I am super excited to relay that Rachel Mercer will be performing my piece The Child, Bringer of Light again this Wednesday, January 29 at a free event. The talk and concert take place at the Paintbox Bistro (555 Dundas Street East, Toronto) between 5-6 pm. Click here for more info.
I just found out that the wonderful Rachel Mercer will be performing my piece The Child, Bringer of Light TONIGHT in Toronto. She did an absolutely superb job with it in November (read my gushing over here) so I am thrilled to hear about this performance.
I know I’m a little late on this, but it’s been busy! My 2013 had a fantastically overloaded ending. Here’s a summary of my year:
1. Finished my opera On the eve of Ivan Kupalo in early January. It was premiered in late January at the Happening Festival in Calgary. It was like delivery a baby I had been carrying for 3.5 years.
2. Also in January, I went to the Banff Centre for three weeks.
3. In February, Thin Edge New Music Collective toured my piece Bridal Train through Banff, Vancouver, Victoria, Toronto and Montreal. They performed it again in Italy in the summer.
4. In April, I defended my thesis and finally graduated. Yey!
5. In May, I travelled to Toronto for the Soundstreams Emerging Composers’ Workshop, where I got to work with the Gryphon Trio, R. Murray Schafer and Juliet Palmer. Had a great time.
6. In August, I spent 4 weeks in France, Spain and Italy with my lovely boyfriend. Yey! Had my purse and passport stolen in Barcelona. Boo.
7. In the summer, I won some SOCAN awards.
8. Sometime in the fall, excerpts of The Child appeared in the arts journal Manor House Quarterly.
9. At the end of October, I went to Toronto for a few days for Rachel Mercer’s amazing performance of my piece The Child, Bringer of Light presented by New Music Concerts. Did I say it was amazing?
10. Straight from Toronto, I traveled to Kosice, Slovakia for the beginning of the ISCM World New Music Days. About 3.5 days and 8 concerts later, we moved on to Bratislava for more ISCM goodness (4 concerts for me). The highlight of this fair city was meeting Kaija Saariaho again. One of the best parts about the Slovak portion of this festival were all the fantastic student volunteers whose work continued well into the night during tours of the local bar scene. From there, we travelled to Vienna, where my solo accordion piece, Light-play through curtain holes, was performed by Alfred Melichar. It was one of the few pieces containing triadic harmony floating in an ocean of hardcore modernism. In total, I saw approximately 20 concerts in 10 days.
11. To top off my ISCM experience, I also returned back to Bratislava on the last day to see Saariaho’s new arrangement of her opera La Passion de Simone commissioned by the Melos Ethos Festival. It was fantastic. The next day I travelled to Kyiv via Riga. In this 24 hours, I had stepped foot in 4 European capitals (if you count the Riga airport).
12. After the ISCM, I spent three weeks in Ukraine, just as the protests were starting up. I visited a couple of villages with my excellent guide, Iryna, and recorded some great songs.
13. After getting back home in December, I fought very hard to finish the piano trio Toss a flower on the water, which will be premiered by the Gryphon Trio in March as the official wrap-up of the Soundstreams workshop. It was extremely hard for some reason. Then I temporary died over the holidays. Phew!
So far it’s not looking like 2014 will be any less busy. Woo!
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.
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!
Check back for further updates about my travels.
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.
I just got the latest ISCM Canadian Section demo CDs in the mail!!! The CD includes works selected by the Canadian Section for submission to the ISCM World New Music Days 2013 and my piece for solo accordion Light-play through curtain holes is among them! I am calling this my first official CD appearance. You can also find works by Brian Harman, Derek Charke, Anna Hostman, Patrick Saint-Denis and Alice Ho on this demo release. Check it out! I believe the CDs are available from the Canadian League of Composers. A big thank you to the German accordionist Olivia Steimel for the wonderful recording featured on this album.
Light-play through curtain holes will be performed at the ISCM World New Music Days festival in November 2013.
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!
I just returned to Vancouver from a three-week creative residency at the Banff Centre. The 15-hour bus ride through Beautiful British Columbia gave me some time to take stock of the last 18 months of my life. Since August 2011, I have moved between Canada’s coasts three times, officially held three addresses plus four transient ones, attended two composition workshops, gave three public talks, and wrote 39 minutes of music in addition to completing a 36-minute chamber opera. My three-months’ stay in Ukraine last fall, though offering some incredible opportunities to hear authentic performances of folk music, was a psychological nightmare from which I came back feeling broken and depressed.
In that mind state, the Banff Centre, despite everything it has to offer, seemed like yet another place to travel to, yet another place to have to work very hard at. I was still trying to finish my chamber opera. I was terribly behind on a piece I was supposed to be workshopping with the Thin Edge New Music Collective and was absolutely dreading having to face them. I was too worn out to enjoy the prospect of yet another three weeks away from home.
But I went. And it ended up being exactly what I needed.
In Ukraine, there’s a saying that without your piece of paper, you are just a piece of poop. This idea infects almost every aspect of life. Going from that to the Banff Centre, I suddenly found myself in an environment where everything and everyone makes you feel supremely important. You have incredible facilities at your disposal and, most importantly, you are surrounded by an intense concentration of talent and energy. It’s absolutely infectious. The residency takes you away from the daily grind and reminds you why you work so hard at this ephemeral idea of music. And it makes you want to work even harder to reach your ultimate goal.
I came to the centre totally exhausted, but managed to write a 5-minute chamber piece amidst constant trips to Calgary for opera rehearsals. I worked like mad, but there is no way I could have done that at home. Somehow I came back to Vancouver feeling more rested and energized than I did when I left three weeks ago. Then, my only goal was to finish my current projects and hibernate indefinitely. Now I am looking forward to facing new challenges and new pieces.
The Banff Centre is truly a magical place and I very much hope that the current restructuring it’s going through will not take these residencies away from us. The centre is not just “inspiring creativity,” as all the signs on campus proclaim. It inspires a kind of radiantly innocent hope for the rest of your life as an artist.
In my hut with the lovely ladies from the Canadian Federation of University Women, the organization that generously funded part of my Banff Centre experience.
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.