Tonight, Essential Opera is performing a revised, two-voice version of my mini-opera, Mirror, mirror. It’s a retelling of the classic Snow White story, focusing on the relationship between Snow White and the Queen, and exploring issues of aging and watching children grow up and take one’s place. While the original version was written for one vocalist, Janice Jackson, performing both roles, tonight’s performance will feature Maureen Ferguson and Julie Ludwig, with musical direction by Cheryl Duvall.

The performance will take place at 7:30 pm at the Heliconian Hall, Toronto. More info here.

A year ago, I made an illustrated score for the piece comprising of five hand-printed panels. There are only seven copies, with six available for sale.

Today I will be premiering Teach your daughters with the Brooklyn-based duo aTonalHits at the Princeton Sound Kitchen concert Polyptych. The concert’s theme is Composer-Singers and will feature music by Elliot Cole, Christopher Douthitt, Alex Dowling, Emma O’Halloran and myself.

I discussed the initial idea for this piece in an interview with Musicworks Magazine before taking some sketches to Avaloch Farm last August. While there, I played with Katha and Illya’s box of Cage piano preparations and tried out some basic ideas with them. I am looking forward to finally bringing this piece to life.

Trying out sketches with Katha Zinn, violin, and Illya Filshtinskiy, piano, at Avaloch Farm.

I’m in Toronto having some great rehearsals with Michael Bridge and Gamin in preparation for the premiere of On the courtship displays of Birds-of-Paradise. This duo for accordion and traditional Korean instrument saenghwang was commissioned by Soundstreams. The premiere will take place on February 10 (8 pm) at Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre at 427 Bloor St West. I will discuss the piece with artistic director Lawrence Cherney at a pre-concert chat at 7 pm. More info here.

I just found out that Dobrochna Zubek will perform The Child, Bringer of Light as part of the “Fast Forward Crescendo” concert at Zamek Cesarski happening on January 7 at 7:30 pm. This will be the first time that my music is heard in Poland.

Dobrochna Zubek rehearsing The Child at the Music Gallery in Toronto in February 2014. 

The lovely Ilana Waniuk and Suhashini Arulanandam will perform Through closed doors with the one-and-only door score in Mississauga, ON this Sunday, November 22. Dobrochna Zubek will also perform The child, bringer of light for solo cello. The performance will be part of a Thin Edge New Music Collective concert featuring music by Linda Caitlin Smith, Anna Hostman and Ana Sokolovic.

The concert will take place at 2:00 pm at the Great Hall in the Unitarian Congregation, 84 South Service Rd., Mississauga, ON.

I’m looking forward to the US premiere of my newest trio Like doves with grey wings embracing, performed by Trio Chimera as part of the Princeton Sound Kitchen concert happening on Tuesday, September 15 (8:00 pm) at Taplin Auditorium in Fine Hall (Princeton University, Princeton, NJ).

This piece draws on material from my work Weeping for a dead love, which I premiered with So Percussion last May. The violin and cello sing my vocal lines, while the piano expands on the sound of the four Noah bells, which so magically fit themselves into the sonic landscape of this piece.

My recently completed set of prints, which make up the illustrated manuscript for the mini-opera Mirror, mirror, are now on display at the Vancouver office of the Canadian Music Centre located at 837 Davie St. This is one of seven such sets and is available for sale.

This opera is based on the Grimms’ fairy tale Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. During performance, the five panels are to be laid flat on a table with the Queen’s and Snow White’s lines appearing on opposite sides. The timing of each vocal entry is coordinated through small square symbols. The staves change size and shape to indicate changes in dynamics and accents.

The prints were carved into linoleum sheets and printed with oil-based ink on handmade paper from Bhutan. Each sheet is hand-coloured and features inserts made from fine tissue papers from Japan, Nepal and Thailand. After printing and colouring, I also wove through threads of woolen, hand-died yarn. Though there are seven copies of each print, each one is unique because it incorporates so many hand-worked elements.

I’ve been in Toronto for a few days preparing for the upcoming premiere of my newest piece Weeping, which will be presented by New Music Concerts on Saturday, April 4th. The piece is based on traditional Ukrainian grieving songs (golosinnja). Since this is an exclusively female tradition, it amuses me greatly that all the performers in this case are male. They’ve been really great sports about trying all the funny squeaky sounds that I’m asking them to produce in an attempt to imitate vocal cracks, hiccups and the raw timbre of older, worn out voices. This performance is also going to be my conducting debut and I am eternally grateful to the performers for being so patient and kind to me.

The premiere will take place on Saturday, April 4th at the Betty Oliphant Theatre located at 404 Jarvis St. in Toronto. There will be a pre-concert talk at 7:15 and a reception following the 8:00 pm show.  The concert also features music by Ukrainian composers Karmella Tsepkolenko and Valentin Silvestrov, as well as Canadian composers of Ukrainian origin Gary Kulesha and Alex Pauk.

For more information on Weeping and my composing practice in general, I invite you to listen to this podcast recently produced by Paul Steenhuisen.

This commission and my presence in Toronto is generously funded by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Shevchenko Foundation.

I just finished my first ever piece for solo harpsichord, …the obsessive circularity of thought…, commissioned by Katelyn Clark. She will premiere the work at 8 pm on February 11 at Chapelle historique du Bon Pasteur, 100 rue Sherbrooke E, Montreal.

The piece was inspired by the tendency to obsessively replay certain conversations in our minds, wishing we said something different and analyzing each phrase from a million different angles. Musically, I concentrated on the slight differences in colour and tuning between the two manuals found on some instruments, obsessively repeating the same pitches and patterns through interlocking hands.

The harpsichord, which I used to compose this piece, located at Princeton University, made in Pennsylvania in the 1980s. 

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