I am exited to participate in the Mise-En Festival 2017 taking place June 20-25 in New York City. The festival will feature works by several dozen composers from around the world with concerts, workshops and presentations happening in different locations throughout the city. My piece Weeping, originally commissioned and premiered by New Music Concerts in Toronto, will be performed as part of the 7:30 pm set of the multi-hour marathon taking place on June 24. I am excited to share the program with Nick Omiccioli, whom I met in Ottawa at the NAC Emerging Composers Workshop back in 2012.

For more information about the festival, click here.

Weeping is my exploration of the nearly extinct tradition of weeping or keeping songs sung by women in rural Ukraine to mourn those they lost. I transcribed a number of recordings matching them with specific instruments based on timbral similarities. I endeavored to capture the idiosyncratic qualities of each voice using the idiosyncratic qualities of each instrument, often asking them to play against their classical training. The overall structure of the work is inspired by an archival recording made at a cemetery on a prescribed day of mass mourning. Here is an excerpt of the piece performed by the New Music Concerts ensemble.

For more information on Weeping and my composing practice in general, I invite you to listen to this podcast produced by Paul Steenhuisen before the work’s premiere.