New Year = New Media

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I started off 2014 with a brand new piece: a violin duo for Thin Edge New Music Collective. This piece is a fortuitous coming together of a commission and an idea that had been stewing at the back of my mind for quite some time.

To earn a living, I spend quite a bit of time restoring antique wooden doors, windows and all their trims. I have grown to really love these unique pieces built from beautiful oldgrowth timbre and hardened by a hundred years of service. I spend quite a number of hours with each piece slowly peeling off years of paint, sanding away the grime and revealing the highly varied wood patterns beneath.

Staring at the wavering lines made me think of musical phrases. Imagining notes on a horizontal wooden surface brought to mind early vocal music performed around a table. The individual parts would be oriented towards all four sides of a sheet of paper, which was placed in the middle of this table so all the performers could see their music. Naturally, I thought, wouldn’t it be cool to engrave a score onto a door?

So when Ilana Waniuk from Thin Edge asked me to write a violin duo for her and Suhashini Arulanandam, sparks started flying from my brain. Imagine two young women, dressed in black, playing their wooden violins around a wooden door! Visual perfection!!!

The chosen door in its original condition 

The door

Now imagine that the chosen door was also attacked with a hatchet or cleaver at some point leaving a jagged hole in one of the panels. DRAMA!!!!

After the attack, the hole was patched with a little piece of plywood

The door's wound

So I’ve spend the last few weeks working out the relationship between these two imaginary women trapped on opposite sides of a locked door. This relationship does not seem very peaceful, I must admit.

The door being stripped of the cheery green paint

The stripping of the door

 

** The door was generously donated by a friend. Thank you! **

2013 Review

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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.

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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.

with Kaija Saariaho in Bratislava-Nov 2013

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.

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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!

Off the Voice in Vancouver

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I am excited to revive my older performance art piece, Off the Voice, in a new, more compact version. I will be performing it tomorrow (Saturday, January 18) at the Western Front (303 East 8th Ave, Vancouver) as part of Vancouver Pro Musica’s Electroacoustic Festival.

This piece was inspired by an ordeal that a singer friend of mine went through some time ago. She lost her voice and was almost completely mute for several months. As you can probably imagine, such an experience is especially terrifying for a singer. For me, the work became an exploration of that too frequent inability (or fear) to express ourselves clearly.

Here’s a video recording of my last performance of the work at the Banff Centre in the winter of 2011.

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.

 

Two concerts and a journal

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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!

My piece, "The Child, Bringer of Light," in Manor House Quarterly

Check back for further updates about my travels.

 

Music copying: old school

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After days of masochistic agony I have finally completed a long-avoided revision of my accordion piece, Light-play through curtain holes, which was originally written in 2010 and premiered by Olivia Steimel. This revision happened at last thanks to the upcoming performance of the work in Vienna as part of the ISCM World New Music Days 2013. The performance will take place on November 11 at 7:30 pm at the Berio-Saal, Konzerthaus, Lothringerstraße 20.

The primary reason I put off this revision for so long was the fact that the original score was done by hand. Just thinking about going through this process all over again made my eyes dry up, my back seize up and my wrists stiffen. Wanting to control every aspect of the layout, I even measured out my own staff lines. It took me days to do just five pages and all I could think was, “thank you to whatever deity might be up there that we have computer software for things like this.”

I love the final result of the hands-on approach; it has a certain density and fluidity hard to replicate in notation software. The lines feel juicier somehow and the possibilities for customization are endless. In this case, the piece seems to look more like it’s supposed to sound.

But, I am eternally grateful that I don’t have to do this with every one of my scores, that this is an aesthetic choice rather than a necessity. I can reserve this labour of love for pieces that would actually gain something from such representation (and I would argue that some wouldn’t).

Light-play

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.