ChamberDestroy is co-produced by The Music Gallery and connects contemporary music ensembles from two of Canada's largest cultural centres with one common artistic goal. Ensemble Paramirabo-EP (Montreal) and Thin Edge New Music Collective - TENMC (Tkarón:to/Toronto) reunite on the heels of a highly successful joint touring/recording project (2015 and 2018), to premiere Nicole Lizée's ChamberVania (AKA ChamberDestroy, FKA ChamberKill) for double sextet, soundtrack and video and Datura for double sextet and video by Yaz Lancaster (USA) alongside, Louis Andriessen’s seminal Workers Union and Julius Eastman’s Joy Boy for unspecified ensemble.
Montreal-based Nicole Lizée is one of Canada’s most sought after and imaginative composers. Nicole’s rhythmically propulsive new work explores ephemera, idioms, and connotations of early video game culture. The 8-bit world infiltrates the chamber ensemble world as instruments assume 8-bit and pixelated characteristics. Sections of the work are duel/battle-based music: ensemble vs ensemble. The ensembles perform on custom-made instruments to evoke the infiltration through the 4th/5th wall into the chamber music world.
Yaz Lancaster is a transdisciplinary artist based in NYC. They are most interested in practices aligned with relational aesthetics & the everyday; fragments & collage; and liberatory politics. Their work is presented in many different mediums & collaborative projects, and often reckons with specific influences ranging from politics of identity & liberation to natural phenomena and poetics.
Louis Andriessen’s experimental compositional style developed as a rebellion against postwar serialist traditions prevalent in Europe during his formative years. Worker’s Union (1975) is an indeterminate piece ‘for any loud sounding group of instruments’. Driven by aggressive, machine-like rhythmic precision, Andriessen believes that "only in the case that every player plays with such an intention that his part is an essential one, will the work succeed; just as in the political work." TENMC and EP are revisiting this powerful composition, which featured prominently on their joint album ‘Raging Against the Machine’ (2015/Redshift Records), in honour of Andriessen’s recent passing.
Joy Boy (1974) by visionary American minimalist composer/performer Julius Eastman, is written for open instrumentation, and includes elements of improvisation within the framework of a set harmonic structure. Joy Boy’s shimmering harmonic textures carry listeners and performers alike along for an ecstatic sonic journey.
ChamberDestroy is made possible with generous support from The Music Gallery, the Canada Council of the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council.
NOTE: In an effort to make Chamber Destroy as financially accessible as possible, TENMC is implementing ticketing options based off of The Music Gallery’s new Pay What You Can Afford (PWYCA) ticketing model. MG’s PWYCA ticketing invites concert goers to choose an appropriate level where possible, to help offset community members attending at a discounted rate. Levels are decided by you based upon your income and financial flexibility and are not verified at the door.
Raging Against the Machine 2015 Tour Photo (Photo Credit: Lou Scamble)
Guest Ensemble
Ensemble Paramirabo (Photo credit: Philippe Latour)
Taking its name from an evocative composition by iconic Montreal composer Claude Vivier, Ensemble Paramirabo was founded in 2008 by young musicians at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal. Since then, the ensemble has forged new paths through its audacious programming, numerous collaborations and exchanges, engagement with the public, and its commitment to the creation of new music by young Canadian and Québec composers at home and abroad.
Paramirabo has performed internationally, from Belgium, France and Germany, to Mexico and the UK, and has been invited to numerous new music festivals: Kontraklang (Berlin, 2021), Festival MNM (Montréal, 2021), Festival LOOP et Ars Musica (Mons, Liège, and Brussels, 2019), Waterloo Region Contemporary Music Sessions (2018), Frontiers Festival (Birmingham, 2016), Eduardo Mata Festival (Oaxaca, 2016), New York's Mise-En Festival (2014), Winnipeg's Cluster New Music Festival, and Montreal Contemporary Music Lab (2013). From 2017
to 2023, Paramirabo was the ensemble in residence for the new music workshop at the international music and dance academy of Domaine Forget, and will begin a new collaboration with Orford Musique in the summer of 2024. Paramirabo is the winner of the 3 OPUS Prizes (2019, 2020, 2021), and was nominated for a JUNO Award in 2020 for Classical Album of the Year.
Featured Composers
Yaz Lancaster
Yaz Lancaster is a transdisciplinary artist residing in Lenapehoking (NYC). Their work as a performer, composer, poet/writer, and collaborator is grounded in queer, DIY, and liberatory frameworks. It utilizes fragmentation and collage; relational aesthetics; improvisatory forms; and experimental electroacoustic composition. Through independent study, Yaz spends time thinking about the cultivation of care and intimacy, Marxist/collectivist praxis, and digital (sub)cultures.
Their debut record AmethYst, comprising music for violin, voice, and electronics was released in April 2023 (ppr) and has been featured on I CARE IF YOU LISTEN, Bandcamp (New & Notable), and Foxy Digitalis, among other publications. Recent and upcoming collaborators include Black Mountain College/Hub New Music, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Dorothy Carlos, Eliza Bagg, Massa Nera, Mingjia, Minnesota Philharmonic, Miss Grit, and Sean Pecknold.
Yaz additionally works as the co-manager of people places records, a co-organizer of abolitionist music collective Sound Off, and a freelance (music) writer. They love powerlifting, horror manga, and summers down South.
Nicole Lizée
Called “a brilliant musical scientist” (CBC), “breathtakingly inventive” (Sydney Times Herald), and “utterly inspiring” (I Care If You Listen), award winning composer and filmmaker Nicole Lizée explores themes of malfunction, turntablism, rave culture, urbex, film theory, psychedelia, game culture, experimental fashion, and thrash metal to create a new kind of expression.
Nicole’s compositions range from works for orchestra and solo turntablist featuring turntable techniques fully notated and integrated into a concert music setting, to other unorthodox instrument combinations that include the Atari 2600 video game console, vintage board games, omnichords, stylophones, Simon™, Ouija boards, and karaoke tapes.
Nicole’s works are regularly performed worldwide to international acclaim. Her commission list of over 60 works includes the Kronos Quartet, BBC Proms, New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Bang On A Can, Colin Currie, National Arts Centre Orchestra, l’Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Tapestry Opera, Ligeti Quartet, Southbank Sinfonia, Donaueschingen Festival, and Sō Percussion.
Nicole was recently awarded the 2024 JUNO Award for Classical Composition of the Year. Other awards include the 2023 Music Critics Association of North America Award for Best New Opera, the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Opera, the SOCAN Jan V. Matejcek Award, the Prix Opus for Composer of the Year, and the Canada Council Jules Léger Prize for Chamber Music. She is a Lucas Artists Fellow (California) and a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellow (Italy). In 2017 she created the music for the National Film Board of Canada’s logo. In 2016 she was selected by composer Howard Shore to be his protégée as part of the Governor General’s Performing Arts Awards.
Julius Eastman
Julius Eastman (1940-1990) was a composer, conductor, singer, pianist, and choreographer. A singular figure in New York City's downtown scene of the 1970s and 80s, he also performed at Lincoln Center with Pierre Boulez and the New York Philharmonic, and recorded music by Arthur Russell, Morton Feldman, Peter Maxwell Davies, and Meredith Monk. “What I am trying to achieve is to be what I am to the fullest," he said in 1976. "Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, a homosexual to the fullest.”
Despite his prominence in the artistic and musical community in New York, Eastman died in obscurity in a Buffalo, NY hospital. His death went unreported for eight months, until an obituary by Kyle Gann appeared in the Village Voice. Eastman left behind few scores and recordings, and his music lay dormant for decades until a three-CD set of his compositions titled Unjust Malaise was issued in 2005 by New World Records. In the years since, there has been a steady increase in attention paid to his music and life, punctuated by newly found recordings and manuscripts, worldwide performances and new arrangements of his surviving works, and newfound interest from choreographers, scholars, educators, and journalists. 'The brazen and brilliant music of Julius Eastman…commands attention: wild, grand, delirious, demonic, an uncontainable personality surging into sound', writes Alex Ross for The New Yorker.
(WiseMusic Classical, n.d)