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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Soprano Emma Morwood in Edinburgh singing along with the ensemble in TorontoThe Edinburgh team observing rehearsal livestreamed from TorontoSingers in Edinburgh performing with the Toronto ensembleComposer Brian Irvine and I chatting across the ocean
I am happy to announce that my music is now published by Oxingale Music. We are slowly editing scores and adding them to the catalogue. All inquiries about score purchase and rentals should go to Oxingale. If you are interested in purchasing something not currently in the catalogue, reach out to the publisher anyway and we’ll try to make it happen.
Today is the world premiere of Our Trudy, a full length opera commissioned from librettist Maria Reva and myself by the Ad Astra Music Festival in Russell, Kansas. This project celebrates the 150th anniversary of the town’s founding. The three performances take place as part of an enormous festival called Prairiesta, which rolls through Russell every ten years. Our Trudy honours the legacy of a beloved local artist and teacher, Trudy Furney, who inspired several generations to pursue an artistic practice and cultivated a lively appreciation for visual arts in the town and the state as a whole. Thirty years after her death, her impact is still felt in the community and in the hearts of those who remember her.
Maria and I joined the project three years ago when the Ad Astra brought us to Russell to interview people who knew Trudy. A week of interviews revealed a rather complex emotional legacy. Initially the idea of boiling all this complexity down to a single narrative seemed utterly overwhelming. On the one hand were all of Trudy’s professional achievements (numerous teaching awards and artistic recognition) and her sociable and nurturing personality, which endeared her to everyone who knew her. On the other, were the horrible personal tragedies she suffered: the loss of her husband to cancer, her son’s death in a somewhat mysterious gun incident in her own kitchen, and Trudy’s own battle with cancer. Trying to reconcile these struggles with her religious, social and personal worldview, Trudy dipped into fringe theories that blended Christian end-of-the-world prophesies with alien contact. Her connection with these theories and their followers landed her name on the pages of national tabloid papers shortly after her death, an unfortunate circumstance that caused much trauma for the people who knew her and the community as a whole.
Maria and I were faced with the challenge of how to represent this complex human being who was remembered in such contrasting light by people who had access to different parts of her life and psyche. Some remembered her as a hardy, fun-loving person who could always cheer them up, a pillar of support, someone who appeared unbroken by the tragedies in her life. Others saw her as vulnerable and struggling with intense grief, questioning everything, including her Christian faith. In this deeply religious community, such questioning was a very serious and potentially threatening matter at that time. Many were rightfully nervous about this project, worried that we would sensationalize the end of her life.
Instead of trying to define a single “correct” version of Trudy, Maria and I decided to construct her out of memories and to represent the different perspectives through several fictional characters who act as amalgams of the people we interviewed. Dora, herself a sunny but perhaps avoidant personality, focuses on Trudy’s nurturing and cheerful nature. Todd, a brooding man who also suffered loss, dwells on Trudy’s darker side. Neither is wrong, but neither is fully right either. Managing this somewhat conflict-ridden but also humorous navigation through memory space is the Narrator. He attempts to remain neutral and uninvolved but is eventually forced to grapple with his own unresolved grief and guilt. Filling out the memories is the Chorus, a quartet of singers who transform into Trudy’s students, townspeople, vicious rumours or Trudy’s friends. In the end, the opera is as much about the town and the people who remember Trudy as it is about Trudy herself.
Maria and I are deeply grateful to the people who welcomed us to Russell and made themselves vulnerable to total strangers by sharing deeply personal memories and reflections on Trudy’s life, memories that were often painful and raw even thirty years after her death. Thank you.
The premiere is directed by Cara Consilvio, with music direction by Austin McWilliams. The set design is by Terrance Volden. The cast includes Katelyn Mattson-Levy (Trudy), Dominic Aragon (Narrator), Alyssa Toepfer (Dora), Gregório Taniguchi (Todd), Janie Brokenicky (Chorus Soprano), Lily Belle Czartorski (Chorus Alto), Michael Davidson (Chorus Tenor), and Alan Williams (Chorus Bass). The musicians of the ensemble are Man Wang, Negar Afazel, Julius Adams, Benjamin Cline, Even Hillis and Megan Bailey. Tina Gorter is the rehearsal pianist. A huge thank you to this wonderful cast and crew for their dedication, enthusiasm and energy. You really made this project happen!
Because of ongoing pandemic travel restrictions in Canada, Maria and I are not able to attend this premiere and have been observing the rehearsal and staging process from afar. This has been a complex emotional experience in itself. We hope that it is the last major premiere we have to attend virtually.
To learn more about the development of this project, check out this documentary created by Ad Astra following a workshop in the summer of 2020.
Maria Reva and Anna Pidgorna catching a glimpse of the dress rehearsal of Our Trudy over Zoom
A couple of years ago, while taking a class on Irish orality taught by renowned sean nós singer Iarla Ó Lionáird, I received an email asking me if I was interested in writing a set of art songs based on Irish poetry. It was a beautiful coincidence and of course, I was delighted! The Irish Song Project lead by Dáirine Ní Mheadhra and Pauline Ashwood commissioned a total of 50 songs from Irish and international composers with the aim of increasing the number of art songs in the Irish language. For various complex political and historical reasons, Irish tends to be associated with oral folk traditions while the classical world, even in Ireland, is dominated by English. The project was funded by the Irish Arts Council. All the scores and recordings are now available for use free of charge on a website hosted by the Irish Contemporary Music Centre. The texts are accompanied by IPA and word-for-ward translations, as well as poetry readings.
Because of my interest in lamentation traditions, I chose excerpts from three keening texts to set for soprano and piano. “Eileen’s Lament” is based on excerpts from the most famous of Irish laments composed by Eibhlín (Eileen) Dubh Ní Chonaill upon the death of her young husband, Art Ó Laoghaire. What I chose to focus on are the young widow’s ruminations about her husband’s erotic appeal, the luxurious life they shared, as well as his quick temper, which she sometimes had to navigate. “Mother’s Lament” draws on excerpts from a larger lament composed by the mother of Diarmaid MacCarthy upon his death, which also includes several verses lamenting her daughter Máire, who was severely abused by her husband. “Joking Lament” is a setting of several verses from a mock lament, written from the point of view of a woman who is ecstatic at the death of her abusive and miserly husband.
The scores and recordings can be found hereand are available for use according to the Creative Commons license.
