Category Archives: My work

Connection through performance

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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.

 

Appearance in Manor House

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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

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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

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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.

Off to Toronto!

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After successfully defending my masters thesis a couple of weeks ago, I’m happily on my way to the next adventure. I’m off to Toronto for the Soundstreams emerging composers’ workshop, which starts tomorrow. I am super excited about this opportunity to work with R. Murray Schafer, Juliet Palmer and the Gryphon Trio, and to meet the other participants. In addition to composing and reading sessions, there will also be some professional development seminars covering topics such as “From emerging to emerged,” “The art of artistic directing” and “Marketing and PR.” There will also be a visit to Mr. Schafer’s farm!

The format of this workshop will be a little different from the other two I’ve participated in (Carnegie Hall and NAC). Instead of coming in with a completed piece to rehearse and tweak, we were asked to bring sketches to try out with the ensemble. The piece will be completed after the workshop.

I’ve spent the last four weeks trying to wrap my brain around a new tuning on both violin and cello. I tried to keep the tuning unchanged at first, but the open strings are so familiar and predictable. And, with the strings being turned in open fifths, the harmonics pretty much form a D major scale.

The moment I started fidgeting with the tuning pegs, the sound assumed a new darkness and mystery. The new tuning also opened up some interesting possibilities for natural harmonics and double stops. I think the pain of keeping track of how everything is notated vs. how it really sounds is well worth the effect. We’ll see what the ensemble has to say.

My primary goal for this piece is to fuse several directions in my composing, which up to now have mostly be confined to different pieces. I am trying to integrate my fascination with Ukrainian folksong with the kind of colour manipulations I was exploring in my solo cello piece, The child, bringer of light. I am taking snippets of a folksong I recorded in the village Kozats’ke, Kalyna Malyna, which has really touched me both in terms of its musical content and meaning, and making them emerge out of and dissolve into various harmonic trills.

A sketch for an upcoming piano trio

I rented a cello and a violin to experiment with these ideas and get a feel for the tuning, but the challenge has been imagining what it will all sound like together. Being so preoccupied with the strings, I’ve also been a little neglectful of the piano, a shortcoming I am hoping to fix by and by. Anyway, I’m excited to hear it all at my first session on Tuesday. Keep tuned for further updates!

Thin Edge on the Bridal Train

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I would like to invite all those who live in Vancouver, Victoria, Toronto or Montreal to attend one of the concerts given by the Thin Edge New Music Collective in the next couple of weeks. Thin Edge is touring with a very unique combination of instruments – flute, violin, accordion and piano – and will be performing my newest piece, Bridal Train.

Bridal Train was the result of some very intense work at the Banff Centre and draws heavily on a folksong I recorded in Ukraine.

Village Kozats’ke, Ensemble Berehynja: “Vesil’naja maty” (“Весільная мати”)

This folksong is part of the traditional wedding rite in the village Kozats’ke, which I visited last September (see the post here). It accompanies the baking of special wedding bread known as karavaj. The song has an interesting formal structure, primarily reserved for this kind of ritualistic repertoire, where six-beat cells go through various subdivisions to accommodate an irregular text. The six-beat cells can sometimes be replaced by shorter or longer cells (commonly four beats); I play with this tendency a little in my piece. These particular performers also do what we know as metric modulation, suddenly going into triplets and letting them become the new quarter-note pulse. This is something that I pushed further in Bridal Train. I think Thin Edge particularly enjoyed rehearsing those bits.

Here’s a list of all the concerts where you can hear this piece as well as music by Juan de Dios Magdaleno, Georg Katzer, Toshio Hosokawa, Uros Rojko, Hope Lee and a brand new piece for the full quartet by Solomiya Moroz.

VANCOUVER – February 1, 8 pm, CMC Vancouver, 837 Davie Street, $15-20

VICTORIA – February 3, 7:30 pm, Wood Hall, The Victoria Conservatory of Music, 900 Johnson St, $10-$15 (Presented by Open Space Arts Society)

TORONTO – February 10, 3 pm, Gallery 345, 345 Sorauren Ave, $15-$20

MONTRÉAL – February 11, 8 pm, Sala Rosa, 4848 boul. Saint-Laurent, $10-15

They are also doing a second show in Vancouver focusing on repertoire with open instrumentation, including some wonderful Cage pieces for violin and keyboard (performed by accordion in this case):

VANCOUVER- January 31, 9 pm, 1067 EAST, 1115b East Hastings, $5 (with guitarist/composer Jeff Younger)

I hope you come out to one of these shows and enjoy this unique ensemble. I’m super excited to hear my piece this Friday!

On the Eve of Ivan Kupalo

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I am very happy to announce that my chamber opera, which has been gestating on and off for almost three and a half years, is finally complete! The score is almost two inches thick. And even more exciting is the fact that it will be premiered in concert form at Calgary’s Happening Festival on January 24 at the Rozsa Centre. You can hear a very short excerpt from an earlier workshop session in the Listen section. 

On the Eve of Ivan Kupalo, a one-act chamber opera steeped in Ukrainian folklore, tells the story of three young women who find themselves involved with one man. With emotions raised to a feverish pitch, the women take their revenge on the devious Taras, thereby enacting the ancient rites of the pagan god Ivan Kupalo. The music draws heavily on folk singing styles with the singers stomping, yelling and gliding their way through a chromatic and modal soundworld.

The opera will be sung in English and will feature vocalists Michelle Minke, Edith Pritchard, Jennifer Sproule, Dana Sharp, Stephanie Plummer, Bethany Routledge and Irina Popescu, as well as the German accordionist Olivia Steimel, percussionist Kyle Eustace and pianist Michael Coburn. The ensemble will be directed by Tim Korthuis.

The rehearsals are sounding amazing already and I am super excited about hearing it next week. The singers will be wearing various items of traditional Ukrainian garb,  including some very old hand-made embroidered shirts, that I picked up during my travels in Ukraine last fall.

This performance is funded by the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, Calgary 2012 and the University of Calgary Music Department.

NAC Workshop: Day of Truth

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Tonight is the climax of the NAC Composers Program with performances of five premieres at the Southam Hall of the National Arts Centre. There will also be a piece by Chen Yi. After a week of sweating, correcting and second-guessing, we have to release our babies into the world. The info for the “Future classics” event can be found here.

Last night was the penultimate and ultimately more ‘important’ event of this whole summer institute – the conductors’ concert. The five conducting students got their big break to conduct the NAC Orchestra through some favorite classics. This is the event that attracts all the donors.

Because it’s the 10th anniversary of the composers’ program, I was asked to represent all the summer institute participants with a ‘thank you to the donors’ speech. Naturally, since few of these people actually come to the composers’ concert, they had me speak at this event instead. It was a bit of a funny concept, but I’m happy that the composers were at least present in some form in the donors’ consciousness. Public speaking is also a kind of performance outlet for me so it was pretty cool to address about 1,500 people. Maybe some of them will even be curious and come out tonight to see what this being alive and composing thing is all about.

The pieces are all sounding great. The ensemble has done a fantastic job. I feel that they’ve really invested themselves. My piece has improved astronomically from the first read through. Once the players realized that they could be much more expressive with my material, it just turned into a different piece. It sounds much more like what I hoped to hear in terms of the intensity of the individual sounds and gestures. The all-too-typical structural problems endemic to young composers are still there, of course, but the piece seems to be standing and continuing to generate a barrage of earworms with dirty legato flavour.

There is also some sort of composers’ panel happening in the city today. It’s not open to the public and no one, not even the participants, seem to know what it’s about. There are representatives from all over the country and they are supposed to be at the show tonight. I finally get to meet a few names I hear everywhere and they’ll add a few bodies to the audience.

Speaking of the audience, apparently they do this concert ‘differently.’ Instead of spreading a 10-person crowd through a 2000 person hall, they just put everyone right on stage with the performers. I am really curious to see how that will work.

Dirty legato and musical parenting

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I’ve been in beautiful Ottawa since Friday afternoon. After three intense days with the NAC Composers Program, I am enjoying a semi-day off. I have an interview with the CBC Radio 1 this afternoon (tune in around 4:45 EST). I also did an interview for the NAC blog earlier. You can check it out here in English or en français.

The last three days have been very emotionally conflicted. We spend our mornings in readthroughs and rehearsals, and in the afternoon the composers hide away in a little hot cave in the dungeons of the NAC to discuss matters great and small. Our mentors are Gary Kulesha and Chen Yi. Gary tends to be very provocative and blunt, while Chen Yi is always laughing and gesticulating excitedly. It’s a very contradictory dynamic.

There is a very talented bunch of young composers gathered here with different issues and strengths. Some pieces are very colourful and energetic, full of shimmering and juicy orchestration. In sharp contrast to that, there’s a piece that explores the idea of urban blight and the stark, decaying landscapes it generates. My piece seems to be a mishmash of earworms, which were plaguing people for hours yesterday. I’m also responsible for a new musical term – dirty legato.

We get to work with a dedicated ensemble drawn from the Orchestre de la francophonie conducted by Jean-Philippe Tremblay. The musicians are great, eager to make things work and try new things. They ask lots of questions and offer suggestions. Jean-Philippe jokes around all the time producing a welcome calming effect. They are playing new music from 10:30 to 4:30 every day. It’s quite a physical and intellectual marathon.

I was very depressed after the first two rehearsals, through no fault of the musicians. I am apparently not very good at communicating my intentions through the score. My markings are too classical and when executed with the precision with which performers tend to approach contemporary music, things just sound flat and shapeless.

After spending two days wallowing in self pity and berating myself for writing and awful piece, I decided to kick it into shape. I was a lot more vocal in the last rehearsal and tried to explain what kind of sound I was going for. That’s how we ended up with dirty legato. I really needed them to play more harshly and aggressively with more glissando and bow pressure, less like Mozart and more like Ukrainian folk singers. We all had a good laugh and it worked. I am really looking forward to the next rehearsal.

I think it can be much easier, emotionally, to simply throw away a creation you are not immediately happy with, to distance yourself from it, to disown it, to forget it ever happened. It’s harder to force yourself to really look at it, accept its faults and figure out how to highlight the strengths. Maybe it’s like being a parent and giving your work unconditional love while still seeing it for what it is. You made it and you are responsible for giving it a fighting chance. I’ll call it musical parenting.

The highlight of the week so far has been a visit from Ana Sokolovic. She spent the day with us yesterday sitting in on rehearsals and joining us for discussion in the afternoon. She talked about her own approach and gave us little private sessions. I love her music and she seems like an amazing teacher, combining very astute critique with a kind of excitement that is extremely encouraging. With some teachers, you come out of this kind of session feeling like you have so much to learn still that it is almost insurmountable and you will never measure up to whatever ideal they set up. Ana has a way of delivering critique that makes you excited about what you are doing and eager to improve.