Editor's Corner - July 2026
A number of decades ago my wife and I attended a fabulous concert by superlative percussionist (now Dame) Evelyn Glennie at the George Weston Recital Hall. The piece that has stuck with me for all these years was PRIM by Icelandic composer Áskell Másson, a ten-minute composition using only one snare drum. The result was transfixing (you can see a performance on YouTube). I would never have imagined that a single drum could be so compelling.
That being said I was a little daunted when I encountered Ryan Scott’s new double CD 21st Century Canadian Snare Drum (collectionqb.bandcamp.com/album/21st-century-canadian-snare-drum). Any qualms I had were quickly put to rest as I began to listen. While the snare drum does indeed figure prominently in the 14 works, almost all of them include additional resources, be it spoken word, electronic processing, prerecorded soundtracks, or requiring Scott to perform in other ways. One notable exception is Michael Oesterle’s brilliant, ironically titled hush (2022) with its seven minutes of just sticks on skin. Anna Höstman’s pebbles also uses the unadorned drum in a piece inspired by the words of artist Rockwell Kent, while Scott whistles and hums fragments of melodic material.
Andrew Staniland’s ANTIGRAVITYDRUM begins with the drum alone, its snare springs disconnected. Two and a half minutes later an engaging soundtrack begins, filled with electronic effects and MIDI-instruments in counterpoint with the still snare-less drum. Bekah Simms’ Skinscape IV involves Scott’s interaction with an electronic, disembodied version of the snare drum, transforming “something intimately familiar into something processed and alien.” Christina Volpini’s only ghosts finds Scott producing a harmonica drone over a soundtrack reminiscent of waves upon a shore. FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) by Kati Agócs is scored for snare drum, kick drum and two large metal plates. It is a sparse piece in which “the soloist enacts a kind of stream-of-consciousness pantomime, searching for something inchoate, elusive, and potentially unreachable.”
Perhaps the most idiosyncratic work is Brian Current’s abrasive Infantry which delves into the militaristic implications of the snare, with pre-recorded texts by soldiers from different backgrounds and periods of history and percussive interjections. The set concludes with Nicole Lizée’s The Dark Night.fm, in which “analogue synths and slowed-down voice smears… wrap themselves around Scott’s nimble percussion and vocal interjections.”
All of the above, plus works from Amy Brandon, Monica Pearce, Vincent Ho, Emilie Cecilia LeBel, Jason Doell and Hiroki Tsurumoto ensure that these discs never devolve into “too much of a muchness.” They provide a welcome showcase for the diversity of Canadian composition at this point in time and a stunning platform for the many talents of Ryan Scott (principal percussionist of Esprit Orchestra, artistic director of Continuum Contemporary Music and a member of the Canadian Opera Company Orchestra).
Listen to '21st Century Canadian Snare Drum' Now in the Listening Room
For the past number of decades another Toronto percussionist has made a name for herself as a virtuoso solo artist. Beverley Johnston’s repertoire stretches from her own transcriptions of the music of Bach, to the most intricate of contemporary works, often employing her super-sized five octave marimba. Her most recent release Finding Her Voice (navonarecords.com/catalog/nv6823) is “a journey through sound, history and identity… celebrating the enduring resonance of women’s voices across time.” Johnston presents works by Julie Spencer, Christos Hatzis, Samuel Kerr, Frederic Rzewski and David Jaeger, and two compellingly meditative structured improvisations of her own.
The instrumentation ranges from assorted quiet percussion in Spencer’s Angels in Arches of Hildegard’s Bingen (in which Johnston is also called upon to intone the text), vibraphone (Hatzis and Jaeger), marimba (Kerr), flowerpots (Rzewski) and temple bowls, temple bells and Thai gongs (Johnston). The Hatzis and Jaeger works also include playback of electroacoustic sounds, and in Kerr’s November we hear the haunting voice of the late character actor Kenneth Welsh reciting a poem by Robert Frost. In each case rich sound worlds are created using minimal resources, a case in point being Rzewski’s To the Earth in which the performer strikes simple clay pots while reciting words that honour the earth.
Jaeger’s Lyrics II pays homage to Canadian composer, broadcaster and co-founder of New Music Concerts Norma Beecroft, referencing her pioneering work in electronic music. We also hear a brief quotation from Beecroft’s celebrated The Living Flame of Love. The disc ends with Johnston’s vocal interpretation of Sara Teasdale’s poem The Crystal Gazer, accompanied by ever more intense Thailand gongs, providing a dramatic close to this beautifully realized album.
When I first encountered Newfoundland composer Robert Humber’s into air – four multitracked pieces (redshiftmusicsociety.bandcamp.com/album/into-air) I expected an album of music that would sound like Steve Reich’s Counterpoint series, with its tuneful overlaid minimalist lines. While there are moments here that do suggest that medium, the overall impression is quite different.
The title work, for five violins (all performed by Adrian Irvine) begins quietly, with distinct separate lines which gradually come together in a doppler-like cloud. The second movement is an agitated storm reminiscent of a demented Vivaldi. The final movement is quiet and somehow gentle, despite bows grating on the strings and strident upper register meanderings.
Mothmouth for three guitars performed by Ben Diamond opens with gentle string scrapes and ringing harmonics that gradually give way to busy contrapuntal picking. Murmurations for six layered pianos (Stephen Eckert) is reminiscent of the “continuous music” of Lubomyr Melnyk before transitioning to Reich-like phasing and then morphing into other worlds including that of Philip Glass. This is more what I expected from my first glimpse, but less derivative than I feared.
The disc ends with a work for solo cello and cello octet (all performed by Heather Tuach). Humber says that singing in circles emerged from a time that he felt himself “approaching a breaking point. I was isolated, anxious and without purpose.” The angst-filled lament begins with an extended solo cadenza lasting more than half of the 14-minute work, before the octet joins for a melancholy but somehow peaceful resolution.
I was the general manager of New Music Concerts from 1999 through 2019 and having mentioned NMC’s co-founder Norma Beecroft and its present artistic director Brian Current above, it’s only fitting that I should include Robert Aitken, who served as artistic director for the organization’s first half century.
For many years Aitken, a world-renowned flutist, had lamented the dearth of works for flute and string quartet. Over the centuries composers had opted to follow the template set by Mozart with his quartets for flute, violin, viola and cello. Aitken’s complaint was that whenever he was invited to perform with an established string quartet, one of the violinists would have to sit out. He has endeavoured to rectify this over the years by commissioning new works for the full five players. A recent example is ‘O‘o by Pulitzer Prize laureate Roger Reynolds, premiered by NMC in May 2018 during the 21C Festival.
Roger Reynolds: WISDOM’s Sources | ‘O‘o (ekkozone.com/recording/roger-reynolds-wisdoms-sources-oo) features the performers from that Royal Conservatory concert, Robert Aitken and the Iris Ensemble (Yolanda Bruno, Mark Lee violins, Rory McLeod, viola and Leana Rutt, cello) who worked with Aitken and Reynolds at the Lunenburg Academy of Music Performance in Nova Scotia in advance of this recording. The subject of the mournful work is the extinct Hawaiian ‘O‘o bird, the last known sighting of which was in 1934 on the slopes of Mauna Loa. Programme notes tell us that “Both male and female of this particular species sang to each other, and what made their plight especially poignant was the persistence of the [last] male, who survived another four years after the female died, continuing to sing to his absent mate.” Reynolds found recordings of the ‘O‘o’s songs at Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology and transcribed them. He uses the ensemble to provide “a metaphorical habitat, a sonic environment within which the outlines of a calling and responding would gradually emerge.”
In his 80th year at the time of the recording, Aitken is in top form as he leads a group of fine young players in this emotionally charged, important addition to the flute quintet repertoire.
The disc also includes WISDOM’s Sources, an extended, extremely challenging work for violin and viola, written for Irvine Arditti and his longtime Arditti Quartet colleague Ralf Ehlers. The players are required to “vocalise – without words – and gesture physically” in ways that the composer says “add investment and whole-body arousal.” Composed during COVID with its imposed isolation and resultant frustrations, Reynolds turned to philosophy for inspiration. The first movement is dedicated to the Greek tragedian Aeschylus, the second to the Tirukkural, a classic Tamil text on morality, and the third to the writings of Pan-Africanist civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois, specifically his The Souls of Black Folk. I’m afraid I don’t have words to describe this excruciating commentary on that terrible COVID time. It simply must be heard.
“The sense of space (height, width and depth) is palpable: the music reaches out to embrace us; withdraws into the distance; then, like a steam locomotive, comes suddenly roaring back. Invisible bands march across the soundstage in two different directions at different speeds, a solo viola mutters an occult hymn-tune as the rest of the orchestra sprays fireworks in all directions; the chorus intones wordless transcendental benedictions as the music fades away into silence. We were all completely blown away…” Those are the words of Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh describing a performance of Charles Ives’ Fourth Symphony by Leopold Stokowski and the American Symphony Orchestra which he attended with his bandmates in 1967.
Back in February 2025 I thought I had probably had my last say about the music of Charles Ives. The year of his sesquicentennial had just concluded, and it seemed that all imaginable archives had been mined. Imagine my surprise when over a year later a new double CD Concordance: 150 Years of Charles Ives appeared under the banner of Bear’s Sonic Journals presented by the Owsley Stanley Foundation (owsleystanleyfoundation.org/concordance-150-years-of-charles-ives).
The hard-bound book that contains the two CDs includes 116 pages of essays, detailed programme and production notes, photographs, anecdotes and appreciations accompanying two live performances of the Piano Sonata No.2 “Concord, Mass. 1840-1860” recorded half a century apart. The first, from 1974, featuring Ives’ collaborator John Kirkpatrick who gave the first complete performance of the work some three decades earlier, was recorded by “Bear” aka Owsley Stanley, the long-time Grateful Dead soundman who documented virtually every Dead performance over the years. The second, staged specifically for this project, features Donald Berman playing in an “intimate home performance space just next to a trail that leads through the woods to Walden Pond” in the heart of Concord, home of the Transcendentalist movement celebrated in Ives’ sonata.
The 2025 recital includes four works written especially for Berman, presented as Concord Legacy: Other Transcendentalists. The contributors are Eve Beglarian – As Syllable from Sound (on Emily Dickinson), David Sanford – Underground (on Harriet Tubman), Marti Epstein – The Piano at Palace Beautiful (on Louisa May Alcott) and Elena Ruehr – Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 (on Margaret Fuller). The artists provide notes giving their compositions a context within the whole. I find them each a satisfying extension of the Ives sonata, with Epstein’s Alcott meditation particularly apt.
As I have often said before, I like it when my reading and my listening coalesce. When I learned about Phil Lesh’s involvement in the Concordance project, I was moved to read his Searching for the Sound – My Life with the Grateful Dead. There I learned that before his days on the road playing bass, he was a classically trained musician and studied composition for a time with 20th century icon Luciano Berio. Who knew?
Two other recordings led me to literature recently. The first was a suitably bombastic treatment of François Rabelais’ GARGANTUA by composer Simon Hanes, scored for three drum sets, three electric basses, three trombones, three French horns and three soprano voices (Pyroclastic Records PR 46 simonhanes.bandcamp.com/album/gargantua). From the opening of A Series of Waves Tremble in a Sea of Blood, to my ear reminiscent of Max Roach’s 1961 classic Garvey’s Ghost with high vocalise from Abbey Lincoln, I was hooked. The subsequent movements vary, but all are in some way or another representative of Rabelais’ rambunctious, audacious, irreverent, scatological and often bawdy writing. Other musical inferences include Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention, the munchkins from The Wizard of Oz, renaissance motets (albeit with closer harmonies) and period pageantry, medieval sackbut chorales, and the profane dissing of contemporary street rap. Yet another eclectic and extraordinary offering from Kris Davis’ Pyroclastic label.
The second takes another French author, Georges Perec, as its point of departure. Although Perec’s La vie mode d’emploie (Life a User’s Manual) is one of my very favourite books, I was unfamiliar with his Espèces d’espace (Species of Spaces) and intrigued when the next recording crossed my desk. Dutch bass clarinetist Fie Schouten uses Perec’s short descriptive novel as the outline for Open Space (relativepitchrecords.bandcamp.com/album/open-space-2). Her frequent collaborators Vincent Courtois (cello) and Sofia Borges (drums) are joined here by actor Pierre Baux, whose distinctive narration of Perec’s texts (in French) is an integral part of the ten group improvisations based on the chapters of the book. Perec’s premise is the depiction, through various list-like constructions, of the various spaces in which we exist, from the confines of a bed, a room, an apartment, the building in which the apartment is located (and here he references his masterwork La vie), a street, a neighbourhood, a city, the (artificial) borders which divide countries, and, ultimately, the world and its place in the universe. The book, and its interpretation by these creative musicians, is intriguing and wholly satisfying. I thank Schouten for expanding my knowledge and appreciation of Perec’s oeuvre.
Listen to 'Open Space' Now in the Listening Room
The next disc I’ll mention only in passing because I don’t quite know what to say about it other than the fact that I like it, perhaps more on each subsequent listening. I’ll let Toronto guitarist and the project’s mastermind Eric St. Laurent’s cryptic press release set the scene: “A team of French speaking music engineers from Alfa Centauri lands in 1822 Bogotá, where they start jamming with a local dance band. At the bar, Duke Ellington smokes a cigar while playing Wordle on his phone… A more conventional bio would mention the meeting of Surf Guitar, Latin Rhythms and exotic vocal melodies in French and Spanish. But where would be the fun in that?”
St. Laurent and his band Science Fiction Cumba, comprised of Calvin Beale (electric bass), Irene Torres (voice and keyboards), Chendy Léon (voice and percussion) and Luisito Orbegoso (voice, percussion and trombone) released Volume 1: Arizona (eric-st-laurent.bandcamp.com/album/science-fiction-cumbia-volume-1-arizona) in April and I can hardly wait for Volume 2. Highlights for me include Torres’ vocal work on the opening track Jean Gendron, St. Laurent channeling Dick Dale’s guitar stylings in Moonlight on Vermont, and a wonderful cover of Joe Jackson’s Steppin’ Out with Orbegoso’s trombone doing yeoman duties on the earworm melody. Léon’s percussion is pervasive and captivating. My only regret is the meagre 20-minute duration of the disc.
I’ve exceeded my space allotment, but there are two late arrivals I feel compelled to recommend before the long summer break. Love and Labour is the debut release by Hannah and Nathan, a duo whose roots-based contemporary songwriting reflects traditional Appalachian and “Old Timey” influences (hannahandnathanmusic.com/music). Their banjo frailing, fiddle and guitar playing, with high lonesome vocal harmonies, is complemented with tasteful and engaging upright bass, pedal steel and drums. Hannah and Natham will be playing various festivals around Ontario this summer.
THE LAURELS is a short one-act opera — a contemporary retelling of the Daphne and Apollo myth, conceived as a thriller charting one woman’s psychological unravelling in the aftermath of a harrowing crisis. Composed by Vancouver-based Jeffrey Ryan with libretto by Torontonian Michael Lewis MacLennan, the opera features Jaqueline Woodley as the tormented soprano with baritone Nathan Keoughan and an ensemble led by Rosemary Thomson. The digital release is available here: redshiftmusicsociety.bandcamp.com/album/the-laurels.
Listen to 'THE LAURELS' Now in the Listening Room
David Olds can be reached at discoveries@thewholenote.com.
