Inventions of Hope Fundraiser

Posted on September 23, 2024 by Anna

Would you like to be a part of Anna’s next composition? She’ll be writing a set of little pieces – inventions – for the fabulous pianist Anna Sagalova, who was forced to flee Ukraine due to russia’s aggression. The commissioner of this work Holy Eucharist Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral, has already received 50% of the commissioning fee from the SOCAN Foundation. We are raising the other 50% from curious folks like you! Enjoy eternal fame by getting your name in the score, get a signed copy of the score or even get one of the inventions dedicated to you or your loved one.

Here’s how it works:

$45 or more: Connoisseur
In addition to the Supporter benefits, enjoy a glass of wine and snacks at the post-concert reception on October 5 at the Holy Eucharist Cathedral in New Westminster, BC, where you can interact with the musicians and view artwork by Ukrainian artists.

$125 or more: Music Lover
In addition to the Connoisseur benefits, you will receive a signed copy of the complete musical score when we premiere the entire piece in February 2025.

$300 or more: Patron (only 6 of 8 left!)
In addition to the Music Lover benefits, you’ll get your name next to one of the pieces in the collection as its commissioner and influence the composition. Choose an occupied region of Ukraine that is particularly dear to you and Anna Pidgorna will work with a folk melody from that region in her original composition. Choose a person or group to whom you want to dedicate the work. The piece will have a dedication like this under the title: “Dedicated to [name] with generous support by [name] with inspiration from [region].”

How to donate:

1. Join us in person at the our fundraising concert on November 9 at the Canadian Music Centre BC in downtown Vancouver: https://www.eventbrite.ca/…/inventions-of-hope…

2. Can’t make it to the concert? Simply donate through the Eventbrite page by entering any amount in the “Donation” option: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/inventions-of-hope-fundraiser-for-ukrainian-music-and-medicine-tickets-1022172524537

“The Child” published by Oxingale

Posted on April 3, 2024 by Anna

Happy to announce that the brand new updated score for my piece “The Child, Bringer of Light” (cello version) is now available from my publisher Oxingale! I completed this work in 2012 for the young composers’ and string players’ workshop with Kaija Saariaho and Anssi Karttunen, hosted by Carnegie Hall in New York. I had a great time working on the piece with cellist Paul Dwyer under their guidance.

This work is really important to me as it was the first time I really felt that I was truly saying something that was 100% me, even though so much of the creative process was influenced by my study of Kaija’s cello pieces. There was some magical combination of authenticity of emotional expression and satisfaction with the technical aspects of the composition process.

The work has had a busy life since that workshop. It’s been performed multiple times by cellists Rachel Mercer, Dobrochna Zubek and Ian Woodman. I made a viola transcription for Claire Poillion, which was taken up and recorded by Marina Thibeault, who has performed it at many concerts. Other violists have reached out to be after hearing Marina’s recording. I made a violin transcription for Ilana Waniuk, which was recently performed in Vancouver by young violinist Jack Campbell. So I’m very proud of this particular musical child.

Starlit Sky

Posted on December 21, 2023 by Anna

On this longest night of the year, I am thrilled to announce the release of my first solo EP Starlit Sky, just the music to listen to while gazing at the stars and think about loved ones in places far and near. This three-song cycle sets poetry by pre-eminent Ukrainian writer Lesya Ukrainka, blending Ukrainian folk elements with contemporary classical techniques and a studio recording and mixing aesthetic. Created on two continents, three countries and five cities, this project was a way to forge connections in the time of pandemic and war. I’m honoured to release this EP with I Shall Sing Until My Land Is Free, a label which donates the proceeds to Ukrainian humanitarian and self-defense foundations and activists. So, by supporting my music, you are also supporting Ukraine’s fight for freedom!

In this small cycle of poems, Lesya Ukrainka speaks to a lonely star, projecting her own feelings of melancholy and isolation onto this distant, cool speck. Friends and lovers separated by distance have long comforted themselves by looking up at the same stars, knowing that at least their gazes can embrace in that same light.

I wrote the music and recording my voice in my bedroom in Vancouver, Canada during pandemic lockdowns. My friends, double bassists Florent Ghys and Ryan Baird, recorded in their bedrooms and living rooms in New Jersey and California. Iryna Danylejko, folk singer, ethnomusicologist and my longtime collaborator, recorded her voice on two of the songs in Chernivtsi, Ukraine in the first few months following the start of russia’s full-scale invasion. She fled there from Kyiv with her three children. In the first weeks of russia’s brutal full-scale assault, she couldn’t sing at all. She was barely holding herself together and she felt that singing would crack her open. I am so honoured that she recorded this for me when she did find her voice again. The mixing and mastering was done by Yuriy Bulychev in Dnipro, Ukraine in the summer of 2023. He did an amazing job putting all of us into one fantastical space. The evocative artwork was created in response to the music by Olson Olberburg, who fled occupied Kherson (my own hometown) and has been a refugee in Sweden for over a year and a half.

It took a long time for this little project to come together and I can’t be more proud of it! Thank you for supporting my music and Ukraine’s fight for freedom! And check out other releases on the label. They are more in the electronic experimental realm and are really cool.

Bandcamp (preferred): https://ishallsinguntilmylandisfree.bandcamp.com/…/star…

Spotify (if you have to): https://open.spotify.com/album/0H8vSmBYHr5hDIpGYcSiJc…

I Shall Sing Until My Land Is Free: https://ishallsinguntilmylandisfree.bandcamp.com/

I would like to acknowledge support by the Shevchenko Foundation, which funded some of the recording costs.

“Through closed doors” score published

Posted on November 30, 2023 by Anna

I’m happy to announce that the paper score for my violin duo Through Closed Doors, notated on an antique door, is now available for purchase from my publisher Oxingale Music. The work was commissioned and premiered by Ilana Waniuk and Suhashini Arulanandam in the winter of 2014. The duo was inspired by an antique door which had been attacked by a teenager girl in a fit of passion, resulting in a jagged hole. I structured the piece around the door’s different panels, creating a kind of choreography for the two performers who move around the door as they play. The notation drew on medieval illuminated manuscripts and incorporates dynamics, accents and bow pressure right into the staff lines for a more intuitive performance. Since the door is rather large and expensive to transport (though it does have a travel case if anyone is interested in renting it), I also made a paper score, which is now available for purchase here.

The premiere of the work from a draft paper score drawn with pencil happened in February 2014, right during the most difficult days of the Maidan protests in Ukraine, which ousted the pro-russian president Yanukovych, a corrupt criminal who was trying to bring Ukraine back into russia’s sphere of influence. I watched livestreams of tires burning in the centre of Kyiv, the people fearlessly resisting a regime rapidly growing increasingly oppressive, as we rehearsed the work. I cannot think of this piece separately from these protests, especially now, knowing the chain of events that eventually forced Ukraine to defend itself yet again against russia’s imperialist aggression.

“Weeping for a dead love” score now published

Posted on November 29, 2023 by Anna

My publisher, Oxingale Music, just released the newly revised and renotated score for the first piece I ever wrote for myself to sing. Weeping for a dead love, for low female voice and percussion quartet, draws on Ukraine’s lamentation tradition, known as gholosinnia, to mourn the dissolution of a romantic relationship. I wrote it for myself and my own semi-folk singing style, not imagining that another singer would take on this rather peculiar work. But not only did another singer take it on, she was a classically trained singer, which I didn’t expect at all. Svitlana Melnyk, a mezzo-soprano who fled from Kharkiv at the start of russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, gave multiple performances of this work in Italy with the students of Istituto Superiore di Studi Musicali di Reggio Emilia in the summer of 2022, connecting to it in a way that was very special to me. She demonstrated that the piece works for a more classically sounding voice and that it is very emotionally relevant to the current moment. So I decided to make it available to others. The score is available for purchase here.

Here is my performance of the piece, premiered with So Percussion at Princeton University’s Sound Kitchen in the spring of 2015.

And here’s Svitlana Melnyk performing the work in Italy in the summer of 2023.

Lekking Birds

Posted on October 27, 2023 by Anna

In 2020, when the live music industry was at a virtual standstill, I wrote “Lekking Birds” for Kornel Wolak (clarinet), Amahl Arulanandam (cello) and Michael Bridge (accordion). Commissioned by The Women’s Musical Club of Toronto, the work received its “premiere” in November 2020, in an empty concert hall in Toronto, live-streamed only to a select group of subscribers. I watched the live stream from my house in Vancouver, drinking wine with my trio of stuffed Mices (Masters Sneaky Mouse, Elph and Orph) and I cried.

The pandemic really made me understand how much I value live performance. Recordings can be great, for obvious reasons, but I like to be in the concert hall, surrounded by other people, feeling their response. I like the whole ritual of it. I like getting feedback from the audience. I love going out for drinks with the performers and other composers after the show, to celebrate success and commiserate about things that didn’t go as well as we hoped.

The experience of this particular premiere – watching friends play to an empty hall on my laptop screen while drinking with small stuffed animals – was so depressing at that moment in time that I just broke down and cried. I think because of that association, I kind of put this piece on a shelf for three years. I couldn’t touch it. But I recently dug it up and listened to the recording more thoroughly and discovered that I am really quite proud of the piece. I love this particular combination of timbres so much that I spent the last four minutes (Third Choreography) cycling through one short chord progression. The accordion – sitting somewhere between winds and strings in its timbre – blends the clarinet and cello so perfectly. It’s molten chocolate pouring from vessel to vessel.

And here recording does have a beautiful advantage over live performance: because of the close placement of the microphones, you can really hear the phrases travel from instrument to instrument, from left to right speaker or earbud, in a way that would not be as apparent in a hall with such a small ensemble. And this is really what the piece is exploring, passing material back and forth with small variations to mimic the fluttering, hopping group mating displays of the blue manakin bird.

A big thank you to Kornel, Amahl and Michael for this immaculate bird display.

Like Moths to a Flame

Posted on September 1, 2023 by Anna

I finished off a duo for cello and marimba today commissioned by Stick&Bow (Krystina Marcoux and Juan Sebastian Delgado). This work is an interesting example of how long ideas can live inside an artist before finally finding their manifestation. I first thought of this image of moths throwing themselves against a lantern when experimenting with a marimba during So Percussion‘s composing for percussion seminar (informally known as Sominar) at Princeton University back in 2015. Something about the dull, but velvety warm thudding of that lowest octave on a 5-octave marimba made me think that if moths were human-sized, they would sound just like that in their manic desire to unite with the flame. These moths were throwing themselves against my mind’s lantern for 8 years before finally reaching the light.

I originally intended to write a quartet for two marimbas and two vibraphones, or two marimbas played by four people (marimba four hands? because you know, getting four 5-octave marimbas on one stage seemed unlikely). I never got around to that. But when this commission came my way, this image floated up from the depth of my creative repository. And then Kaija Saariaho passed away not long before I started the work and I knew this piece would be my homage to her. Her solo cello work Sept Papillon, Seven Butterflies, blew my mind when I first heard it back in 2011 from the hands of Vanessa Hunt Russell, who was learning it at the Banff Centre, where I was also doing my first residency. The work was important in my investigations of the cello, along with Spins and Spells, as I wrote The Child, Bringer of Light for a workshop led by Kaija and her long-time collaborator, cellist Anssi Karttunen.

Like Moths to a Flame is very different from Kaija’s style, but I have retained many timbral elements and notational approaches from her work in my string writing. Studying her scores, and then studying with her and Anssi was a transformative moment in my artist development. The Sominar was also an import moment in my development. So this is how two different formative experiences unexpectedly came together in one piece, many years later. Thank you!

Stockhausen Menagerie

Posted on August 7, 2023 by Anna

I’m happy to announce that Stockhausen Menagerie for flute and Bb clarinet is now available for sale from Oxingale Music. The work was commissioned and premiered by Duo Inquietum (Mark Takeshi McGregor and Liam Hockley) with support from the Canada Council for the Arts. It’s a collection of miniatures drawing on phrases from Karkheinz Stockhausen’s Tierkreis (the Aries, Taurus and Gemini movements) to create portraits of fantasy birds. The bits of phrases are “birdified” and shaped into imaginary interactions between displaying males. It’s a fun, light-hearted piece with opportunities for some choreography.

The score is available for purchase here.

“Weeping for a Dead Love” in Italy

Posted on April 26, 2023 by Anna

Last summer there was a series of rather unexpected and rewarding performances of my piece for voice and percussion quartet “Weeping for a dead love” in Italy. This was the first work I wrote for myself to sing in pseudo-folk style and I honestly didn’t expect any other singers to ever perform it, let alone classically trained singers. In Ukraine, there’s virtually no mixing between the folk and classical realms because the folk timbre supposedly ruins your voice (it doesn’t if you sing in a healthy way).

So I was very surprised when mezzo-soprano Svitlana Melnyk took on the piece. She fled from Kharkiv to Italy, where the Istituto Superiore di Studi Musicali di Reggio Emilia has been hosting displaced faculty and students from Ukraine. The institute just posted a video of one of the performances on YouTube.

Svitlana performs with percussion students from the conservatory, including another displaced Ukrainian. Svitlana sings the folk-inspired work in her own more classical way, powerfully and with a great deal of feeling. She told me that the work speaks to her own grief of living through war and displacement. It means a lot to me that she and other Ukrainians have connected to my music in that way. This project was initiated by Simone Beneventi, a percussionist who teaches at Reggio Emilia.

“New Normal” Workshop with Red Note

Posted on March 5, 2023 by Anna

I recently wrapped up a week-long workshop for an in-progress project co-produced by Red Note Ensemble in Edinburgh, Scotland and Soundstreams in Toronto, Canada. Tentatively titled “New Normal”, the project is a ritualistic operatic piece co-written by myself and Northern Irish composer Brian Irvine. Born in the depth of the pandemic, the project explores the challenges of international collaboration with limited travel. So far, only the composers have travelled across the ocean to work with local ensembles. The final result will be two simultaneous concerts in Toronto and Edinburgh with mine and Brian’s intertwined pieces livestreamed from one hall to the other to form one narrative.

For this second workshop I was again in Edinburgh (the first workshop took place in November 2021) working with sopranos Emma Morwood and Jessica Leary, mezzo-soprano Laura Margaret Smith, and members of the Red Note Ensemble. Brian Irvine was in Toronto working with the Soundsterams team. The singers on the Edinburgh side play three aliens who have landed on Earth on the streets of a small town emptied out by pandemic lockdowns. They attempt to make contact with the one and only human they spy through a window (who is actually in Toronto), but he is utterly oblivious to them, caught up in his own attempt to build a spaceship to escape his life on earth.

This workshop focused on establishing video and audio contact between the two cities in order to test technological capabilities and limitations. We also workshopped a bunch of music and experimented with livestreamed overlap between the performers stationed on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

The premiere for this work is slated for 2024.