for young children, and Kata Tjuta—Valley of the Winds for string quartet. In memory of Peter Sculthorpe with whom she had studied in Australia years ago, Skarecky is currently working on the subsequent movements of the string quartet, each inspired by a different natural location in that country.
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noteworthy
Michael Colgrass
Jan Jarvlepp
Colgrass is currently the Wilma & Clifford Smith Visitor in Music at the University of Toronto, giving lectures and workshops and coaching performances of his music. Colgrass gave a presentation at the Faculty of Music on January 26, 2016, and his work Arctic Dreams will be performed by the U of T Wind Ensemble on March 19, 2016 at the Macmillan Theatre.
On February 13, 2016, trombonist Dale Sorensen and percussionist Rob Power gave the first performance of CMC Associate Composer Jan Jarvlepp’s Light in Fog and Daylight at Suncor Energy Hall in the School of Music of Memorial University, St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada. This follows significant performances from 2015 including four performances in August of Jarvlepp’s Garbage Concerto by the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra (OSESP), under the direction of Giancarlo Guerrero with the Mexican ensemble Tambuco as featured soloists. Jarvlepp was also featured in the Music and Beyond Festival on July 13 in Ottawa as his Trio No. 3 was premiered at Dominion-Chalmers United Church.
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Peter Hatch
Jim Harley
Peter Hatch was the featured composer at this past November’s “Guelph Lecture: On Being Canadian.” On November 13, 2015, two of his string quartets—Forest for the Trees (2013) and Once Upon a Time (world premiere)— were performed by the Penderecki String Quartet in a multi-disciplinary evening that also featured authors Jaron Lanier and Lee Maracle. The latter work was also performed at Waterloo’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics on November 28th. Peter is currently working on a collaborative full evening music-theatre-physics work called “Entanglement” that will premiere in May 2016 as part of the Open Ears Festival of Music and Sound.
CMC Associate Composer Jim Harley is a leading scholar on the works of Iannis Xenakis, and Harley recently published a book entitled Iannis Xenakis: Kraanerg. The book, published by Ashgate in 2015, explores, one of Xenakis’s most significant works. You can also read about a recent recording project, Spin, on page 82 of this issue of Notations.
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noteworthy
Robert Lemay CMC Associate Composer Robert Lemay had his piece Varius Multiplex Multiformis for brass quintet selected by the International Society for Contemporary Music Canadian Section for a performance at the World New Music Days 2016 in Korea. Lemay’s piece is inspired by the book Les mémoires d’Hadrien (1951) by French writer Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987). It was written for the Quintette de cuivres de l’Université Laval and was premiered at the Église Notre-Dame-de-Jacques-Cartier in Québec City in 2006 during the College Music Society’s 48th National Conference. ISCM Canadian Section also selected works by Randolph Peters and Rita Ueda.
Monica Pearce This past October, Monica Pearce traveled to Huntsville, Texas for the premiere of her all-metal percussion quartet chain maille, with travel supported by the Canada Council for the Arts. Under the direction of percussionist/composer John Lane, the students of Sam Houston University workshopped and premiered the work, which included prepared vibraphone, glockenspiel, almglocken, a chain maille hood and various other metals. This piece is the beginning of a longer-term project for Pearce which involves a set of solo and chamber works inspired by textiles and patterns entitled Textile Fantasies. Check out Pearce featured on John Lane’s podcast Standing in the Stream, where she discusses the percussion quartet, toy pianos, operas, and more.
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Aris Carastathis A new electroacoustic work by Aris Carastathis, with video by Romanian artist Ioana Sisea, was selected by the London Contemporary Orchestra, in partnership with the Roundhouse as part of The Hub Sessions “Present Continuous” films. Titled ValuriII, the work was presented in concert on October 25, 2015 in London and is now available on YouTube. View the new work here!
Afarin Mansouri CMC Associate Composer Afarin Mansouri expanded her artistic horizons by collaborating with the Tirgan 2015 summer festival as both a soprano and composer. As part of the performance she sang one of her own compositions, Yeganeye Javedane (Immortal Unique), in Farsi. In collaboration with the Iranian-Canadian Composers of Toronto (ICOT), Mansouri is working with North York Arts (an initiative of Toronto Arts Foundation) to present an annual three-part concert series. The first concert featured ICOT’s community orchestra, and, most recently, a concert
on February 19, 2016 called The 30th Act included nine pieces and four premieres— Mansouri sang in four of the pieces in the February concert. Through all of this, Mansouri is working on a Farsi children’s song album, preparing a piece for Ladom Ensemble (to be performed this spring), and working on her PhD comprehensive exams at York University.
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