Ontario Concerts

Just a quick heads up about two upcoming events in Ontario featuring Through closed doors performed from its antique wooded door score. The program, performed brilliantly by Thin Edge New Music Collective, will also feature fantastic works by Ana Sokolovic, Anna Hostman and Brian Harman. If you know me and would like to come to the Toronto fundraiser, get in touch with me please.

September 20, 2014, 8:00 pm (Waterloo, ON, Canada)
The Button Factory (Waterloo Community Arts Theatre), 25 Regina St. Tickets available here.

September 21, 2014 (Toronto, ON, Canada)
A private fundraiser in Rosedale. Entrance by invitation.

I will be selling high-quality copies of four of the pages from the paper manuscript of Through closed doors. They are printed on nice 12×15″ watercolour paper and will be available for $40 each (or $140 for the set of four). I also have 5×7″ postcards for $5 each (just the first two pages). Bring cash or cheques!

Through closed doors, page 1Through closed doors, page 2Through closed doors, page 3Through closed doors, page 4

 

Super concert with Thin Edge

I just want to say that I am thrilled with how the Thin Edge concert went last Friday. Gallery 345 is a beautiful space with great acoustics. The new violin duo, Through closed doors, looked great in there and Ilana and Suhashini sounded FANTASTIC! I couldn’t be happier with the piece at this stage in the process.

"Through closed doors" premiere

Photo by Terry Lim. Performers: Ilana Waniuk and Suhashini Arulanandam. 

I am happy to say that the notation seems to be working exactly as planned. I feel so lucky to work with such adventurous and dedicated musicians. Now I’m waiting for the recording (and taking a little breather) before making some revisions and starting on the next stages: making the final layout of the score and engraving the door (if this sentence is confusing, look down at the last two posts).

I am also extremely happy to have met the cellist Dobrochna Zubek, who performed The Child, Bringer of Light. It was great working with her to prepare the piece. She approached it with thoughtfulness, sensitivity and a strong desire to make it her own. She is now the fourth performer to take it on and it’s fascinating to hear the transformations the piece goes through each time.

Dobrochna Zubek performing "The Child, Bringer of Light"

Photo by Terry Lim. Performer: Dobrochna Zubek. 

Speaking of The Child  and its transformations, the piece will be performed at the end of March by Claire Poillion in a brand new arrangement for viola. I am very curious to see how the piece will transfer to this instrument. The performance will be my Uruguayan debut (check the Events page for details).

Connection through performance

Last Friday, the super talented Rachel Mercer performed The Child, Bringer of Light at the Betty Oliphant Theatre as part of Toronto’s New Music Concerts. This concert has yet again made me feel how fantastically lucky I have been over the course of my young career to work with such amazing and dedicated performers.

Rachel played with gusto and extreme sensitivity. She dug into all the raw, scratchy sounds without hesitation and her sense of timing was superb. I felt like she really connected with my music. Hearing her reminded me yet again that one of the main reasons I compose is to form those connections with people; to feel something I created, a piece of my soul, pass through another human being absorbing their essence in the process and becoming something new. For this reason, working with soloists can be an especially intense and intimate experience.

Such intimate connections with performers in turn allow me to connect to listeners. At Friday’s concert Rachel helped me make a truly fascinating connection. This cello piece is my exploration of Carl Jung’s archetype of the Child. It is about a child’s innocently joyful arrival in the world being broken by the discovery of pain and loneliness, and his eventual rediscovery of light. For me, writing this piece was a deeply immersive and emotional experience.

To my great delight, one of the audience members at last Friday’s concert turned out to be a Jungian psychologist with a particular fascination with the Child archetype. What are the odds??? She has been studying and living with this image for decades and here she was unexpectedly confronted with it in musical form. It was extremely rewarding to hear about her experience with my musical interpretation of an idea that was so dear to her. To have someone thank you for the music you created is truly the greatest honour.

 

Two concerts and a journal

It seems that I just got back from my last four-week-long trip to Europe (my suitcase was still in the middle of my bedroom until very recently), and already I’m getting ready to fly off for another five weeks. While the first trip was purely pleasure, this one has some work sprinkled in.

After a quick stopover in Toronto for a performance of my cello piece (see below), I’m heading over to Slovakia and Austria for the ISCM World New Music Days 2013 festival to hear my solo accordion piece, Light-play through curtain holes, in Vienna. To cap off the trip, I’ll spend a few weeks in Ukraine to do some more village recordings. Most of this is generously funded by the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council. I love my life!

First stop: Toronto. My piece for solo cello, The Child, Bringer of Light, which I originally composed for a Carnegie Hall workshop with Kaija Saariaho and Anssi Karttunen, will be performed by Rachel Mercer as part of Toronto’s New Music Concerts Series on November 1st. Check out more info here. Rachel will be amplified and I will diffuse her sound through eight speakers surrounding the audience. I haven’t tried this before with this piece, so I am super excited!

 

Also, check out excerpts of this piece in the current issue (No. 7) of Manor House Quarterly, which is available online or at Chapters. The score excerpts are accompanied by a very insightful artistic analysis by Cooper Troxell, and remarkably fitting photographs by Lissy Elle. The whole issue looks gorgeous!

My piece, "The Child, Bringer of Light," in Manor House Quarterly

Check back for further updates about my travels.

 

Appearance in Manor House

I am happy to report that excerpts of my piece The Child, Bringer of Light, will appear in the upcoming issue of the art journal, Manor House Quarterly. The score excerpts will be accompanied by an analysis by Cooper Troxell, the journal’s composition editor. MHQ is a beautifully put-together publication covering contemporary visual arts, literature, music and other things artsy. I am really excited to see my work appear in this journal and recommend it to any arts enthusiast. It’s lovely to flip through and interesting to read (also looks great on a coffee table).

Two SOCAN wins

I am super excited to finally announce that I received two prizes in this year’s SOCAN Awards for Young Composers. My chamber opera On the Eve of Ivan Kupalo, which was my master’s thesis project, received a shared first prize in the Godfrey Ridout vocal category. Congratulations also to Marie-Claire Saindon, who is sharing the win with me.

The solo cello piece The Child, Bringer of Light, which I wrote for a workshop with Kaija Saariaho and Anssi Karttunen at Carnegie Hall, received the third prize in the Pierre Mercure category for solo and duo compositions. The Child will be performed by Rachel Mercer as part of Toronto’s New Music Concerts on November 1, 2013. Excerpts of the score will also appear in the summer issue of Manor House Quarterly.

Congratulations also to a super talented friend of mine, James O’Callaghan, for his first prize win in the Hugh Le Caine category for works with live or prerecorded electroacoustics.

Soundstreams post-mortem

It’s been about a month since I returned from Toronto and I’m just waking up from my post-masters hibernation. I’ve done no composing since the Soundstreams workshop, and after deadening my brain with hundred-year-old dust and pain fumes at a heritage house reno over the last four weeks, I feel ready to jump back into creative activities.

I had a fantastic time at the Soundstreams Emerging Composers’ Workshop with the Gryphon Trio, and our mentors R. Murray Schafer and Juliet Palmer (see this entry and this one). As mentioned earlier, we were to bring sketches for a new piece for piano trio to be completed after the workshop. I am primarily working with combining fragments from a folksong I recorded in Ukraine with the more timbral ideas and extended techniques I started exploring in The Child, Bringer of Light.

There is a loose narrative in this piece inspired by a group of folksongs dealing with the subject of young women growing old prematurely from hard labour and abusive marriages. One of these songs explores a beautiful metaphor for this idea. A lonely young woman throws a flower into a river hoping that it will reach her people. When her mother finds it floating in a still pool, she wonders why it has wilted despite being in water, why her daughter has aged before her time. My piece will follow the progression of this flower on the river starting with the woman’s excited anticipation of a new marriage, going through the rapids of all the hardships she encounters, and ending in that dark and still pool.

Soundstreams: Piano Trio, Sketch 1

The rough beginning exploring the nervous excitement of a new marriage.

Soundstreams: Piano Trio, Sketch 2

The rough ending, the wilted flower arriving in the still pool. I am exploring ideas similar to the opening, but cast in a darker light.

Soundstreams: Piano Trio, Sketch 3

This material was meant to go in the middle section of the piece, but it became apparent that the overall feel of the sketch doesn’t really fit in the soundworld I am exploring in Sketch 1 and 2. I will probably extract certain gestures from this sketch and reshape them into something more consistent with the opening and closing of the piece. 

During the first two sessions I had with the trio, I started to suspect that the traditional notational system was not really doing a great job capturing the feel I was looking for in this piece. It was too confining. I figured out that the performers needed more room for spontaneous reactions to each other and time to engage all the timbral effects I was asking them to perform. The music needed room for stretching. After rewriting one of the sketches without measures and will less rhythmic precision, I was amazed at how the music magically locked into itself. Considering the freedom that my notation implied, it was remarkable how close the performers’ interpretation came to what I had imagined. I felt like I tapped into their natural tendencies and allowed them to simply play.

Thank you so much to the Gryphon Trio for being so amazing to work with and to the workshop organizers for creating this amazing opportunity.

The Child (and updates)

I can finally share the recording of The child, bringer of light that Paul Dwyer and I did “in studio” (as in some room at Carroll Studios) while we were in New York. While editing this recording, I had another epiphany about its formal structure and ended up chopping out another section. I think I am fully satisfied with the flow of the piece now, though I added back a tiny phrase that got in the way in the mass chopping prior to the concert. We’ll just have to wait till the next recording to hear that one.

Since finishing the workshop at Carnegie Hall, I have been trying to squeeze out a piece for the workshop at the National Arts Centre. I thought I had a crystal clear image of this piece when I started, but the image has proven very difficult to translate into anything remotely musical.

I’m exhausted from everything I’ve done already and my body’s resistance to this new musical assault is so great I seem to have developed some sort of walking bronchitis. Or maybe it’s TB. That would be very romantic: starving artist wasting away from consumption…in her trendy Halifax condo. Woe is me! Khem, khem…

In better news, I just found out that I received my very first non-academic grant. I am collaborating with Moscow’s Ensemble Sonore and RUSQUARTET to organize a few concerts of contemporary music focused on Canadian and Russian female composers. Should all other funding come through, the “Women of the North” project will take place in Moscow in November 2012. I will be contributing a piece for piano quartet as an homage to Barbara Pentland, one of Canada’s first great female composers.

Carnegie Hall Workshop: Post-mortem

The child, bringer of light received its première at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall on Monday night. The hall was reasonably full, the audience quite varied. We were even graced with the presence of a group of nuns in dark blue and brown habit. I know music is a big part of religious culture, but it was still awesome to see them there.

with cellist Paul Dwyer after the concert

I’ve had some very satisfying performances with soloists in the past. But this was really my best première. Having a chance to hear the piece every day over the course of a week allowed me to really understand its sound world and feel its existence in time. By the time we got to the actual concert, I was happy enough with the piece from a compositional point of view that I could simply enjoy the performance in all its glory. And what a fabulous performance it was! A big thank you to Paul Dwyer for bringing the piece to life in such an intense way.

Through this whole week it was also fascinating to watch the other pieces take shape. An instant favourite of mine was Edmund FinnisRelative Colour for string septet. He split the ensemble into two trios with the double bass acting as a kind of mirror line between them. It was one of those pieces, which made me think, “Damn! I wish I wrote that!” The subtle, low bass notes emerging beneath the high shimmer of the trios were earth shattering.

Edmund Finnis conducting his "Relative Colour" during the dress rehearsal. Performers from left to right: Aisha Orazbayeva, Anna Pelczer, Mira Luxion, Tony Flynt, Paul Dwyer, Emily Deans, Sarah Saviet

A piece that was a total surprise was Chris WilliamsSan-Shih-Fan for cello and double bass. What first started out as a collection of cool but seemingly unrelated sounds, slowly morphed into a cohesive and very satisfying musical whole. The dynamic between the performers (Paul Dwyer and Tony Flynt) was delightfully playful, and made me wonder how the piece would look and sound if performed by two women, or a mix. The other pieces also came together very nicely through everyone’s hard work and passion. I feel lucky to have met so many talented and dedicated musicians and sincerely hope that our paths will cross again.

I am now safely stowed away in my little cubbyhole in Halifax, trying to process everything that’s happened and getting ready to dive into the chamber orchestra piece for NAC’s Composers Program. It will be a while before I can top Carnegie Hall, but this Ottawa workshop is a great experience to look forward to.

with Kaija Saariaho and Anssi Karttunen after the concert