Tag Archives: my work

“Through closed doors” score published

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I’m happy to announce that the paper score for my violin duo Through Closed Doors, notated on an antique door, is now available for purchase from my publisher Oxingale Music. The work was commissioned and premiered by Ilana Waniuk and Suhashini Arulanandam in the winter of 2014. The duo was inspired by an antique door which had been attacked by a teenager girl in a fit of passion, resulting in a jagged hole. I structured the piece around the door’s different panels, creating a kind of choreography for the two performers who move around the door as they play. The notation drew on medieval illuminated manuscripts and incorporates dynamics, accents and bow pressure right into the staff lines for a more intuitive performance. Since the door is rather large and expensive to transport (though it does have a travel case if anyone is interested in renting it), I also made a paper score, which is now available for purchase here.

The premiere of the work from a draft paper score drawn with pencil happened in February 2014, right during the most difficult days of the Maidan protests in Ukraine, which ousted the pro-russian president Yanukovych, a corrupt criminal who was trying to bring Ukraine back into russia’s sphere of influence. I watched livestreams of tires burning in the centre of Kyiv, the people fearlessly resisting a regime rapidly growing increasingly oppressive, as we rehearsed the work. I cannot think of this piece separately from these protests, especially now, knowing the chain of events that eventually forced Ukraine to defend itself yet again against russia’s imperialist aggression.

“Weeping for a dead love” score now published

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My publisher, Oxingale Music, just released the newly revised and renotated score for the first piece I ever wrote for myself to sing. Weeping for a dead love, for low female voice and percussion quartet, draws on Ukraine’s lamentation tradition, known as gholosinnia, to mourn the dissolution of a romantic relationship. I wrote it for myself and my own semi-folk singing style, not imagining that another singer would take on this rather peculiar work. But not only did another singer take it on, she was a classically trained singer, which I didn’t expect at all. Svitlana Melnyk, a mezzo-soprano who fled from Kharkiv at the start of russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, gave multiple performances of this work in Italy with the students of Istituto Superiore di Studi Musicali di Reggio Emilia in the summer of 2022, connecting to it in a way that was very special to me. She demonstrated that the piece works for a more classically sounding voice and that it is very emotionally relevant to the current moment. So I decided to make it available to others. The score is available for purchase here.

Here is my performance of the piece, premiered with So Percussion at Princeton University’s Sound Kitchen in the spring of 2015.

And here’s Svitlana Melnyk performing the work in Italy in the summer of 2023.

Lekking Birds

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In 2020, when the live music industry was at a virtual standstill, I wrote “Lekking Birds” for Kornel Wolak (clarinet), Amahl Arulanandam (cello) and Michael Bridge (accordion). Commissioned by The Women’s Musical Club of Toronto, the work received its “premiere” in November 2020, in an empty concert hall in Toronto, live-streamed only to a select group of subscribers. I watched the live stream from my house in Vancouver, drinking wine with my trio of stuffed Mices (Masters Sneaky Mouse, Elph and Orph) and I cried.

The pandemic really made me understand how much I value live performance. Recordings can be great, for obvious reasons, but I like to be in the concert hall, surrounded by other people, feeling their response. I like the whole ritual of it. I like getting feedback from the audience. I love going out for drinks with the performers and other composers after the show, to celebrate success and commiserate about things that didn’t go as well as we hoped.

The experience of this particular premiere – watching friends play to an empty hall on my laptop screen while drinking with small stuffed animals – was so depressing at that moment in time that I just broke down and cried. I think because of that association, I kind of put this piece on a shelf for three years. I couldn’t touch it. But I recently dug it up and listened to the recording more thoroughly and discovered that I am really quite proud of the piece. I love this particular combination of timbres so much that I spent the last four minutes (Third Choreography) cycling through one short chord progression. The accordion – sitting somewhere between winds and strings in its timbre – blends the clarinet and cello so perfectly. It’s molten chocolate pouring from vessel to vessel.

And here recording does have a beautiful advantage over live performance: because of the close placement of the microphones, you can really hear the phrases travel from instrument to instrument, from left to right speaker or earbud, in a way that would not be as apparent in a hall with such a small ensemble. And this is really what the piece is exploring, passing material back and forth with small variations to mimic the fluttering, hopping group mating displays of the blue manakin bird.

A big thank you to Kornel, Amahl and Michael for this immaculate bird display.