Tag Archives: Toronto

Ontario Concerts

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Just a quick heads up about two upcoming events in Ontario featuring Through closed doors performed from its antique wooded door score. The program, performed brilliantly by Thin Edge New Music Collective, will also feature fantastic works by Ana Sokolovic, Anna Hostman and Brian Harman. If you know me and would like to come to the Toronto fundraiser, get in touch with me please.

September 20, 2014, 8:00 pm (Waterloo, ON, Canada)
The Button Factory (Waterloo Community Arts Theatre), 25 Regina St. Tickets available here.

September 21, 2014 (Toronto, ON, Canada)
A private fundraiser in Rosedale. Entrance by invitation.

I will be selling high-quality copies of four of the pages from the paper manuscript of Through closed doors. They are printed on nice 12×15″ watercolour paper and will be available for $40 each (or $140 for the set of four). I also have 5×7″ postcards for $5 each (just the first two pages). Bring cash or cheques!

Through closed doors, page 1Through closed doors, page 2Through closed doors, page 3Through closed doors, page 4

 

Super concert with Thin Edge

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I just want to say that I am thrilled with how the Thin Edge concert went last Friday. Gallery 345 is a beautiful space with great acoustics. The new violin duo, Through closed doors, looked great in there and Ilana and Suhashini sounded FANTASTIC! I couldn’t be happier with the piece at this stage in the process.

"Through closed doors" premiere

Photo by Terry Lim. Performers: Ilana Waniuk and Suhashini Arulanandam. 

I am happy to say that the notation seems to be working exactly as planned. I feel so lucky to work with such adventurous and dedicated musicians. Now I’m waiting for the recording (and taking a little breather) before making some revisions and starting on the next stages: making the final layout of the score and engraving the door (if this sentence is confusing, look down at the last two posts).

I am also extremely happy to have met the cellist Dobrochna Zubek, who performed The Child, Bringer of Light. It was great working with her to prepare the piece. She approached it with thoughtfulness, sensitivity and a strong desire to make it her own. She is now the fourth performer to take it on and it’s fascinating to hear the transformations the piece goes through each time.

Dobrochna Zubek performing "The Child, Bringer of Light"

Photo by Terry Lim. Performer: Dobrochna Zubek. 

Speaking of The Child  and its transformations, the piece will be performed at the end of March by Claire Poillion in a brand new arrangement for viola. I am very curious to see how the piece will transfer to this instrument. The performance will be my Uruguayan debut (check the Events page for details).

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.

 

The first six days of Soundstreams

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It’s been a crazy week here at the Soundstreams Emerging Composers’ Workshop in Toronto. The days have been packed with composing seminars with R. Murray Schafer and Juliet Palmer, reading sessions with the Gryphon Trio, various professional development talks, and reunions with many friends. My jetlag combined with overexcited insomnia means that I have mostly been running on adrenalin and copious amounts if tea.

Despite the sleep deprivation, I’ve been having a really wonderful time. I am really enjoying working with the Gryphon Trio. Jamie, Roman and Annalee have been extremely supportive and patient as we try to communicate and explore our ideas. They have a great sense of humour, which makes the whole process fun rather than stressful. It turns out that scordatura (funky tuning) can be a little annoying (to put it lightly) for string players with perfect pitch; they expect to hear a certain note and something else comes out. Annalee is being a very good sport about it though (thank you!). I am enjoying the pulsating, shimmering textures I’m getting from the strings, but finding that I need to go even further into that world, away from the very solid sound of traditional playing. I’m still struggling with fitting the piano into this soundworld.

There has been no drama among the participants, but, since everything is being recorded, we feel like we are on reality radio of some sort (or should I say podcast?). It would be a pretty borring reality show for the average viewer since we all get along…We all have very different aesthetics, so it’s an interesting learning experience. Adam Scime has these crazy dense textures and very detailed string writing. Gabriel Dharmoo is working with Carnatic material from India, with lots of heterophonic unison playing and quiet noisy textures in the strings. Caitlin Smith is incorporating jazz and Turkish traditions. Graham Flett is doing some trippy things with Schumann and string harmonics. Emilie LeBel is combining her gradual, shimmering textures with very broad melodic lines.

Juliet has already asked us what we are planning to steal from each other (Adam Scime, I WILL have your trilly-glissy figures!). I am very curious to see where these pieces will end up. Will there be any cross influences creeping in?

We had a very special treat today: a visit to Murray Schafer’s farm! We got a tour of his current work in progress – a massive theatrical, musical and spatial experience – that’s being erected on his property. He also very generously gave us some of his scores and books as gifts after showing us his publishing house located in his basement. I am now the happy owner of two of his beautifully hand-drawn scores: a chamber opera Loving, and The Black Theatre of Hermes Trismegistos from the Patria cycle. He even gave me the LP recording of the opera! I am very pleased and excited.

Excerpts from the score The Black Theatre of Hermes Trismegistos by R. Murray Schafer

Excerpt from "The Black Theatre of Hermes Trismegistos" by R. Murray Schafer

Excerpt from "The Black Theatre of Hermes Trismegistos" by R. Murray SchaferI love how the lines of the staves turn into waves in the second one. If you like what you see here, get yourself to your nearest CMC library and check out these gorgeous scores. You can also buy them from Arcana, Schafer’s very own publishing label.

Off to Toronto!

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After successfully defending my masters thesis a couple of weeks ago, I’m happily on my way to the next adventure. I’m off to Toronto for the Soundstreams emerging composers’ workshop, which starts tomorrow. I am super excited about this opportunity to work with R. Murray Schafer, Juliet Palmer and the Gryphon Trio, and to meet the other participants. In addition to composing and reading sessions, there will also be some professional development seminars covering topics such as “From emerging to emerged,” “The art of artistic directing” and “Marketing and PR.” There will also be a visit to Mr. Schafer’s farm!

The format of this workshop will be a little different from the other two I’ve participated in (Carnegie Hall and NAC). Instead of coming in with a completed piece to rehearse and tweak, we were asked to bring sketches to try out with the ensemble. The piece will be completed after the workshop.

I’ve spent the last four weeks trying to wrap my brain around a new tuning on both violin and cello. I tried to keep the tuning unchanged at first, but the open strings are so familiar and predictable. And, with the strings being turned in open fifths, the harmonics pretty much form a D major scale.

The moment I started fidgeting with the tuning pegs, the sound assumed a new darkness and mystery. The new tuning also opened up some interesting possibilities for natural harmonics and double stops. I think the pain of keeping track of how everything is notated vs. how it really sounds is well worth the effect. We’ll see what the ensemble has to say.

My primary goal for this piece is to fuse several directions in my composing, which up to now have mostly be confined to different pieces. I am trying to integrate my fascination with Ukrainian folksong with the kind of colour manipulations I was exploring in my solo cello piece, The child, bringer of light. I am taking snippets of a folksong I recorded in the village Kozats’ke, Kalyna Malyna, which has really touched me both in terms of its musical content and meaning, and making them emerge out of and dissolve into various harmonic trills.

A sketch for an upcoming piano trio

I rented a cello and a violin to experiment with these ideas and get a feel for the tuning, but the challenge has been imagining what it will all sound like together. Being so preoccupied with the strings, I’ve also been a little neglectful of the piano, a shortcoming I am hoping to fix by and by. Anyway, I’m excited to hear it all at my first session on Tuesday. Keep tuned for further updates!