Notations Summer 2015

Notations summer 2015

+ Wendake/Huronia

A look at composition, artistic practice, and First Nations story telling

+ Generations/Conversations Features Walter Buczynski, Patricia Morehead

+ Remembering

Edward Laufer, Norman Sherman + CMC project updates, music reviews, and more!

In this issue

photo Projections featured as part of After the Fire, Directed by Ange Loft. Loft discusses the motivation for, and development of the piece in this issue of Notations. credit Jeff Bierk

26 Music for Huronia

Four hundred years ago Samuel de Champlain and a few fellow adventurers from France voyaged to the "Mer douce" or "Fresh-water sea"-today's Lake Huron-the first Europeans to do so.

32 Idle No More

"I feel like you can't just sit down and watch a show; you have to be moved around a little bit. You have to be able to actually get your hands on some of the material."

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46 Generations/ Conversations

“I actually grew up in a time where I didn't even consider that women wrote music. I didn't think about it, but just assumed that it was only men who wrote music, because all of the music I studied was by men.�

73 Memorials

Remembering the life and works of CMC Associate Composers Norman Sherman, and Edward Laufer.

Table of Contents

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Letter from the Editors A message from the Regional Council Chair 8 Ontario Project Updates 20 New Associate Composers 26 Music for Huronia 32 In Focus: Idle No More 40 In Focus: Kitchi Zibi Omàmìwininì Anishinàbe 46 Generations/Conversations 54 CD Reviews 58 Noteworthy 73 Memorials

SUMMER 2015, VOL. 22, NO. 2 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 Design Jennifer Chan cover image On Lake Mutadenenadod, North Shore, Lake Huron. John Herbert Caddy. ca. 1853. Credit: Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. R926671 Peter Winkworth Collection of Canadiana Contributors Samuel Bayefsky, John Beckwith, Menon Dwarka, Matthew Fava, Cecilia Livingston, Melody McKiver, Jeremy Strachan 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

Welcome to the summer issue of Notations! 2015 has the makings of a pivotal year for Canadian society, and as always, the arts will play a crucial role in how we document, remember, and celebrate our stories.

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olitical landscapes are far from static, and in the build up to a national election we as artists can illuminate long-standing systemic problems in our country. Canada’s ongoing history as a colonial state is rarely confronted; in many ways, public discourse regarding the ramifications of colonialism, racism, and misogyny are ignored—First Nations communities and allies have struggled in countless ways to address these issues. How do these conditions influence individual artists and communities?

CMC Associate Composer John Beckwith was recently commissioned to write a piece to mark the 400th anniversary of Samuel de Champlain’s voyage to Lake Huron that will be premiered in July. In our main article, Beckwith discusses his approach to writing Wendake/Huronia in which he seeks to look beyond Champlain’s individual story to represent a fraught and catastrophic period in our region’s history, as well as hopefulness regarding a reconciliation process between First Nations and settler communities today.

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letter from the editors

We at Notations began to consider how the voices and struggles of First Nations communities become refracted through various artistic disciplines. The tradition of Western European composition is not a ready outlet for First Nations artists, and in two of our features we share the perspectives and methods of artists who access music composition, but also have a broad definition for their artistic practice.

Ange Loft, Toronto-based, from Kahnawake Nation outside of Montréal, shares her experiences with Notations contributor Matthew Fava. In response to the Idle No More movement, Loft began documenting stories in 2013 that serve as material for ongoing, interdisciplinary, collaborative projects. Loft also offers her own reflection on the voyage of Champlain.

We also invite artist/improviser Melody McKiver to share her perspective on the relationship between Indigenous artists and codified artistic practices. Public memory of Champlain is constituted by a variety of funded celebrations of his role in Canadian history. McKiver points out: less prominent are the under-funded responses from Indigenous artists that contest or augment public memory. This is a timely article given the recent efforts of the Canada Council for the Arts regarding funding models—they are also confronting the fact that some Aboriginal artists feel that current funding structures “do not reflect their historical or contemporary cultures.”1 The current issue of Notations also includes a summary of the exciting projects that have taken place at the CMC in recent months including regional collaborations, workshops, and concert presentations.

Our Noteworthy section highlights some

of the recent achievements, and upcoming activities involving CMC Associate Composers from Ontario. We also feature a profile on the new Associate Composers who joined the CMC. Generations/ Conversations, our inter-generational interview series, returns in this issue as we feature CMC Associates Walter Buczynski and Patricia Morehead.

Our reviews section includes contributions covering recent Centrediscs and Centretracks releases that include music by Brian Harman, Aaron Jensen, and Monica Pearce.

We spend the latter portion of this issue remembering two of our associate composers who have passed away: Edward Laufer and Norman Sherman. Laufer passed away in May 2014 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he spent a good portion of his life; however a great deal of his training and early professional work took place in Toronto. Modest and inconspicuous, Laufer’s achievements in composition and analysis are considered legendary among his peers, and we are happy to share a reflection from composer Menon Dwarka, a former student of Laufer’s. Norman Sherman passed away at the age of 91 in April 2015, and we share some information on his life and works reflecting his accomplishments as a composer and musician.

We hope you enjoy the current issue!

If you want to connect with the editorial collective, contribute to future issues, or find out more about the CMC, contact ontario@musiccentre.ca!

Notations Editorial Collective Matthew Fava Jeremy Strachan Alexa Woloshyn

1. Pg 3, http://www.canadacouncil.ca/~/media/files/interim%20funding%20model%20page/conversations%20towards%20change.pdf

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A message from the Regional Council Chair

When I was a TA grading musicology papers, there were two lessons I tried to impart more often than any others. Lesson 1: Wikipedia is not a reliable source. Lesson 2: Beware the perils of generalities.

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ailing against that latter phenomenon, I (probably unoriginally) coined the phrase ’musical sports-casting,’ and I wielded my red pen with ferocity at the slightest whiff of such fluff: “Beethoven was an influential composer” and “The texture thinned like wispy clouds”… you get my drift.

And now, in defiance of both of my own rules, I give you here the first sentence of Wikipedia’s current answer to the Google search “What is Canadian Music?”—a general question that yields a remarkably general, uninspired, and absolutely fluffy answer: “Canadian music genres identifies [sic] musical sounds as belonging to a particular category and type of music that can be distinguished from other types of music made by Canadians.”1 Enter the same search for American Music and Google’s summary text at the top of the hit elaborates: “By the beginning of the 20th century, many American composers were incorporating disparate elements into their work, ranging from jazz and blues to Native American music.” 2 Although I do stand by my rule against giving too much clout to Wikipedia, these excerpts reflect in their difference a better collective understanding of American music

than Canadian. This understanding is bred from concert halls to universities (contemporary American composers are part of the canon in many music history textbooks, while Canadians are relegated to colourful text boxes and culturally interesting asides rather than critical content), and for reasons vast enough to warrant a dissertation or five on the topic, Canadian music struggles to get its story told.

Every bit as important as making sure Canadian music gets played is making sure that Canadian music gets talked about, as Barbara Scales, board president of CMC Quebec, recently reminded me.

Barbara and I, along with other members of the Communications Committee on the CMC National Board, met this month to strategize how we can work with CMC staff to shout the stories of Canadian music from the rooftops.

Have some ideas to help us make it happen?

Send me an e-mail and let’s start a conversation.

With my very best,

Andrea Warren Chair, Ontario Regional Council ontariochair@musiccentre.ca

1. W ikipedia contributors, “Canadian music genres,” Wikipedia, May 16, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Canadian_music_genres&oldid=662615409 (accessed May 25, 2015).

2. W ikipedia contributors, "Music of the United States," Wikipedia, May 19, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Music_of_the_United_States&oldid=663127750 (accessed May 25, 2015).

Ontario Project Updates Here are some of the activities that have taken place at the Ontario Region of the Canadian Music Centre. →

photo Ed Hanley performing as part of Nonclassical Global at the CMC. credit Vanese Smith

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Nonclassical Global In late November 2014, the CMC hosted the Toronto event as part of the 10th anniversary of Nonclassical – the UK based label and event series established

by Gabriel Prokofiev. This global anniversary event included performances in New York, Sao Paulo, Basel, Toronto, and London that were linked by video stream. Events centred around a virtual ensemble consisting of players in each city – CMC Associate Composer Jason Doell had his piece Animal Spirits and Quantitative Easings performed by the ensemble. The event at the CMC included performances by Wesley Shen (piano), The Afiara String Quartet, Dinuk Wijeratne (piano), Ed Hanley (tabla), SlowPitchSound (turntable/ electronics), Kyle Brenders (sax/clarinet) and Brandon Valdivia (percussion), and Tanya Goncalves (live code).

photo SlowPitchSound building his soundworld as part of Nonclassical Global at the CMC. credit Vanese Smith

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ontario project updates cmc

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Opus: Testing The CMC has continued its collaboration with Torontobased Musica Reflecta to present the bi-monthly workshop series, Opus: Testing. In January, the workshop focused on adapting Russian fables for narrator and wind quintet. Alex Eddington (narrator) and the Blythwood Winds participated, and shared five newly developed pieces by participating composers – the pieces were conceived for a young audience, and in one instance, the audience was compelled to bark like dogs.

In March, Opus: Testing featured Amely Zhou, a Toronto-based erhu player, alongside Musica Reflecta members Anastasia Tchernikova (piano) and Evan Lamberton (cello) for Instagrammophon featuring pieces inspired by a composer’s neighbourhood, workplace, and other surroundings. The performance included projections of images captured by each composer, and the music reflected harsh winters, forgotten histories, industrial spaces, the monotony and the mundane, or the inspirational in each composer’s environment.

Stay tuned for ongoing opportunities! Any Canadian composer is welcome to participate in the workshop.

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photo L to R: Anastasia Tchernikova, Evan Lamberton, and Amely Zhou performing new works as part of Instagrammophon. bottom photo L to R Curtis Vander Hyden, Michael Macaulay, and Anthony Thompson from the Blythwood credit Matthew Fava

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Class Axe Guitar Workshop The Guitar Society of Toronto and the CMC collaborated to present the first edition of the Class Axe Guitar Workshop in the fall and early winter of 2014. Overseen by guitarist Rob MacDonald, the workshop provides composers with an in-depth exploration of the classical guitar, techniques, notation strategies, and more. Composers based in Vancouver and Toronto participated, and the multi-part workshop culminated in a live-streamed performance in December at the CMC including four new pieces developed as part of Class Axe by Colin Sandquist, Jacquie Leggatt, Roydon Tse, and Lucas Oickle.

top photo Guitarist Rob MacDonald warming up before the Class Axe Guitar Concert. right photo L to R, Colin Sandquist, Rob MacDonald, and Roydon Tse at the Class Axe Guitar Workshop concert. credit Matthew Fava

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ontario project updates cmc

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OBA, OSA Reading Sessions The CMC collaborated with the Ontario Band Association, in particular OBA member Chris Dickson, to coordinate the second edition of the wind reading project. The project invites composers to submit pieces for a reading session, which took place in February. The session featured The Toronto Youth Wind Orchestra (TYWO) Metropolitan Winds, conducted by Colin Clarke. The orchestra read through nine works by composers, many of whom were present to interact with the group.

The reading project included a collaboration with Musicfest Canada in May. We were delighted to work with music educator Nikki Brown and students from Parry Sound High School who visited Toronto to work with composers Abel Borg, Jason Doell, and David Tanner. This initiative helps to connect performers and composers interested in concert band music, inspiring new performances, and new directions in concert band writing.

The CMC expanded the reading project in 2015, working with the Ontario String Association and composer-conductor William Rowson to present a similar reading session for string orchestra/ ensemble at the OSA Spring String Conference in March. Open to any Canadian composer, the session included works by high school students, educators, and CMC Associate Composers from across the country.

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cmc ontario region

top left Colin Clarke (left) conducting the TYWO Metropolitan Winds top right Jason Doell leading two groups from Parry Sound High School in a creative workshop. bottom William Rowson (right) leading a group of string students, educators, and other players in a reading session featuring Canadian works. credit Matthew Fava

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ontario project updates cmc

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Invisible Orchestra, Doors Open Toronto/Hamilton The CMC collaborated with the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra as part of their What Next Festival of New Music to showcase Canadian electroacoustic compositions as part of Doors Open Hamilton and Doors Open Toronto.

We welcomed a variety of submissions from composers across the country, and Canadians abroad, whose pieces explored sounds in unique spaces, or musical sounds as source material. Included in the installation were Ontario Associate Composers David Nichols (Slant), Gayle Young (Wavelength One), Nick Storring (Terminal Burrowing), Alice Ho (Deep Cave Oriental Beasts), and James Harley (Northern India Soundscapes). CMC Associate Composer and HPO Composer in Residence Abigail RichardsonSchulte initiated and organized the project.

At the Doors Open Toronto event at the CMC, we also launched the first public edition of a youth-focused, interactive electronic music workshop. In collaboration with Adam Tindale, Dafydd Hughes, and Rob Cruickshank, audiences were able to explore sound and composition through a tablet, laptop, and analog synthesizer.

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cmc ontario region

far left Rob Cruickshank manipulating a synthesizer and pedal as part of a special rig during Doors Open Toronto. left Adam Tindale performing on tablet. above Tindale introducing young audience members to various musical apps credit Matthew Fava (all)

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ontario project updates cmc

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Toronto Emerging Composer Award CMC Associate Composer Adam Scime was selected as the winner of the 2015 CMC Toronto Emerging Composer Award. Scime received $6,000 towards a piece for chamber ensemble in collaboration with saxophonist Wallace Halladay. The piece is intended as a companion to Hot, Franco Donatoni’s daring piece for clarinet, trombone, saxophone, percussion, double bass, and piano. Scime was publicly recognized at the Esprit Orchestra concert in Koerner Hall in March.

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photo Duo Piano 2x10 (Lydia Wong and Midori Koga) perform Alice Ping Yee Ho’s Heart to Heart at the JUNOfest showcase

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JUNOfest Classical Nominees’ Showcase The Canadian Music Centre was in Hamilton for the 2015 JUNO Awards, hosting a concert and reception as part of the JUNOfest Classical Nominees’ Showcase. Hosted by CBC Radio’s Tom Allen, the concert featured performances by Duo Piano 2X10, the Blythwood Winds, and Alexander Dobson with Stephen Philcox (performing pieces

by Alice Ho, Jacques Hétu, and Brian Current, respectively). The other nominated composers included Gordon Fitzell, and John Estacio. Apart from the composition category, nominees from other Classical categories were represented: Paul Stewart, Matt Haimovitz, and Daniel Taylor (the latter performing with Ellen McAteer).

top L to R Tim Crouch and Liz Eccleston of the Blythwood Winds performing Jacques Hétu’s Quintette Op. 13 as part of the JUNOfest Showcase. bottom L to R Steven Philcox and Alexander Dobson performing "The Pilot’s Aria" From Airline Icarus by Brian Current. credit JUNO photos by James MacDonald

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ontario project updates

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Other collaborations at the CMC Percussionist Shawn Mativetsky, a leading proponent of the tabla in contemporary composition, was in Toronto for a concert at the Music Gallery in May. We were delighted to host a workshop for composers introducing notation strategies for the tabla.

Noam Bierstone (percussion) and Joshua Hyde (saxophones) of the scapegoat duo visited the CMC as part of their North American tour. They presented an open rehearsal and discussion of the live electronics involved in performing the music of composer Mauricio Pauly. The duo performed at Ratio as part of a concert presented by Burn Down the Capital.

The CMC was thrilled to host a composer discussion in collaboration with the TSO New Creations Festival.

CMC Associate Composer Kevin Lau, who wrapped up his tenure as RBC Emerging Composer in Residence with the TSO, moderated a discussion with visiting composer George Benjamin, and CMC Associate Composer Chris Paul Harman.

right photo L to R Kevin Lau, George Benjamin, and Chris Paul Harman at the CMC during the TSO New Creations Festival.

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cmc ontario region

left photo Shawn Mativetsky presenting at the Canadian Music Centre

To be continued in the Summer You can look forward to these activities at the CMC in July and August.

July 13–17 Music from Scratch, a music education workshop for 18-25 year olds conducted

by Contact Contemporary Music, featuring resident composer Christien Ledroit July 25 Students from Regent Park School of Music premiere new works for voice and piano by Canadian composers August 19–23 The CMC renews its collaboration with the Canadian Electroacoustic Community and New Adventures in Sound Art to present the Toronto International Electroacoustic Symposium

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New Associate Composers In this section we learn more about composers who have joined the CMC in the Ontario Region. You can get more information about each composer by visiting the CMC Website. www.musiccentre.ca

Jason Doell → To learn more about Jason, click here.

What got you excited about music at a young age?

When I was young, I listened to my Dad’s Columbia House selections and made cassette compilations of my favourite songs and albums.

I would listen to these tapes so much that I eventually wore them out. Endless Summer by the Beach Boys, Born in the USA by the Boss, and Kenny Rogers’ Greatest Hits were all worn into oblivion when I was a child. When I started playing music in my late teens, I would make weirdo/ abstract 4-track recordings that sounded like echoes of worn tapes. Making mushy, ill-conceived music on tape one layer at a time, got me excited about the process of personal musical discovery.

What was the most important music concert/event you attended?

The Array Music/ Evergreen Gamelan concert in 2001 at Massey Hall. I went to listen to Evergreen because a friend had recently introduced me to Gamelan music, which I immediately adored. However, it was Flock

by Henry Kucharzyk performed by Array that totally warped my understanding of music at the time. A lot of that piece has made its way into my music over the last five years and has forever damaged my ability to hear music through more traditional ears.

What is on your personal playlist?

Most recently I have been drawing a lot of inspiration from living composers. This past year, I was pummeled by discussions regarding repertoire and it really wore me out. Most of these discussions were about dead white men who made music in a time that was very different from the one in which I’ve been living.

Although the music of those conversations may be interesting, beautiful, or important (feel free to insert your own adjectives), I began to feel less and less interested in canonized/ conventionally heralded works/composers. The music that has had the most impact on me and found itself embedded in my playlists for the last while has been the works of Linda Catlin Smith (particularly Knotted Silk...it’s a stunning and magical piece that I have been studying very deeply), Allison Cameron, Anna Hostman, Emlie C LeBel, and Nick Storring’s recent release Endless Conjecture.

How is the field of composition changing, and how do you fit in?

I don’t know how it’s changing...I haven’t been in it long enough or deep enough to really say anything important here. I’m not sure how I fit in. Sometimes, I feel like I’m on the fringes of an entrenched community...sometimes, the outside...My personality and my music probably fit best in the cracks...

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new associate composers cmc

Matthew Emery → To learn more about Matthew, click here.

What got you excited about music at a young age?

Music has always been part of my life. Growing up, my grandmother played the trumpet, my mother played French horn, and my father currently plays percussion – presently, my father plays in a community band here in London, Ontario. I grew up singing in the Amabile Choir organization. I started as a young boy in elementary school and sang with them for nearly ten years. Now, having returned to London, I am their composer-in-residence. Some of my fondest musical memories are from Amabile concerts, trips and the wonderful friendships I have made through the organization. I think singing in choir as a young person is perhaps one of the best ways to get excited about music.

What was the most important music concert/event you attended?

This past October I had the opportunity to spend a week studying with Alice Parker at her farmhouse in rural Massachusetts (coincidently the same house where Leonard Bernstein stayed when he would visit with her). She is an American composer who wrote arrangements for the Robert Shaw Chorale, and is now one of the most performed living composers worldwide. We studied scores, listened to masterpieces, worked through counterpoint and wrote many rounds.

She balanced the intense study with cooking bread from scratch, afternoon soup lunches and short hikes through the Appalachian Mountains, and of course, lots of singing. It was one of the most fulfilling and inspiring weeks of my life.

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What is on your personal playlist?

My go-to music is that of Simon and Garfunkel, late Beethoven Quartets, Sigur Rós, music of Arvo Pärt, choral music of Healey Willan and Stephen Chatman, Symphonies of Sibelius and Mahler, Elgar’s Enigma Variations and Richard Danielpour’s American Requiem.

How is the field of composition changing, and how do you fit in?

I am not sure how exactly I fit into the field of composition just yet. My hope is that the music I write is relatable and resonates with others. I hope it is relevant in some way and allows the performers to connect to their audiences.

cmc ontario region

Jason Grossi → To learn more about Jason, click here.

What got you excited about music at a young age?

My parents had an old Encyclopedia Britannica set on the shelf, which was, at that time—before the internet— the oracle of all knowledge for us. This ivory colour book set contained one page from the score of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. I must have been 9 or 10 at that time, and this one page mystified me knowing that it somehow produced all the sounds I was hearing on the turntable in a brief moment of time. I taught myself a tremendous amount from that page! I remember telling myself that I was going to learn what all this meant and that I was going to be able to create such a page one day. I’m still working on that part of the childish thought.

What was the most important music concert/event you attended?

There are a number of these…Obviously as a composer hearing your first work performed in a first rehearsal is an event to remember because it is a jarring experience. Just before they start you are hoping that the thing in your mind resembles what will come out. Luckily it did or I may have quit that day. Listening to my first work commissioned for my local orchestra was one such event. But I also recall a concert of Carmina Burana performed the full scenic way at the Musical Arts Center, Indiana University.

I was in grade 12 and, not having gone to many performances, this showed me the beginning of the interdisciplinary force composition can be in a way I never imagined and how space and design can become vital to a full understanding of a work.

What is on your personal playlist?

These days I am finding less and less time to listen or play. When I do listen, its purpose is to bring sanity back into my existence and for this Bach is the cure. I find that playing fugues relieves stress. If my schedule permits I’ll pick up the guitar and run through one of the lute suite fugues. Lately the fugue from the BWV 997 seems to work. I know some will not appreciate this but Bruckner Symphonies also have the same effect for me. Other recent listenings that I recall: Henri Dutilleux, Robert Graetinger, Montsalvatge, Per Nørgård, and Mingus’ Ah Um played very loudly was required a few nights ago.

How is the field of composition changing, and how do you fit in?

We are now a long way from the mid-twentieth century repression of simple ideas like theme and repetition which seemed to be out of the allowed vocabulary. Today the range of musical language in use from the most abstruse to the most translucent or perhaps the most academic to the utterly emotional are all available to me as a composer and audiences are more malleable to be receptive to this range. I still remember being told (and I won’t say what professors scolded me on this) not to listen to stalwart structural thinking and certainly do not be swayed by composers like Vaughan Williams or Hindemith. This is all gone today and so my palate is as open as I can put restrictions on when defining the parameters of each work.

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new associate composers cmc

Daryl Jamieson → To learn more about Daryl, click here.

What got you excited about music at a young age?

My grandfather was a church organist, and he had an organ and an upright piano in his house. I can remember going to visit from a young age and loving improvising on both instruments—not just making as much noise as possible (though I’m sure I did do that), but also trying to figure out patterns and playing little sound games with myself.

Just exploring sound. I didn’t start learning piano and composition per se until I was eight (I began writing down music almost as soon as I learned how to read music), but I can still remember how intrigued and excited I was by the instruments at grandfather’s house.

What was the most important music concert/event you attended?

This is an extremely difficult question.

There is no particular concert that stands out as the most important. Furthermore, a lot of the most creatively inspiring concerts I’ve been to were of music I didn’t like – analysing why I don’t like a particular piece often gives me great ideas for writing something more to my taste. But perhaps the most memorable concerts have been performances of pieces that I had thought I didn’t like, but due to the power of the performer, I suddenly found that I loved.

Of these sudden conversions, the one that jumps to mind is Heather Taves (and I don’t remember who else, sadly) playing the Schumann Piano Quintet at Wilfrid Laurier University when I was a student there. Up to that point I had imagined

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myself immune to post-Beethoven/preSchoenberg German Romanticism, but my mind was completely changed in one shattering performance.

What is on your personal playlist?

I got this questionnaire in December, and thus drafted this answer at a time when my literal playlist was all seasonal music, of which my favourites are Berlioz’s L’Enfance du Christ (John Eliot Gardiner, cond), Messiaen’s Vingt Regards sur l’enfant Jésus (Yvonne Loriod), and, above all, the King’s College Choir’s album of contemporary Christmas Carols (of which the best are Thom Adès’ Fayrfax Carol and Birtwistle’s The Gleam). I hear that Julian Anderson has written a string quartet entirely woven out of 300 18th century German Christmas Carols; I really want to get ahold of a recording of that piece before next year’s Christmas Season.

Addendum: Since Epiphany, I’ve been listening to a lot of Jonathan Harvey’s orchestral music (especially the Bird Concerto with Pianosong and The Glasgow Trilogy), and I’ve also just been getting into Anna Þorvaldsdóttir’s new disc Aerial.

How is the field of composition changing, and how do you fit in?

I don’t rightly know; I don’t really feel I have much perspective on ’the field’ as a whole.

I still sit at a desk with a pencil and paper, think of something to write, then I write it, and eventually one of my friends and/ or collaborators will perform it. About half

the time, I’ll produce concerts of my own and others’ music myself. All of this activity doesn’t sound to me to be much different than what Mozart got up to after leaving the employ of noble and church patrons, or what the New York School guys were doing in the 1950s. I have a website and post scores and recordings on it, which is superficially something new, but actually just a way of spreading music around, an activity that has been ongoing as long as music itself has. So I guess some things are changing, and some things are not changing so much.

I’ll keep making little spaces in the field for my own music, and keep hoping that some performers and listeners are interested enough to make some spaces in their lives for my music as well.

cmc ontario region

Colin Labadie → To learn more about Colin, click here.

What got you excited about music at a young age?

When I was six or seven, we had a small keyboard in the house. I remember you could record bass lines that would harmonize themselves, and overlay MIDI drum sounds. I used to spend hours making little arrangements of Beatles tunes that my dad had taught me. I also used to come home and plunk out tunes that I heard throughout the day, which prompted my parents to put me into piano lessons.

Although I liked the piano, it was the guitar that got me really excited. I used to rush home from school and play my dad’s guitar before he got home from work, even though I had no idea what I was doing.

career. The best concert I’ve ever seen is either Steve Reich and Friends when they performed Drumming in Toronto in 2005, or Daft Punk on their 2007 Alive Tour, when they performed in a giant pyramid.

What is on your personal playlist?

I got the idea from a friend to listen to my whole library in alphabetical order by song.

It’s nicer than a random shuffle because I’ll get interesting little pockets of music, like several different versions of the same song, or 8 adagios in a row followed by a Cannibal Corpse song. I’ve also been completely obsessed with Meshuggah and Bob Marley for the past few years, so they’re usually my go to’s on long drives.

What was the most important music concert/event you attended?

How is the field of composition changing, and how do you fit in?

I’ve been to so many great concerts over the years that it’s tough to pick just one.

Probably the one that had the biggest impact was my first rock concert when I was 15. I remember being left with the feeling that I wanted to make music as a

I try not to worry too much about how or where I fit into the field of composition.

I mostly try to keep my head down, create interesting music, and hope that it resonates with people on some level. That said, I do think it’s a challenging time for

new music. Technology is creating more avenues for people to share their art, but it’s a double-edged sword; people are oversaturated, and it’s becoming harder to find an audience. And with dwindling budgets, arts organizations are having to find new and creative ways to get people out to their concerts. But it’s not all bleak; many people are frustrated with big box stores and large corporations, and the push toward local businesses is encouraging. I think new music can find a stable home in this niche market, as long as we create space for conversation.

New Associates from across Canada: + British Columbia Wolf Edwards Jared Miller + Ontario Keyan Emami

+ Quebec James O’Callaghan Lucie Roy Phillippe Leroux Gilles Fresnais

+ International Geof Holbrook

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Four hundred years ago Samuel de Champlain and a few fellow adventurers from France voyaged to the “Mer douce” or “Fresh-water sea”—today’s Lake Huron—the first Europeans to do so. Battle wounds preventing his return to Quebec City, he spent the winter of 1615-16 in the district, which he called Huronia (it was Wendake to the natives), a chain of villages stretching from the present Penetang Peninsula to Lake Simcoe and as far as the north shore of Lake Ontario. credit A map drawn by Samuel Champlain, dated 1616, courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University

music for huronia jo

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ate in 2013, John French, director of the Brookside Music Association in Midland, invited me to compose a piece to be performed in July 2015, marking the anniversary of Champlain’s voyage. I said yes, and the Ontario Arts Council approved a commission. I had encountered Champlain’s history twenty-five years before in preparing Les Premiers hivernements (First Winterings), a work for two voices and chamber ensemble that concerned his earlier voyages in what is now Nova Scotia; its

libretto draws on Champlain’s writings. The new proposal immediately intrigued me, and has occupied much of my composing energy for over a year. The completed work, whose title Wendake/Huronia links the area’s two names, will be performed at the end of July in Midland, Parry Sound, Barrie, and Meaford by the Toronto Consort (commissioners of Les Premiers hivernements), the Brookside Festival Chorus, and Shirley Hay and Marilyn George, a pair of First Nations drummers, conducted by David Fallis, with Laura Pudwell, alto, and Theodore Baerg, narrator.

Section for alto solo and percussion from movement 5 of Wendake/Huronia, in the composer’s manuscript

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In earlier such projects, I worked with a collaborator, but searches for one this time were discouraging. As I continued to read relevant sources and interview prominent authorities, I felt more and more involved in the early-seventeenth-century events.

My paternal forbears were New England immigrants who came about a decade after Champlain’s venture. I imagined Europeans in that era learning for the first time about crossing the Atlantic and finding land: it was hard to rationalize their next move, to plant a flag and announce, “This land now

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belongs to the King of Spain (or France, England, or Holland).” Ownership of land was not part of the Indigenous way of thinking. The Wendats, inhabitants of Huronia for several generations (without feeling they “owned” it), were ready to share with the French newcomers: native canoes and native paddlers had brought Champlain to the territory. The encounter led to many profound changes: the flourishing fur trade, the first Christian missions, the introduction of European technologies. As vividly portrayed in Joseph Boyden’s recent novel The Orenda, it was a crisis period with constant deadly raids by enemy tribes—the Iroquois—and several terrible epidemics of European diseases. By mid-century, the Wendat villages were abandoned and the survivors dispersed, some to a reserve near Quebec City and others to the Midwest, where the name survives as “Wyandot.”

I decided to compile a text from various sources, aiming for a sort of impressionistic summary of the Wendat experience, before and after Champlain.

For a prologue suggesting “precontact,” I chose a feature that the French visitors found novel and remarkable: snowshoes. Against percussion imitating the sound of this mode of travel, individual voices shout out, as in a roll-call, the names of various Wendat clans. The words were provided by the linguist John Steckley, the leading authority on the Wendat language, who also kindly supplied me with a prayerlike text to be sung by the alto soloist.

Champlain’s published account of his travels (1619) includes in its second edition (1632) a poetic epigraph written by a fan.

It employs the then-brand-new terms “Canada” and “la Nouvelle France” and elaborately extols Champlain, his ventures

The Sun plants in the noon the seeds of the morning Summer lovingly bears the promise of the Spring The ripe fruit longs to fall to give Earth its children The blue eggs in the nest contain the first of birds And the trouts well concealed, guard their roe forever.

So see we in you, child, our hope, our reason, And in you we can hear the Voice of our Master.

Nephew, understand if I call you grandfather, Though you make me relive in your tender season — Georges E. Sioui “To Adario Masty, my new nephew,” 1979 (Seawi, 2013) Georges Sioui’s poem in a French translation, forms the text for movement 6 of Wendake/Huronia.

It appears in his multilingual poetry collection Seawi (New Orleans, 2013: Dialogos Books), and is reproduced here by permission.

and his writings. I decided to set three of its four stanzas, in a contrapuntal choral style that might sound “European” after that prologue.

Like snowshoes in winter, canoes in summer were new and fascinating to the French, who admired both the vessels and their adroit management by Aboriginal inhabitants. My third panel is an instrumental evocation of canoeing, accompanying extracts from contemporary descriptions chanted by the chorus.

The fourth panel is the most extended.

I first read of the traditional “Feast of the Dead” in Olive Dickason’s groundbreaking study Canada’s First Nations. It is described in a chapter of The Orenda.

The Wendat term translates as “Feast of Souls”. Once a decade or so, villagers would disinter their deceased and transport their remains to an agreed central

place where in a week-long ceremony of dancing and chanting they would rebury them in a common plot, with furs, food, ceramics and other artifacts. The early French observers all mention this festival, including Champlain, the Récollet missionary Gabriel Sagard (copying Champlain almost word for word), and the later Jesuit missionary Jean de Brébeuf.

The 1636 account by Brébeuf is the most elaborate, suggesting by its first-person comments that, unlike Champlain and Sagard, he actually attended a Feast. While still regarding native peoples as “savages” and “barbarians,” he was clearly touched by their devotion. I felt a musical depiction of the Feast was essential, but found it hard to imagine short passages from the Brébeuf text being sung. The solution is to have them spoken by a narrator against instrumental and choral sound-

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music for huronia jo

illustrations.

Bruce Trigger’s The Children of Atahentsic (1976) and Georges Sioui’s Les Wendats (1994) are the most profound studies of the Wendat history. As an appendix to Les Wendats, Sioui published a paper he gave at Laval University in 1992 on the five-hundredth anniversary of another famous voyage, that of Columbus.

It recounts the life-patterns of Wendats in the years 992, 1492, and 1642. His picture of the state of Huronia a century and a half after Columbus affected me deeply.

He imagines a young Wendat, having lived through the crisis of European “takeover,” calling on the Great Spirit to restore his people to their former dignity. When I interviewed Sioui in Ottawa, he generously gave me permission to set this “lament” as my fifth panel. It is sung by the alto soloist and the men of the chorus, mostly in unison, accompanied almost exclusively by the percussion; the whole chorus joins in the final spiritual outburst.

“But,” Georges Sioui advised me, “don’t end there.” He thought the angry lament should be followed by more optimistic sentiments, reflecting today’s efforts towards reconciliation of Aboriginal and settler cultures. In his most recent book of poems, Seawi (2013), I found an English-language poem addressed to his infant nephew, expressing hopes of a more peaceful future. The text of Wendake/ Huronia is in Wendat and French, for which Brookside has promised supertitles of the English translations (no one spoke English in Huronia in 1615). I asked Sioui if he would translate that poem into French, and he said I should make my own translation. I gave it a try, and was pleased that he made only one correction.

Among the Consort’s available

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instruments, I chose those most suited to a seventeenth-century Canadian setting: recorders, lute, mandolin, viola da gamba, chamber organ, and (a first in my composing experience) hurdy-gurdy; plus —for percussion—drums, rattles, sticks, and scrapers. I felt I should avoid metal percussion but on learning that small bells were favored at that time as trade items allowed myself a hand-bell. Shirley Hay, one of the First Nations drummers, sang me, to her own drum-beat, a traditional Ojibwe “mourning song,” and gave me permission to quote it as a coda to the Feast of Souls movement. She will sing it in the premiere, with phrases repeated by the choir, as if she is teaching it to them.

A map drawn by Samuel Champlain, dated 1616, depicting the St. Lawrence Seaway, the great lakes, and surrounding regions. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University →

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Have not been idle matthew fava & Jeremy Strachan photo After The Fire, audience movement during performance. credit Jeff Bierk

Ange Loft is the Assistant Artistic Director of Jumblies Theatre in Toronto, and has worked throughout Ontario with various organizations such as Aanmitaagzi in Nipissing First Nation, and Thinking Rock Community Arts in the Algoma Region.

She is outspoken and passionate about engaging communities through the arts, and sharing her skills and experiences with others. Loft and Jumblies have collaborated with the Canadian Music Centre to present “Composing Community�, a workshop designed to introduce composers to community arts practice and interdisciplinary collaboration.

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This premise relates closely to some of Loft’s own artistic work. In January 2013, she issued a call on social media for participants to be interviewed for a documentary performance project on Idle No More.

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he purpose of the project was to hear from voices across North America about the movement.

In our discussion, I asked her about the origins of the project, and the performances that have resulted thus far; in addition, we had a chance to reflect on her creative methods and how they contrast some traditions in composition.

MF: I’m wondering if you could just begin by saying what you view as your artistic terrain?

AL: Sure. I grew up out of doing community musical theatre in Kahnawake Mohawk territory and that made me have to be able to learn how to make anything out of anything; trying to figure out how to make as much as we can with as little as possible. Using everything we had to get our work made regardless.

MF: How did the Idle No More project begin?

AL: Around November 2012, people started getting really excited about countering Bill C-45, the omnibus bill.

People were getting more informed and raising public awareness about it. At the same time, I was unemployed for a month

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and was working at a cigarette shack in Kahnawake. So I was sitting at a computer for a good chunk of the day, and I was going through all of these internet discussions— constant articles, and I was getting overwhelmed with the chatter online, and that feeling of how there’s no way I could get to the bottom of what’s happening, because there was no way I could read that much. Like, I actually couldn’t absorb every bit of information, and all the countering opinions. Not to mention the ridiculously horrible comment sections following every single article. So, I was getting really frustrated with this feeling that it’s going to get absorbed into the ridiculous cloud.

And it’s going to dissipate, right? That all of these words are going to wash away, and we’ll all forget.

What happened was that I put out this call; it went all over the Internet. It was a really convoluted call. I want people to answer these three questions; How did we get to this point? What does this moment mean to you? Where do we go from here?

I wanted people to answer these questions truthfully…we don’t need the academic stuff.

What I really wanted to hear was personal. I wanted to know: Who was on board? Did they appreciate what’s happening? How were

they being affected by it? I got some really intense and diverse responses.

MF: And how did the project evolve from that point?

I conducted about twelve of the interviews myself, and then other people were doing interviews as well. Some interviewed themselves with the questions and submitted their responses that way. It was kind of overwhelming, because I suddenly had all of this audio recording—without

have not been idle

photo Rosina Kazi of LAL performs spoken word piece from interview text. credit Jeff Bierk

funding—and I decided I was going to sit down and slowly chunk through transcribing these things. I had a hard time because I applied to two theatre creators reserve recommenders with this project at a time when I hadn’t fully wrapped my brain around it yet. Actually, I got denied and was told that the project was not relevant, and that I should just be making a filmed documentary. And I was like, well that’s too late; I already have all

the audio. What I really wanted to do was figure out how to work with verbatim text.

Creation from interviews had always been an interest of mine. I come from a place of story weaving (I work with Spiderwoman Theatre), and have a multi arts approach to creating. I feel like you can’t just sit down and watch a show; you have to be moved around a little bit. You have to be able to actually get your hands on some of the material.

MF: You recently presented elements of this project at Jumblies. What was the outcome of this first production?

We had people cutting stencils to answer the question “how did we get to this point?”

So we ended up with this long projected scroll of shadow stencil art full of churches and birds, and things burning down, and stuff falling out of the sky and all of these symbols of really “how did we get to this

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in focus

Dustin Frank with written audience response to "One word for Idle No More". credit Jeff Bierk

point?” It got really dark; it was kind of great. [For] “What does this moment mean to you?” we responded with jewelry; so I wanted people to be able to find beads and materials they were drawn to and just go with it. The last question was “where do you want to go from here?” And that was actually almost a petition campaign, so we had these beautiful silkscreened postcards that I got made of the poster image. We had people actually write to various federal departments, and they’re being currently mailed out, little by little, just in case they decide to throw them all out [laughter].

[For] Weaving, I worked with Muriel Miguel in the initial development period, which was amazing to get somebody who’s such a pro wordsmith, a movement and action kind of story weaver to bust us out of our shells and get us on our feet. I’m working with a lot of people who are multi-

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arts people in the first place. So: sound artists; visual artists who also perform; vocalists.

So our group was really diverse, not just native folks, but people who I really appreciated, people who felt drawn to the material, and people who I really wanted to work with. That was my team, and we made something really weird, and hopefully it’s going to be able to come back. We want to make it a tourable package that can go to schools and community centres.

MF: How does your process relate to a tradition of music composition that often finds the composer working in isolation?

AL: I considered After the Fire a community-engaged piece. If you want to make a community art piece, and it turns out exactly like what you had in your

imagination, then it’s not a community art piece. […] You can see when the artist’s hand is definitely guiding the process, and with this one I had the challenge of seeing what these artists wanted to contribute, and also honouring the words and intentions of the interviewees.

I have my own visual arts practice, and that’s actually done in the way that you describe. I do historical research in archives and I jump off it and make my own work. That’s the only time that I like working by myself. But I feel like if it’s something performative and durational, you kind of have to have a lot more input.

That’s just my personal approach to it. I’m not like a playwright. […] I don’t identify with that process of creating, where you just write something and you expect somebody to put it up. I work with people and off of people. I don’t really identify

have not been idle

top photo Stephen Harper head patrols during Government audio collage. bottom photo Ange Loft, Gilda Monreal, Dustin Frank, Cherish Violet Blood, Iehente Foot, and Rosina Kazi. credit Jeff Bierk

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in focus

Performers Cherish Violet Blood, Dustin Frank, and Gilda Monreal in “after media relations” scene. credit Jeff Bierk

with the established processes and divisions of labour prominent in Western theatre and composition.

MF: I’d like to think that the artistic process you describe is one of the things that can strengthen organizing, such as with First Nations solidarity. How do you feel art making and political organizing are related?

AL: It’s that frustrating thing where you’re like, “You know we could talk about this for ever and ever and ever and nothing is going to change.” It’s like going to policy meetings, which are the only things that may conceivably affect any of these discussions. You’ve just eaten like twenty croissants over the past two weeks and you realize, man we didn’t get anything done.

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There’s nothing; you’ve argued about three words.

When it comes down to it, there’s no reason for me to not be making these wild huge creations, and involve as many people as I possibly can. Because if we are not actually doing something together, there’s no way we’re going to figure out how to work with each other.

The government talks of this journey to reconciliation… I don’t want to talk about reconciliation. I just want to get you rolling around on the floor together and let you figure out, “alright, if you move this way, what do I have to do?”…

Collaborative composition, working with people trying to get everybody’s voices involved, is what I consider embodied sovereignty. Because everybody gets their own chance to do or say or make.

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aside...

I explained the origins and context of John Beckwith’s piece Huronia/Wendake to Ange, and she responded with a lengthy lesson about Samuel de Champlain’s first voyage down what is now the St. Lawrence River. As Ange tells it, Champlain met a group of Mohawk on the shores of the river who were there, and who provided Champlain and his severely ill men with restorative cedar tea. Seven years later, when Champlain returned on his second voyage, he encountered no people in the same location. Travelling further west, Champlain met what would have likely been Algonquin people, and inquired of them as to what happened to the group they’d earlier encountered. The Algonqiun couldn’t tell them, and Champlain’s claim to sovereignty over those territories—what is now Montreal and environs—is based on the false assumption that the land was

vacated. This is untrue, given that Champlain happened to catch those people during a period of seasonal fishing; the land was simply temporarily unused when Champlain travelled there again.

Ange recounted a second story about the explorer Simon Fraser’s assumption that the area of Enderby, B.C. was also without people when he “discovered” the territory and recorded such observations in his journal.

There exists, however, a counter-narrative, as oral history tells us that the Indigenous people inhabiting those lands merely chose to remain unseen, observing the British explorer from a distance until they felt it necessary to make themselves known. In Ange’s view, both viewpoints (in both instances) are important, and contribute to the cultural truth of each side of the story.

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Kitchi Zibi Omàmìwininì Anishinàbe On Responding to Colonial Nostalgia Melody McKiver

photo still taken from Melody McKiver’s stop motion film of Kitchi Zibi Omàmìwininì Anishinàbe's Light Party

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As the capital of Canada, Ottawa is filled with statues and monuments that carefully curate a colonial nostalgia for “explorers” and “discoverers,” with little consideration for the Indigenous peoples that were displaced in the process of such violent discovery.

Ottawa is located on unceded Algonquin territory along the shores of the Kitchi Zibi (Ottawa River), and is in the eastern portion of Anishinaabe territories which stretch across a significant portion of North America.

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uch of my matrilineal family continues to call home Obishikokaang (Lac Seul First Nation), an Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) community in beautiful Treaty #3 territory in Northwestern Ontario. Though my heart lies in the northwestern portion of Anishinaabe Aki, I currently live as a visitor in Algonquin territory.

One of the major landmarks in Ottawa is a statue of Samuel de Champlain created by Hamilton MacCarthy in 1918. Situated behind the National Gallery of Canada at Nepean Point and overlooking the interprovincial Alexandra Bridge, which provides a connection from downtown Ottawa to Gatineau Québec, Champlain hoists his astrolabe (erroneously sculpted upside-down) triumphantly. In 1924, an additional statue of an unnamed “Indian scout” was added at the base of the Champlain statue with the intention of paying tribute to the Indigenous peoples that guided Champlain in his “explorations.” The anonymous scout spent decades kneeling at Champlain’s foot, gazing up in subservience.

After protestation from the Assembly of First Nations in the 1990s, the Anishinabe Scout (formerly known as the Indian Scout) was moved to nearby Major Hill’s Park as a compromise. Throughout the years, Indigenous artists such as Jeff Thomas and Greg Hill have

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referenced the Anishinabe Scout in their works, and in 2013, the Ottawa Ontario 7 (OO7) Indigenous arts collective revisited the yetunnamed statue as part of a show at the neighbouring Blink Gallery also located in Major’s Hill Park. As part of the OO7 show, local Anishinaabe artist and filmmaker Howard Adler (Lac des Mille Lacs First Nation) invited Annie Smith St. Georges, a local Algonquin Elder, to hold a naming ceremony for the Scout. At a gathering around the statue, the Anishinabe Scout was gifted with the name Kitchi Zibi Omàmìwininì Anishinàbe. Through the act of naming, the intent was to humanize Indigenous peoples that are too often left anonymous in historical records, represented as a uniform “Indian,” and acknowledge that Champlain was guided through the region by Omàmìwininì people who were all complex, distinct individuals with their own names.

Shortly after the naming ceremony, a major light and sound installation by French artists from 1024 Architecture was commissioned by the National Capital Commission and the Embassy of France. Held over three evenings on September 19-21 2013, the Plain-Chant event was in commemoration of the 400th anniversary of Samuel de Champlain’s arrival to the region not yet known as Ottawa. The narrative of “discovery” and celebration

Kitchi Zibi Omàmìwininì Anishinàbe

photo The statue of Kitchi Zibi Omàmìwininì Anishinàbe in profile with the statue of Champlain in the distance. credit Kitchi Zibi Omàmìwininì Anishinàbe’s facebook page

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of male European explorers is a rampant narrative throughout Canadian nationalistic art projects. Considering Kitchi Zibi Omàmìwininì Anishinàbe’s closely-linked history with the Champlain statue and omission from the officially sanctioned celebrations, the OO7 Collective - now also helping Kitchi Zibi Omàmìwininì Anishinàbe with the maintenance of his very own Facebook account, the source of the photo on the previous page—decided to host an ad hoc, unfunded celebration.

A group of partiers, decked out with dollar store glow sticks, bike lights, and Indigenous music playing off of a set of portable speakers, gathered to celebrate as the sound and light from the nearby PlainChant installation spilled across the park.

For these reasons, I extend the metaphor of Kitchi Zibi Omàmìwininì Anishinàbe’s statue, previously cast under Champlain’s statue, to struggles that Indigenous artists confront in their efforts to express their cultures, traditions, histories, and aspirations.

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Consider these two contrasting artistic installations as a metaphor for the broader climate of the dialogue between Indigenous histories complicating Canadian state narratives, and interactions within artistic communities. In the recent closure of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), there has been a push for Canadians of all backgrounds to read the full Executive Summary and implement the 94 Calls to Action brought forward by the TRC. Referenced throughout the TRC is the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), including a call to implement concrete measures to achieve the goals of UNDRIP. Article 15 1. of UNDRIP notes that “Indigenous peoples have the right to the dignity and diversity of their cultures, traditions, histories and aspirations which shall be appropriately reflected in education and public information” (emphasis added).

Comprehensive artistic engagement with historical narratives, especially those that reflect the ongoing colonization of Canada and the impacts upon Indigenous peoples whose lives, lands, and well-being have been disrupted, is essential to any meaningful reconciliation process.

With the ongoing emphasis on colonizing figures such as Champlain, the experiences of a vast and diverse group of peoples continue to be reduced to a homogenous whole. Sadly, any musical responses that could be led by

the creative direction of Indigenous artists does not at first glance seem to receive any commissions from the major provincial and national funding bodies dedicated to the arts in Canada. For these reasons, I extend the metaphor of Kitchi Zibi Omàmìwininì Anishinàbe’s statue, previously cast under Champlain’s statue, to struggles that Indigenous artists confront in their efforts to express their cultures, traditions, histories, and aspirations. In the context of ongoing work from concert music organizations to develop younger and more “diverse” audiences, and in recognition of UNDRIP’s call of appropriately reflecting the diversity of Indigenous peoples, I challenge arts organizations and funders to continue to invest in the professional development, mentorship, and presentation of Indigenous artists at all stages of their careers.

Kitchi Zibi Omàmìwininì Anishinàbe

Kitchi Zibi Omàmìwininì Anishinàbe's Light Party (Melody McKiver 2013)

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/

Generations Conversations An inter-generational interview series that connects young composers and performers with senior and established CMC Associate Composers in Ontario.

Participants are paired up to share their histories, and contrast their experiences in the field of music and the arts. In this issue we learn more about two composers: Patricia Morehead and Walter Buczynski.

a conversation with

Patricia Morehead

By Amanda Lowry

generations/conversations pa

Patricia Morehead is an accomplished composer and musician who has lived in Chicago for the majority of her professional life; however, the impetus for composition came during her studies in Toronto. I had an opportunity to connect with Morehead as she was preparing to move from the “Windy City” to Ontario.

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orehead shared many experiences about the kinds of organizing and creative energy involved in fashioning a career in the arts, in particular as a woman in contemporary composition. Here is an excerpt of our discussion:

AL: What is your musical background, and how did you arrive at composition?

PM: My background is a degree in oboe performance from the New England Conservatory. I really didn’t do any composition there, but did compose every week in an orchestration class in my final year. I actually grew up in a time where I didn’t even consider that women wrote music. I didn’t think about it, but just assumed that it was only men who wrote music, because all of the music I studied was by men. When I was in Toronto I took a summer class with Dr. Samuel Dolin and wrote my first piece. I started writing around the age of 39. Actually the first piece I wrote was a little oboe d’amore and percussion piece. Everyone in the class was a composer except for me at the time. I studied with him for the next few years while I was teaching oboe and chamber music at the Royal Conservatory.

When we moved to Chicago I registered for a Continuing Education Composition Course at the University of Chicago with Ralph Shapey, and I did that for three years. Then I finally decided, well, I’d better jump into the PhD course in composition. I did it part time as I was teaching the whole time, and it took forever for me to

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get my degree but I eventually graduated with a PhD in composition from the University of Chicago in 2005. I studied with Ralph Shapey, Shulamit Ran, and John Eaton. In many ways my main teacher was Dr. Dolin, who was the one that got me started, and who was a wonderful encouraging man.

AL: You said that it didn’t even occur to you when you were younger that women could write music; as you became aware that it was a possibility, were there any female composers whose music influenced you?

PM: I was asked to play a piece by a woman composer, Ruth Crawford Seeger, after I graduated, by one of the teachers from the Royal Conservatory, Pozzi Escot. Thus the first pieces I learned by a woman composer were solo pieces for flute or oboe. I was also working with a woman composer, Ruth Lomon. She had written me two wonderful pieces and she always felt that I should write music and so she always encouraged me! So there were two Ruths in my life that were influential in getting me started.

AL: How has your performance experience influenced the way that you write?

PM: I think I like to consider that the performers should be challenging themselves with the music that I write, but they should

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also be able to enjoy it. And when I’m writing for more instruments than just my own, I make sure that everybody has an important role to play in the piece.

Also, it’s very important as a composer to investigate what is possible on an instrument, and of course these days, there’s been a lot of use of extended techniques. I was very fond of this type of music in the beginning, though I’m less fond of it now. It’s very important to make the extended techniques you do use be a true part of the communication process with the audience. If not, then they’re just an etude: they don’t add much.

AL: What about your compositional process? Where do you look for inspiration, where do your ideas spring from and how do you develop them?

PM: I would say this method I studied with Ralph helped me very much—being able to develop a motif for instance. His method of composition really influenced me very strongly that way. As for inspiration, I’ve had a very strong relationship with performers on what they would like me to write for them. I had a flutist ask me to write her a piece and she said “Would you write me something with a beautiful melody? I want something that I can relate to.” So I worked on that with her and that turned out very well. I have a piece called Edible Flute, which is based on a book by Margaret Atwood called the Edible Woman.

The book itself had a profound influence on me when I read it and when I decided to use it for inspiration I didn’t go back and read the book; I just went back and used the ideas that had struck me at the time. And then, talking about inspiration, I was asked to write a piece for orchestra by an amateur group here in Chicago; I’ve written two

pieces for them. I wrote one about the city of Chicago called Cityscape. By the time I wrote for them the second time they were a much better orchestra, and the inspiration for that was the movie Metropolis for one of the movements, and then I used some music that I’d been writing for an opera.

AL: One of the things that I find intriguing about opera is that it’s much more collaborative than most composing, because as composers we end up so isolated, until you get to the stage of everything being written down and finally you’re working with the musicians, hopefully, to bring it to life; but with an opera there are so many more aspects to it and it seems much more collaborative.

PM: It is, and I actually enjoy the collaborative process. I’ve done a few short films, and there you have to satisfy the filmmaker with the music you’re writing, and that’s always a challenge. What helps is to have them send you music that they like from films they know. I’ve just recently completed an eleven-minute musical accompaniment to a video of a man doing two sketches of the Chicago skyline. I was working with the videographer, and it took me several tries before he was happy with it, and one of the things one has to remember is that the music cannot overwhelm the visuals. With this video I was able to try and capture the rhythm of the person drawing and stay pretty much in the background.

AL: I know you’ve been involved with the conference for women composers as well as some other organizations specifically for women composers. What kinds of challenges have you found in working with those organizations?

PM: Well, I think the issue with women composers is visibility. If you take a look at what concerts are playing, there are very few women represented, and so these organizations exist to raise the profile of women composers, and also to help them to push to get their music in front of these different organizations for the possibility of performance. I’ve been on selection committees where the men just throw out all the women composers, and I would keep bringing these scores back and say we really should take a look at these scores.

I think that’s changed now; I think that women have much more visibility, but the fact that the repertoire is so out of date means that women get excluded. I started a music group, CUBE, here in Chicago that went on for 25 years and the most important thing was to get local composers performed and to get women on the programming as much as possible.

AL: I think there’s a bit of a lag too.

Even as more women are composing, the presenting organizations are really focused on music from the 70s and 80s at best, and more recent music is not being played.

PM: That’s true. That’s one of the reasons I started the group, and also most of the music that’s on my two recordings has come from those CUBE concerts. I was able to fortunately have very good performances. Without CUBE I would have had to find situations to have the music performed and recorded. → Click here to explore Patricia

Morehead’s music!

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a conversation with

Walter Buczynski

By Sammy Bayefsky

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generations/conversations

At age 81, CMC Associate Composer Walter Buczynski remains active as a pianist and composer. Amiable, opinionated, and self-deprecating, during our conversation, Buczynski was just as curious to hear about my experiences as an undergrad at the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto, as he was willing to offer his own stories.

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t is rare to speak with an artist whose career involved performing as a soloist in a concerto in one concert and having a major work performed in another. Buczynski discussed his balancing act as a pianist and composer, while also devoting much of his life to education.

SB: How did you get into music?

WB: I started piano lessons around the age of 10 with a man named Ernest Dainty, who played organ for the hockey games at Maple Leaf Gardens. He introduced me to Beethoven and got me playing slow movements of the piano sonatas. When he died, I ended up studying with Earle Moss at the age of 13. I then studied theory and composition with Godfrey Ridout and by the time I was 16, I had my ARCT from the Conservatory.

SB: What were some of your earliest musical influences­—either classical or popular?

WB: I’ve always been interested in pop music. My favourite singer is Frank Sinatra. Classical? Bach. I used to play a prelude every day for sight reading purposes. When I was in Paris studying with Nadia Boulanger, we had a session where we would sight read Schubert songs up a minor third, down a minor third, etc. It took concentration and focus: good skills for a musician.

SB: What else did you learn from Nadia Boulanger in Paris?

WB: Sixteenth-century counterpoint. Nadia did not teach harmony to any of her students. The students that she had were already accomplished so when they came to her, she went back to the fundamentals. It was worth every second. On top of that, she taught you how to teach yourself.

SB: After teaching piano and theory at the Royal Conservatory, what was it like to teach composition at the University of Toronto?

WB: It was terrific. I loved teaching. The students made me feel as young as they were. We had group lessons of 3-6 students, which was good because in 1-on-1 lessons, the students never had enough work for me to criticize to fill the hour. In the group lessons, the students could learn from everyone’s music.

SB: When did composition eclipse performing as the main focus of your career?

WB: By age fifty I was strictly composing. However, in my last three years at the Faculty, I started writing a lot of songs for another faculty member, Lorna MacDonald, and I would accompany her on the piano when she sang them.

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walter buczynski

But I’m 81 and it just dawned on me that I’m doing the same thing with my sonatas as I did with my 24 Preludes thirty years ago. They are all one-movement pieces that take an idea and run with it. However, I’m careful to look for musical ideas that lend themselves to development. It takes many pieces to learn what works and what doesn’t.

Also, I like writing songs. It’s my favourite thing to do because it’s the easiest—you got the words to guide the music. But you have to take time to look for the right text.

And in the time I spend looking for text, I could’ve written another sonata!

SB: What else do you like composing?

WB: I used to write background music SB: A rather humourous piece of yours, Burlesque (1970), contains the line “To compose or to practice, that is the question.”

WB: Yes, that was in my theatrical period

added, “you know, Beethoven wrote thirtytwo.” Now it’s actually in my range. If I devote my composing to nothing but piano sonatas for the next few years, I can catch him. I’ll make sure I write thirty-three, though. I’m on my fifth piano sonata since September and I’ve got to get going if I’m gonna catch Ludwig.

in the early 70s. Nothing has changed. I really still have the same problem today: to compose or to practice. But I’ll tell you what’s happened to me lately. I think I’m going to give Beethoven a run for his money. I’m on my sixteenth piano sonata.

SB: Tell me about your piece, The August Collection: 24 Preludes for Piano. How did you approach this work?

SB: Would you care to elaborate?

WB: It was written in 95-degree heat, and

WB: I had an experience I’ll never forget.

I was in my office at the Faculty on the second floor, and Pierre Souvairan, one of the top teachers of piano at the Faculty, came to my door and asked what I was playing. I told him it was my third piano sonata, he said it was very good, and

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I don’t tolerate heat. I’m like a jellyfish in that weather. So here’s what I did: whatever came into my head, I put it down on the paper. It might’ve been three notes, it might’ve been two bars, and then I’d ask myself, “how can I make this into an entity in and of itself?” That became my task.

for CBC’s The Friendly Giant for ten years. They wanted one-minute pieces, and I would write these virtuoso pieces for two recorders and spinet. I also wrote background music for CBC Radio’s children shows. Everyday it was six seconds of swirly music or murky, spooky music. Then I would take these bits and turn them into longer children’s pieces.

You see what I’m getting at with composition? You can take something completely nebulous, and with your creativity, you can make something out of it. You’ll find that the more you do it, the more it will start doing itself. You’ll say “holy moly, there must be a force here!”

That’s the wonderful thing about creativity.

All of a sudden you surprise yourself. You went there, but your mind wasn’t there. → Click here to explore

Walter Bucynskis’s music!

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CD Reviews

From Sea to Sea

Aaron Jensen

Review by Sammy Bayefsky

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rom Sea to Sea, a recent release from the Centrediscs record label featuring the music of Associate Composer Aaron Jensen, paints an incredibly colourful image of Canada, as the composer sets one piece of poetry from each of the 13 provinces and territories to choral music. The album features choirs such as The SING! Singers, The Elmer Iseler Singers, Cawthra Park Chamber Choir, and Countermeasure (of which Jensen is the musical director).

Beautiful jazzy harmony is scattered throughout the album, in pieces such as “Sing me the Songs I love, Once More,” “Onions,” and “Pulse.” Jensen has an incredible ability to create layers within his pieces. In “Eunoia,” countermeasure generates a funky polyrhythmic groove by accentuating different vowels and consonants while text about text is spoken on top (almost reminiscent of Radiohead’s OK Computer). But Jensen doesn’t sit with one style for too long. He bounces from percussive sailor songs right into vocoder-electrified dance tunes, and from atmospheric throat singing into more traditional choral pieces.

The versatility of style is quite impressive for an almost entirely a cappella album. When Jensen does add percussion, it is always light and it blends seamlessly with the voices. This blending of different

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textures is really what makes the music so successful. Just as the voices of the choirs blend into one, so too do all of Jensen’s ingenious vocal techniques and audio effects. The whispers, whistles, yodels, and beat boxing don’t sound out of place as one might expect of such unconventional effects; instead, they fit right in the choral context and enhance the pieces.

“Poems in Braille,” with text by Gwendolyn MacEwan, has an interesting backstory. According to the liner notes, Jensen transcribed some of the poem into braille before converting the braille into musical notes. Sung by KAJAK Collective featuring Andrea Koziol, the piece sounds simultaneously acoustic and electronic.

The same ambiguous atmosphere is created in the grand finale of the album, “Opera Somnia,” where Jensen takes the elements of modern electronic pop music and transposes them into a choral medium. Each section of the choir takes on a different aspect of the band: bass, synth lead, synth pad, percussion, and so on. It will make you dance like you’ve never danced (to choral music) before! → F or more information and to purchase

the recording, click here!

In the Forest, Glow

Monica Pearce

review by Cecilia Livingston

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n the Forest, Glow by Torontobased composer Monica Pearce is now available as a “single” through Centretracks, and at just more than eight minutes, it’s a lovely sample of Pearce’s work. Combining bass clarinet, piano, and an eclectic mix of percussion instruments—including dry leaves, terra cotta pots, glockenspiel, and a golden bowl—this highly atmospheric, programmatic work responds to an evocative image from Toronto artist Brandon James Scott. The image now forms the track cover, and was projected during the premiere performance. And while that visual element isn’t quite as immediate in this live concert recording, Pearce’s frank, conversational program notes make the connection clear.

Opening with the mysterious rustling of dry leaves, setting us in the shadowy forest of both Scott’s image and the poem Pearce wrote to guide the players through the score, Pearce blends her unusual percussion palette with a vivid range of sounds from the bass clarinet, which really becomes the star. (Indeed, the interactions of percussive material in all three instrumental voices is the most intriguing aspect of the piece.) Impeccably played here by Jeff Reilly, the clarinet becomes a mysterious character luring us further down the enigmatic path the piece takes,

with its sudden turns into more aggressive material, and the eventual return of the gentle, rustling opening. Pianist Simon Docking and percussionist D’Arcy Gray shine in a shimmering, simple piano-andglockenspiel duet in the middle section, when the music glows indeed.

The recording is immaculate, with the most silent live audience of all time all time—they really only make their presence known in the applause at the end. It’s well-deserved, and anyone looking for a sonic amuse-bouche should check out Centretrack’s jewel-like offerings in this digital format, and they’d do well to start with this new work. → F or more information and to purchase

the recording, click here!

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CD Reviews

Sewing the Earthworm

Brian Harman, Canadian Art Song Project

review by Cecilia Livingston

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he Canadian Art Song Project has released another remarkable recording (readers will remember last year’s astonishing Ash Roses, featuring Lawrence Wiliford and Mireille Asselin).

Sewing the Earthworm by composer Brian Harman with writer David James Brock, for contemporary music star Carla Huhtanen, “combin[es] elements of poetry, drama, opera and new music” as the song cycle “explores a woman’s loss of physical control over her body and the effect this has on her mental stability.” The dramatic arc over these 21 minutes is sure and compelling: three longer songs anchor the set, with brief, fragmentary interludes interspersed.

Unusually, the program notes’ background details—the tenacious, struggling character reflects the life of 1970s punk rocker Wendy O. Williams— are not necessary to an appreciation of the cycle: a sign of truly well-crafted work that allows a wide variety of meanings (I almost wish I’d heard it first and learned these details later). Also unusually, I’m glad that the poems didn’t come with the digital download: what had seemed like a slight annoyance was made irrelevant by Huhtanen’s crystalline diction, and I’m very glad I wasn’t “reading” but truly, theatreimmersively, listening.

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Most remarkable is the extraordinary range of extended techniques for both voice and piano: their natural and convincing use moment-to-moment and in creating the dramatic whole of this extended aria-monodrama. Pianist Steven Philcox’s performance is marvelous: Harman has crafted a piano role so enmeshed with the vocal performance that the piano and the voice are seamlessly this one character’s mind, with all her murmurings, whisperings, asides, grunts, and so on. The piano flits and darts as suddenly as her thoughts, and what seemed initially to be a delicate garden-scape for the character’s first appearance becomes instead an unnerving melding of place and mind. (I also appreciate the spatialisation of the vocal sound in the recording; as it moves, disembodied, it becomes a “voice in one’s head” that darts around like one’s own thoughts.)

Harman handles Brock’s texts with skill, using word repetition and the distortion of consonants to enhance the dramatic strength of the character’s naturalistic speech. The entrancing opening, with humming and brushed strings on the piano, and the gentle stopped-strings of the piano in the epilogue, are haunting and ethereal. Huhtanen and Philcox shine in this music that calls for such symbiotic unity of conception and precision of

performance, and the result is a dark, uncanny delight. → F or more information and to purchase

the recording, click here!

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Note worthy In this section we share some of the achievements and recent activities of CMC Associate Composers from Ontario. →

photo Pianist Steven Philcox and Soprano Carla Huhtanen recording Brian Harman’s Sewing the Earthworm credit Brian Harman

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Afarin Mansouri Tehrani In recent months, CMC Associate Composer Afarin Mansouri Tehrani has been involved in several projects.

Her piece, Sound of Water, was played by Duo Maclé (a piano 4-hands duo from Italy) in an event called “Beautiful Music and Women, the Nature of Aesthetics” featuring contemporary women composers and/or performers in New Jersey. Tehrani also continues her collaborations through the Iranian Canadian Composers of Toronto which worked with Youdance National Ballet. Tehrani created a trio for piano, tonbak, and tar which was performed with choreography by Lindsay Fischer as part of school performances taking place across Toronto.

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Chris Meyer CMC Associate Composer Chris Meyer had a short oratorio for baritone and men’s chorus, Our Murray, performed by the Canadian Men’s Chorus and the Stratford Symphony Orchestra last fall. The theme was the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I, and Meyer collected from letters written by a Canadian soldier to his fiancée in Stratford as a source for the text. Meyer was able to access materials through the Canadian Letters and Images Project which features various materials relating to individuals who were part of the Canadian Armed Forces in various conflicts in the twentieth century.

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Kam Kee Yong CMC Associate Composer Kam Kee Yong has had a recent and ongoing string of activity that includes his Malaysian Suite for Strings which was premiered by Singapore’s NAFA Project Strings at the Esplanade Recital Studio, Singapore on March 31st, 2014. His recent commission for clarinet trio, a piece based on two Tang Dynasty poems, received a world premiered on March 28th, 2015 in Leon, Mexico by the world-renowned Verdehr Trio. Kam is presently working on a commission for a violin concerto entitled Four Seasons of the East for solo violin, strings and harp.

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Allison Cameron CMC Associate Composer Allison Cameron had a busy spring! She released a new chamber CD, A Gossamer Bit, featuring four compositions for Contact Contemporary Music on the Vancouver-based Redshift music label. The recording was funded in part by the OAC Classical Music Recording Program and FACTOR. In addition, Cameron’s trio, c_RL (which includes Germaine Liu, and Nicole Rampersaud), released a self-published CD of improvised music in early May. Cameron also performed in a concert of electroacoustic music at the Deep Wireless Festival at New Adventures in Sound Art—this included solo pieces and collaborations with James Bailey and Dan Tapper.

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Maria Molinari The End of Days at Godfrey Global Inventory for which CMC Associate Composer Maria Molinari composed the score in partnership with composer Rohan Staton, received its premiere screening at the USA Film Festival in Dallas, Texas on April 24th at the Angelika Film Centre. Starring Mark O’Brien (of CBC’s Republic of Doyle) and Anna Ferguson (Anne of Green Gables) the film is from the award-winning team of director Jennifer Liao and producer Sandy Kellerman. As well, the Bravo!FACT-supported short film, Family First, scored by Molinari has been picked up for distribution in Japan after a lengthy international festival run. Directed by Chris Hanratty, it stars Peter Mooney of the TV series Rookie Blue.

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Brian Harman CMC Associate Composer Brian Harman has collaborated with the Canadian Art Song Project to release his piece, Sewing the Earthworm, through CMC’s digital sublabel Centretracks. This innovative song cycle was written with librettist David James Brock, and recorded by soprano Carla Huhtanen and pianist Steven Philcox. Through poetic, dramatic and operative elements, Sewing the Earthworm explores a woman’s loss of physical control over her body and the effect this has on her mental stability. You can read about the piece in the Notations Review section on page 50, or you can purchase the piece by clicking here! Released this spring, the piece will be performed in the fall and will feature a solo dance, choreographed and danced by Jennifer Nichols.

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John Beckwith John Beckwith’s Wendake/Huronia will be featured on Friday July 30th, in Midland, as part of a concert by the Toronto Consort, the Brookside Festival Chorus, and drummers Shirley Hay and Marilyn George. David Fallis will conduct, with soloists Laura Pudwell, alto, and Theodore Baerg, narrator. Marking the fourhundredth anniversary of Samuel de Champlain’s historic voyage to Lake Huron, and commissioned thanks to funding by the Ontario Arts Council, the work is in six movements, tracing the political and cultural changes marked by that initial meeting of Aboriginal people and Europeans in what is now central Ontario. The libretto, in French with a few Wendat inclusions, was compiled by the composer from historical and modern sources, and will be “supertitled” in an English translation. There will be further performances at the Festival of the Sound in Parry Sound (matinee on July 31st), in Barrie (the same evening), and in Meaford (August 1st). Beckwith’s article in this issue page 26 describes the work’s origins and creative approach.

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credit André Leduc

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Alice Ho CMC Associate Composer Alice Ho’s Hakka Tea Bliss for solo english horn and orchestra won the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony’s "Friendship Orchestral Composition Competition" (Canadian composers category). The piece was premiered by KWS under conductor Edwin Atwater on February 7th, 2015 at the Conrad Centre for the Arts in Kitchener-Waterloo.

In addition, Ho’s Glistening Pianos was performed by Duo Trivella to great acclaim on February 8th at the New World Centre in Miami, Florida. Performed as part of the Dranoff International 2 Piano Foundation’s 2014-2015 Season, Ho’s piece was included alongside those by American icons John Corigliano, and John Adams. Ho was invited to give a pre-concert talk. Glistening Pianos also received a 2015 Juno nomination in the Classical Composition of the Year category.

above Ho (centre) with the members of Duo Trivella in Miami.

Lastly, Ho enjoyed two premieres this spring including Mira for solo violin and string orchestra, performed by Sinfonia Toronto, featuring Nurhan Arman (conductor) and Xiaohan Guo (solo violin). On May 2nd, Jubilation of Spring was performed at the North York Performing Arts Centre, and subsequently by the Montreal Chamber Orchestra, in the Bourgie Concert Hall, in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, on June 2nd.

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Brian Current The Canadian Music Centre would like to congratulate CMC Associate Composer Brian Current, who won the 2015 JUNO Award for Classical Composition of the Year for his opera Airline Icarus, released as part of the Naxos Canadian Classics series. The piece features a libretto by Anton Piatigorsky.

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Monica Pearce CMC Associate Composer Monica Pearce’s solo soprano opera Aunt Helen was presented by Opera Nova Scotia on May 22nd and 23rd in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Aunt Helen, which was originally premiered as part of Vocalypse’s Opera from Scratch program in 2012, focuses on the life and adventures of folksong archivist Helen Creighton. Frequent collaborator Maureen Batt will be reprising her role as Aunt Helen in the Opera Nova Scotia performances.

credit Terry Lim

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Pearce’s new vocal work Leda Songs for mezzo soprano, clarinet, violin, viola and cello was premiered by the Talisker Players in Toronto on May 12th and 13th on their concert Heroes, Gods and Mortals.

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Robert Rival Spring, a piece commissioned by the CMC-administered Norman Burgess Fund, and written by CMC Associate Composer Robert Rival, has had quite a run since its premiere in 2012. In addition to early performances by the Ottawa Youth Orchestra (including on tour in Europe) and the Ontario Strings Association Youth Orchestra, Spring received its professional premiere by the Victoria Symphony with Bernhard Gueller conducting, last October 4th & 5th. Next season Symphony Nova Scotia presents Spring on April 14, 2016 with Martin Panteleev conducting.

In related news, Rival’s Six Pieces for solo piano was added to the latest (2015) RCM Piano Syllabus at the ARCT level.

Currently, Rival is finishing two commissions: a sonata for viola, and a piece for trumpet and piano, both for Edmonton musicians. Rival’s summer projects include a commission, funded by Queen’s University, to write a piece for solo kantele (chromatic zither) that will be premiered by Hedi Viisma, an Estonian musician, in Helsinki, Finland.

above Rival appearing in hockey attire—not entirely uncommon among composers.

In other news, Pro Coro Canada, led by Michael Zaugg, gave the world premiere of Rival’s Saison des semailles, le soir in Edmonton last October 19. They presented the piece once more on May 22nd in Vancouver—Saison was written 10 years earlier but was never once even read until 2014!

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Juliet Palmer CMC Associate Composer Juliet Palmer is the Artistic Director of Toronto’s Urbanvessel which is developing a project that is part of the Pan Am Path Art Relay. This summer, Urbanvessel presents Singing River, a series of performances and installations renewing our relationship with the Wonscotonach/Don River. On July 4th and 5th, various activities will take place along the Lower Don Trail between Riverdale Park & Pottery Road. This collaborative project involves Native Earth Performing Arts, Regent Park School of Music, Regent Park Focus, Todmorden Mills, Aanmitaagzi, and Evergreen Brickworks. Among the various performances, Palmer will have a new work performed by Christine Duncan and the Element Choir, written in collaboration with Anna Chatterton.

Palmer is also collaborating with Christopher Willes on audio installations for the event.

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Chris Thornborrow Sleeping Giant, a film by Andrew Cividino, features a score by CMC Associate Composer Chris Thornborrow and the band Bruce Peninsula. Chris was delighted to learn that the feature was selected to compete for the Camera d’Or award for first features at this year’s Cannes International Film Festival in France, which took place in May.

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Emilie LeBel Through their RBC Emerging Composers Program, the National Youth Orchestra has been inviting composers to work with the NYOC in recent years. The CMC was pleased to hear that CMC Associate Composer Emilie LeBel was appointed the 2015 RBC Foundation Emerging Composer in Residence. LeBel has been working on a new piece for the orchestra which will be featured as part of their Canadian tour during July and August. You can learn more about the NYOC tour on their website.

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Maya Badian CMC Associate Composer Maya Badian released a book detailing her compositional approach in 2014. The book, titled Glimpses Into My Compositional Style and Techniques, explores a range of works from early in her career up to the present. Among her activities in 2015, Badian presented at the 2015 Keys symposium at the National University of Music in Bucharest in April 2015 regarding the influence of computers on music education.

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Jordan Pal CMC Associate Composer Jordan Pal has had a lot of activity recently! His piece, Into the Ether, was premiered in May and was commissioned by the Eckhardt-Gramatté Competition to serve as the imposed test piece for the 2015 competition in strings. Pal also received performances of his Starling: Triple Concerto, with the Gryphon Trio and National Arts Centre Orchestra as part of Ontario Scene which took place in Ottawa in early May. In late July, Pal’s String Quartet will be premiered at the Ottawa Chamberfest, commissioned by the Ottawa Chamber Music Society for the St. Lawrence String Quartet. And looking forward to the fall, Pal’s piece On the Double: Concert Overture for Orchestra will be performed by the Ochestre Symphonique de Québec.

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Elizabeth Raum Elizabeth Raum celebrated the release of her Centrediscs CD Myth, Legend, Romance in late 2014. The CD features her double concerto for violin and viola, Persephone and Demeter, concerto for french horn, Sherwood Legend, and violin concerto. The second Piano and Erhu Project CD was released earlier this year, and it includes Raum’s A Garden of Transplants.

In February, Symphony Nova Scotia played Raum’s Halifax Harbour and principal oboist Suzanne Lemieux joined the Blue Engine String Quartet to perform The Baroque Suite for their “From Bax to Bach” program in January. In addition, The King Lear Fantasy was performed at the Heliconian Centre by the Canadian Sinfonietta Winds in March. She also had a new song cycle, YaYa: The Nanny, premiered at Recitals at Rosedale with Michele Bogdanovicz, mezzo soprano, and Rachel Andrist, piano. Raum’s new work for band, Fanfare, was commissioned by the Saskatoon Serenade and received its premiere in May. Meanwhile, Raum is at work on an opera, A Time of Trouble, about the nuns who founded Mount St. Vincent University in Halifax and their power struggle with the archbishop. This work was commissioned with assistance from the Ontario Arts Council by the Maritime Concert Opera in Halifax and will be premiered in October. In addition, Raum was commissioned by Duo Brubeck (based in Florida) to write a work for trumpet and trombone for the International Trumpet Guild event this year. Raum will soon be featured in an article both in print and online by Chris Dickey for the International Tuba Euphonium Association series “Composer Friends.”

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Conversations with post-World War II Pioneers of Electronic Music

By Norma Beecroft

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It is my great pleasure to share with you the fruits of a pet project begun in the late 1970s as part of my continuing exploration into the new resources for musical composition. photo An early photo of Norma Beecroft in the University of Toronto Electronic Music Studio. credit John Reeves

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cmc ontario region The high tech world of CBC Television where I worked in the 1950s, and the exposure as an emerging composer to the musical aesthetics of that time were part of the stimuli leading me to technology. The first trigger was a lecture given by Vladimir Ussachevsky in Toronto in the mid 50s where he presented his Sonic Contours, one of the first tape music compositions. Then my exposure to musique concrète and the powerful electronic works of Karlheinz Stockhausen during my sojourn in Europe between 1959-62 solidified my interest in the new world of electronic music.

As a producer of CBC Radio’s Music of Today for many years, along with personal research and work, curiosity dictated that I must talk to those colleagues who were among the first to create music using electronic technology. And so I conducted many interviews in the late 1970s, trotting around Europe and the United States with my cassette tape recorder.

These rather primitive recordings were transferred digitally by recording engineer William Van Ree, and transcriptions of the voice tracks were painstakingly undertaken and edited by this writer, then subjected to digital editing. Translations were provided by Ananda Suddath.

The series includes major figures: Karlheinz Stockhausen, Karel Goeyvaerts, Gottfried Michael Koenig, Luciano Berio, Iannis Xenakis, John Cage, Oskar Sala, Vladimir Ussachevsky, Otto Luening, Pierre Schaeffer, Barry Truax, Bill Buxton, James Montgomery, Gustav Ciamaga, Bengt Hambraeus, Earle Brown & Hubert Howe, Peter Zinovieff, Hugh Davies, Emmanuel Ghent, Francois Bayle, Desmond Briscoe, Jean Claude Risset & Gerald Bennett.

Production and publication of this series has been made possible with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, and will be made available through the facilities of the Canadian Music Centre.

“ … what is really happening is a very, very slow steady process to change man himself, his perception, his body. There will be very different bodies very soon which are the product, last but not least, of music, and of many other things … but music as a very secret means to modulate the physical wave structure, the electric wave structure of man.

This is more the electro-biological aspect of the new music of the future ….”

Karlheinz Stockhausen In conversation with Norma Beecroft

“ …we have gotten so carried away with the bigness or the greatness or the innovative qualities, especially in technological music, that we’ve lost sight of the question of communication…I think it’s very important that we keep music where music belongs and see the technological developments extraneous to the music…”

Bill Buxton In conversation with Norma Beecroft

Book Launch ­

Conversations with Post World War II Pioneers of Electronic Music by Norma Beecroft Saturday, September 26, 2015, 4-6pm The Canadian Music Centre 20 St. Joseph Street, Toronto, ON Attendance is free

The launch of Beecrofts’s book will take place at the CMC in September as a co-presentation with the Music Gallery. Music Gallery Artistic Director David Dacks will lead a discussion exploring the history of the project, and Beecroft’s role in the history of electronic music. The event will include an exhibit of archival materials related to Norma’s research, and a special performance by the Canadian Electronic Ensemble.

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Memorials Remembering Norman Sherman & Edward Laufer

memorial Norma

In Memoriam, Norman Sherman / by Matthew Fava

CMC Associate Composer Norman Sherman passed away on Thursday, April 30, 2015 at the age of 91. He is survived by his wife Riquette Sherman, his children (Philip and Natalie) and their families.

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orn in Boston, Massachusetts in 1924, Sherman had vivid memories of hearing the music of Benny Goodman on the radio for the first time in the 1930s. Big band and jazz of the era sparked an interest in music. In an interview conducted with the CMC in 2014 Sherman recalled, “when I saw students in high school having little dance bands, playing that kind of music, I became more and more interested and finally I became involved to the point where music was my goal: it was everything for me.”

Sherman graduated from Boston University with a degree in composition while also studying bassoon with Ernst Panenka and chamber music performance with Fernand Gillet, both of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. During that period he had three years of intensive studies in advanced compositional techniques with Dr. R. Brogue Henning of Harvard University. While attending Tanglewood, Sherman met Olivier Messiaen who invited him to join his class in Musical Aesthetics and Analysis at the Conservatoire National de Paris, which he did.

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Sherman arrived in Canada in 1957 to take up the position of principal bassoon with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra and the CBC Orchestra. At that time, Sherman was active both as a composer for CBC radio dramas and as a conductor/arranger of light music for his own radio shows. After four years in Winnipeg, Sherman left Canada to accept the principal bassoon position with The Hague Philharmonic Orchestra of The Netherlands.

In a letter dated November 15, 1971, Pierre Boulez, towering figure of twentieth-century modernism, and regular guest-conductor of The Hague orchestra at that time, had this to say about Sherman: “He is not only a very good bassoon player, but also an extremely conscientious musician and very aware of both his instrument and all the general field of music.”

During the course of his performing career Sherman played under the direction of many famous conductors such as Charles Munch, Leonard Bernstein, Kurt Masur, and others. In particular, Sherman admired Bruno Maderna who he credited with conducting one of the best performances

of his music: the premiere of Through the Rainbow and/or Across the Valley with the Rotterdam Philharmonic. Among his musical appointments, Sherman was principal bassoonist with the Radio Symphony Orchestra in Jerusalem, Israel from 1973 to 1974.

Upon returning to Canada in 1975, Sherman was appointed to the position of Senior Instructor in composition and orchestration in the School of Music of Queen’s University, Kingston. He remained in that position until 1999 when he decided to devote all his energies to composition.

Sherman’s orchestral compositions have been performed and broadcast by orchestras

morial Norman sherman

in Canada, the leading orchestras of The Netherlands, and by the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, while his chamber music has been performed throughout the world. From his earliest days, jazz music served as a source of inspiration, and the rhythmic characteristics of jazz filtered into Sherman’s writing. As his studies progressed his interest in a harmonic language that explored the beauty of sound, of blending, and of colour became more prominent. His life as an orchestral performer led to his precise and exacting ear as a composer—he knew the sonic capacity of an instrument and sought to explore it fully.

In June 2014, Toronto-based Blythwood Winds performed a special program of contemporary Canadian repertoire for wind quintet at the CMC. Sherman’s piece Quintessant was a part of the program, and Sherman made the trip from London, Ontario with his wife Riquette; we had a toast for his 90th birthday. Blythwood bassoonist Michael Macaulay had the following reflection from his work on the piece: “Norman Sherman’s Quintessant isn’t the sort of piece that gives up its secrets easily.” Macauley continued, “It’s a tremendous challenge to put the piece

together as an ensemble, and it’s only after many hours have been spent in rehearsal trying to tie together so many seemingly unrelated strands of music that a sense of beautiful compositional logic emerges.

For the Blythwood Winds, it was like learning to spell words by rote and then suddenly discovering after a few days that we had become fluent in a new language.

It was a real joy to take on Quintessant’s challenges, and especially rewarding to have the chance to perform the piece for Mr. Sherman at his birthday celebration last year at the CMC.” When discussing his musical life at 90, Sherman commented, “I don’t expect, at this stage in my life, to produce very much more. But what you have to do, is when you write, do the best job you can. It sounds kind of corny, but it’s true. You have to believe in what you’re doing.”

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memorial Edward

In Memoriam, Edward Laufer / By Menon Dwarka

A few months ago I received word from an old friend in New York City that Edward Laufer had passed away. I wasn’t very close to Laufer personally. He was my composition teacher during my undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto. He was an intensely private man, exhibiting a quiet devotion to his craft that was as inspiring as it was out of fashion.

I

t would be safe to say that I was in awe of his talent and intellect, and yet I was aware that he was not very well known in Canada, and I’ve always wondered why that was the case.

As a composition teacher, Laufer’s knowledge of the canon was legendary.

I remember an incident where CMC Associate Composer Z. Chesky Nechesky was playing Bauhaus’ Who Killed Mister Moonlight before one of our Schenkerian Analysis classes at U of T. Laufer crossed the threshold of the room, cocking his ear, trying to discern what Nechesky was playing. "Don’t worry, Professor, I’m playing a song by a band you’ve never heard of," Nechesky commented. "That may be so,” Laufer replied, “but the melody is also an inverted inner voice of

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a Chopin prelude." He sat down at the piano to demonstrate with boyish glee, completely unaware of the “wait, did that just happen?” look on all of our faces.

It would be understandable for a man with prodigious recall to have a huge ego, but he often seemed to go out of his way to underplay his achievements. I remember once asking him if he was the same Edward Laufer who wrote an analysis of Roger Sessions’ Montezuma for Perspectives of New Music, to which he replied, "That was a very long time ago."

Of course, it was the same Edward Laufer.

During his graduate studies in the US, Laufer worked with Sessions, Babbitt, Earl Kim, and Eduard Steuermann, the pianist who took part in the premiere performance of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. No Canadian composer of his

generation could lay claim to being more part of New York’s “Uptown” scene than Laufer.

I had the chance to meet Milton Babbitt some time in the late 1990s, and he couldn’t have beamed with more pleasure at the mention of Laufer’s name. "My goodness! How is Eddie? Please tell him to submit his final thesis, will you?" And there I became aware of another side of Laufer’s personality. He seemed to embody the sentiment of that Woody Allen joke about never wanting to be a member of a club that would have him. He told me the story of how he decided to stop pursuing the life of a concert pianist. It was after hearing a one of Vladimir Ashkenazy’s encores at a Carnegie Hall recital. Laufer was initially surprised that he could not identify the work, but it was not due to

morial Edward Laufer

the fact that it was new to him. Quite the contrary, he had just spent the last few months creating some analytical sketches of the work as part of his studies with the great Schenkerian analyst Ernst Oester, but the piece was played with such speed and fluidity that it only revealed itself to him in the last few seconds of the performance.

He wasn’t bitter about this change in career path, but it was clear that if he couldn’t be one of the great pianists of his time, he was happy to move on to other things.

There may have been a similar moment with Laufer’s compositions, but one can only surmise why there are only a handful from the 1960s and ’70s. What I can say for certain is that the works are of an astonishingly high quality. Yes, they do sound like the works of a man who worked with serial composers, but his personal voice, in my opinion, is quite unique. His Nostos for soprano and chamber ensemble (1966), Variations for Seven Instruments (1969), and his Divertimento for Orchestra (1972) all display a penchant for expansive, soaring melodic lines. He also staved off the usual harmonic greyness of serial procedures through the use of incomplete aggregates, allowing his listeners to perceive the arrival of new phrases or sections of a work by introducing the notes that were waiting in the wings, as it were.

A quick glance at the scores might give the impression of highly dissonant, difficult works, but there is a generosity of spirit and sensuous pleasure that are not easily found in the works of other “Uptown” composers.

Of course, he will most likely be remembered for his Schenkerian sketches.

photo An image of Edward Laufer with music theorist Su Yin Mak

His work could be highly controversial there, too. I remember auditing a class in New York where Laufer’s sketch of Schoenberg’s Op. 33a was trotted out for ridicule. Laufer often commented on the referential sonority of various post-tonal pieces, and his sketches often show voice leadings and unfoldings that support this view. But for many, it was a step too far.

Needless to say, I didn’t stick around for any further auditing.

But that was Laufer’s way: not caring what others had to say, trusting his own view of what was true and right. I remember I was writing a passacaglia for string quartet under his guidance, and he suggested I check out the last movement of Britten’s String Quartet No. 2. I balked at the suggestion. I was writing a serial work, and Britten was definitely not my cup

of tea. He dropped the suggestion for the moment, but at my next lesson, I found a brand new pocket score of the quartet on his desk. He insisted that I have a look at the last movement, and to please accept the score as a gift. That act of generosity changed my view of Britten forever, and I always smile that the full-quartet quadruple-stop C major chords at the end of the work should remind me of this man.

This modest master probably wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

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