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As the new season of concerts gets underway in these somewhat post-Covid days, some of the larger-scale presenters have, with fingers crossed, announced ambitious season lineups. As I looked through their listings, a noteworthy trend was emerging: the regular programming of contemporary works. Perhaps there’s been a shift away from the token or obligatory inclusion of music by living composers which would indicate that past events such as the TSO’s New Creations Festivals, or several seasons of the 21C Festival have been successful in bringing in an eager audience interested in listening to current ideas and styles. 

At the TSO 

A good example of this lies with two October concerts presented by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. On their October 12 concert, the programming includes a work by Christina Volpini, a Hamilton/Toronto based composer whose music is known for its subtle and nuanced textures, and the Canadian premiere of subito con forza (2020) by Korean-born/Berlin-based composer Unsuk Chin. Volpini’s piece is one of the five Celebration Preludes commissioned from GTA composers for the 2022/23 season. These recently composed pieces stand alongside 20th-century master Ligeti’s Atmosphères and classic compositions by Haydn and Beethoven. Chin’s piece was composed for the 2020 Beethoven anniversary year, and quotes from his 1807 Coriolan Overture are shape-shifted and woven throughout the orchestra. Other references to Beethoven’s music in Chin’s densely textured piece include the Fifth Symphony’s opening rhythm and flourishes from the Emperor Concerto.

The month of May brings a full blooming spring along with a packed 21C Music Festival, now in its fourth year. Running from May 24 to 28, the festival has had a significant impact on bringing new music to a wider audience, with five days of a wide range of musical voices and approaches to sonic experimentation spread over nine concerts, including 31 premieres. One of the themes this year, Canada 150, will be marked through collaborations with the Canadian Opera Company, the Canadian Art Song Project and Soundstreams.

Another is the festival’s strong focus on women composers and performers, with Korean-born Unsuk Chin as the featured composer. This focus makes for a perfect follow-up to my last two columns in which I explored stories about how issues of gender, race and musical diversity are impacting both large festivals such as the TSO’s New Creations (March issue) and individual projects, such as the work Century Song (April issue) performed and co-created by Neema Bickersteth.

Cecilia String Quartet: One of the 21C concerts that caught my attention is “Cecilia String Quartet Celebrates Canadian Women” on May 25 by the Toronto-based Cecilia String Quartet. In a conversation with the Quartet’s cellist Rachel Desoer, I discovered that the vision for the project began three years ago when the all-female quartet was inspired to encourage the representation of women’s music within their own genre. After looking at some of the existing string quartet repertoire, they decided to get involved in the curating process and commissioned four different composers as a way of encouraging these talented women to write for string quartet. The composers they chose were Katarina Ćurčin, Kati Agócs, Emilie LeBel and Nicole Lizée.

There has been much conversation over the years around the pros and cons of creating concerts that feature only women composers, but that is not the topic I particularly wish to delve into here. Rather, as I took a look at each piece on this program, I saw something else emerging that I hadn’t noticed so distinctly before in other women composer concerts. The pattern I noticed here was that the focus each composer chose for their piece harkened back to topics that characterized earlier movements of feminist art practice. Back in the 1970s, American women such as visual artist Judy Chicago and performance artist Suzanne Lacy, for example, began creating work organized around specific feminist principles. Their goal was to create work that influenced cultural attitudes so as to transform stereotypes. Strategies they employed included bringing awareness to women’s experience and history, as well as incorporating traditional forms of women’s creativity into their own work. This may seem not so revolutionary now, but at the time it was a bold departure from accepted practices. This movement however did not create strong inroads into the contemporary music world, although there was definitely a movement to research and perform music by women composers from the past.

So it was through this lens that I observed that each of the four works on the Cecilia String Quartet concert program shared something in common with these earlier feminist practices. When I asked Desoer if the quartet had given any guidelines for the pieces, her response was: “At the beginning of the project we wondered about creating a theme or having another piece of art for the composers to respond to. But instead, we let the artists decide, and were curious about what they would choose.” The quartet was delighted to discover that each composer found their inspiration in other art forms, texts and other women artists without any direct request.

Katarina Ćurčin’s String Quartet No.3 is based on a folk-song melody from her Serbian roots. The song tells the story of a young woman who feels trapped inside the house, expressing outrage at her mother for keeping her housebound. In Ćurčin’s quartet, her characteristic vibrant and rhythmic style aptly captures the song’s strong emotional journey, beginning with expressions of anger and finally dissolving into resignation. This work captures well the sense of limitation that has characterized women’s lives over millennia.

Kati Agócs’s music has been described as encouraging audience members to listen and be changed. In Tantric Variations, she bases her musical explorations on the word tantric, which means woven together. Using a one-bar motive as the basis, she weaves “a landscape that really goes everywhere you could imagine,” Desoer said. Desoer was originally drawn to Agócs’ music when she performed her Violoncello Duet (I And Thou) and was inspired by all the sounds she didn’t know her instrument could make. Starting with a word referring to the practice of weaving, Agócs is able to both reference the traditional craft as well as evoke the universal idea of weaving strands together to create a unified whole.

With Emilie LeBel’s Taxonomy of Paper Wings, we get a glimpse into one aspect of the work of writer Emily Dickinson, who lived a mostly introverted and confined life. Dickinson wrote a series of poems on fragments of used envelopes, using the shape of the paper to influence her placement of words on the page. LeBel uses the shape and structure of one of these envelope poems, which resembles the hinged wings of a bird, to inform the musical structure of her piece. The bird element translates into an ethereal texture in the music and as Desoer describes it, LeBel “explores the subtleties of softer sounds on string instruments in a way that is rare.”

Risk-taker and fashion designer Isabella Blow is the figure behind Nicole Lizée’s work entitled Isabella Blow at Somerset House. The composition is a response to a posthumous Blow photo exhibit of disembodied mannequin heads wearing Blow’s designs. These macabre images inspired Lizée to translate techniques from her background in vintage technologies and looping into instrumental gestures that “ride a beautiful line between roboticism and humanity,” says Desoer. This is a rare acoustic work for Lizée and yet she manages to expand the sound world of the string quartet with a few additional sources.

For a project that began with a search for repertoire by women, it’s inspiring to see how each of the composers addresses themes important in the early days of feminist art practices. For the quartet, the project has blossomed into something for which “it’s hard to see an end date” Desoer said. It certainly has inspired them with a desire to commission more repertoire for string quartet by women composers and to encourage other quartets to do so as well. (The quartet will also be performing both the Lizée and Ćurčin works on May 6 as part of a program presented by the Kitchener-Waterloo Chamber Music Society.)

Unsuk Chin: There will be plenty of opportunities at 21C to hear the music of featured composer Unsuk Chin. On May 24, the Canadian Opera Company Orchestra will perform her work snagS&Snarls in Koerner Hall and on May 27, her Piano Étude will be performed in a concert in the Temerty Theatre that also includes works by Alexina Louie, Raphael Weinroth-Browne, Kotoka Suzuki, and Aaron Parker. Chin will also join Canadian composer Chris Paul Harman as mentors for Soundstreams’ Emerging Composers Workshop with the final concert featuring world premieres by the six composers on May 26.

The showcase concert of Chin’s work will be on May 28 in a co-presentation with Soundstreams with performances of her Advice from a Caterpillar and Cantatrix Sopranica. (The concert will also include Harman’s works Love Locked Out along with the world premiere of It’s All Forgotten Now.) A major theme that emerges in Chin’s music is her fascination with word play and word games. In a written correspondence, I asked Chin to describe the relationship between the music and the projected text one sees during the performance of Advice from a Caterpillar. This piece for bass clarinetist is “part of my opera Alice in Wonderland, in which the performer is dressed up as a caterpillar” she replied. “In my opera, the caterpillar, one of the grotesque characters in the Wonderland, questions Alice, who is in the midst of an identity crisis and seeks advice. Instead of replying to her questions, he talks to her in bizarre riddles. By playing the bass clarinet, the Caterpillar ‘speaks’ his lines and the musical gestures are inspired by the Caterpillar’s words.”

In speaking about her work Cantatrix Sopranica, she expands upon her fascination with “the threshold regions between music and language. The piece was inspired by the ideas of OULIPO (a loose group of French-speaking writers and mathematicians), and the texts, which I wrote during the process of composition, mostly consist of palindromes, acrostics, anagrams and other wordplays. I used the texts as totally flexible musical material – just like pitches, timbre or rhythm. The piece is “about the act of singing itself, and plays with all kinds of clichés about singing. There is a good dose of black humour in it.”

Regarding questions of identity of gender or race in music, she responds that she has not “pondered [the subject] during the 30 years I’ve been in the business since that would have been stifling for my compositional work.” However, she did bring up a more pressing concern for her – “that young musicians (female, but also male) who refuse to play the glamour game are easily disadvantaged. There is the problematic tendency that the focus is less and less on music and more on marketed image.” She did note too the growing number of excellent female conductors, “one good example being the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s new principal guest conductor Susanna Mälkki.”

The question of gender in contemporary music is varied and complex and I’ve tried to shine a light on some aspects of the issue within the context of the 21C Festival offerings. There is much more to explore in the festival programming than is possible to cover here, so I encourage you to check out the listings. As for other goings-on in May, here is a quick look at upcoming concerts by local new music presenters:

QUICK PICKS

May 17: The Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan will be celebrating their new double CD release, performing arrangements of Indonesian songs as well as Translating Grace, for gamelan, voice, cello, organ, bass clarinet and film.

May 19: Contact Contemporary Music is back with two programs: “Without a Net” with works by Tina Pearson, John Mark Sherlock, Anna Hostman and Jerry Pergolesi; and Jun 2: “Feeling Backwards” with works by Christopher Reiche, Allison Cameron, Nephenee Rose, Annette Brosin, and Julius Eastman.

May 24: The Thin Edge New Music Collective also has two upcoming programs with their “Keys, Wind and Strings Festival, works by Allison Cameron, Gregory Lee Newsome, Solomiya Moroz, Uroš Rojko and Marielle Groven; and May 25 works by Jason Doell, Germaine Liu, Fjóla Evans, Kasia Czarski-Jachimovicz and Tobias Eduard Schick.

Jun 3 and 4: Continuum Contemporary Music presents Four Lands in collaboration with Jumblies Theatre.

Jun 3: Spectrum Music presents “Tales from Turtle Island” featuring new compositions along with storytelling.

Additional events:

May 10: Burdock. “A Strange Impulse.”

May 12: Anne Mizen in concert: “Celebrating Canada” includes Schafer’s Snowforms.

May 12: Gallery 345. “From Sea to Sea: A Celebration of Canada 150 in Poetry and Music.” David Jaeger, composer.

May 14: Orpheus Choir of Toronto. “Identities: Glorious and Free,” with compositions by Kuzmenko and Estacio

May 27: Array Ensemble. “Young Composers’ Workshop Concert.”

Wendalyn Bartley is a Toronto-based composer and electro-vocal sound artist. sounddreaming@gmail.com.

June is an important time of transition. This is true not only for the seasons (the 21st marks the summer solstice and a promise of consistently better weather) but also for the live music scene, where the closing concert season makes way for a flourishing of summer music festivals.

It is also true for me: I am making a transition away from the music field to take up new challenges in the arena of arts and learning. This means that I will also be stepping away from writing this column, which has given me endless opportunity to explore how Toronto’s new music community has made its own remarkable transitions over time. The most noticeable of these is in the sheer range of appropriations, influences, inspirations and collaborations new music makers employ to create and showcase exciting new work.

We can look to a handful of this month’s concerts to see this notion at play.

One group that has been constantly pushing at the boundaries of what it means to be “new music” is CONTACT Contem-porary Music. Their multidisciplinary approach crosses between live and electronic, traditional and site specific, popular and avant-garde, audiovisual and interactive, in ways that many other ensembles would be too timid to try. If that weren’t enough, the content of each CONTACT show treads into touchy territory – from transexualism to transcendentalism, popular music to electro-eroticism, and just about everything in between. Ultimately, CONTACT seeks to unlock the power of artists, leveraged through music-based collaborations, to create situations that eliminate barriers, open new dialogues, find new perspectives and advance new understandings of current, contemporary challenges. It would be absentminded not to mention their “Electronica Unplugged” lunchtime concert on June 8 at the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre, which features original electronic works by David Bowie, Brian Eno, Robert Fripp, Gavin Bryars and Philip Glass arranged for the unique forces of the CONTACT ensemble. You can learn more at www.contactcontemproarymusic.ca

Another case in point is the deliriously eclectic Adventures of the Smoid, a creative concoction from the ever-adventurous percussionist/composer/artistic director Rick Sacks for the Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan. Drawing on the growing popularity of visual story telling through comic books and graphic novels, Sacks inventively connects a diverse series of dots to link this world to the tradition of gamelan and Indonesian shadow puppetry. Sacks asks the Club to do double duty as musicians and puppeteers to tell a humorous tale about an astronaut’s adventures in space. Adventures of the Smoid is prefaced by a song cycle from iNSiDEaMiND, the wildly experimental turntable duo. New music crossover eclecticism doesn’t get much better than this. The boundaries are definitely pushed once again for these June 13 and 14 events at the Music Gallery.

Tapestry New Opera Works has long been exploring new paths to collaboration between composers, writers and musicians in the creation of the highest of musical forms: opera. Over the last quarter century and beyond, this hallmark company has expanded beyond its Canadian roots to provide a haven for an increasingly international network of creators to develop some of the most promising new work in the field. Tapestry’s season-closing New Opera Showcase will no doubt be another exhilarating adventure through a collection of shorter pieces in development, ranging from those by veteran creative partners to new collaborations. The inspirations range just as far, from Ancient Greek tragedies to modern-day Irish pub love stories, from Icelandic mythology to Canadian immigrant stories filtered through Old Testament morality tales. Be sure to visit www.tapestrynewopera.com to get full details for the June 14 and 15 performances at the Ernest Balmer Studio in the Distillery District.

These three events are just the tip of an iceberg of musical innovation at work in our local music community; I hope to find such radical minds and creative connections in my future work. Don’t miss your chance to catch such new sounds while they are still summer fresh! Be sure to get in with the new via The WholeNote concert listings here and online at www.thewholenote.com.

Jason van Eyk, The WholeNote’s longtime New Music beat writer is stepping down from this column and from his position as Ontario Regional Director of the Canadian Music Centre.

“Sound art” is a performance genre, I think it’s safe to say, that will not ring bells, tuned or otherwise, for the majority of readers of The WholeNote. “We are, as a culture, obsessed with the new,” says blogger John Terauds in a recent entertaining post at musicaltoronto.org, “but it takes only the shallowest scratch on the surface to discover that what we all seek is comfort and continuity — flowers, sunsets, barbequed ribs, cheesecake and a bit of Mozart.”

Most of us, maybe, but all? Two mid-career contemporary composers in our midst, both being honoured with significant awards this month, Darren Copeland and Brian Current, would doubtless disagree.

Composer Copeland is probably best known in the new music community as the inspiration for New Adventures In Sound Art (NAISA). NAISA, as their website explains, is a non-profit organization, based at Toronto’s Wychwood Barns, that “produces performances and installations spanning the entire spectrum of electroacoustic and experimental sound art … to foster awareness and understanding … in the cultural vitality of experimental sound art in its myriad forms of expression … through the exploration of new sound technologies in conjunction with the creation of cultural events and artifacts.”

Mind you, Copeland would probably not object to being told that what he does “isn’t music.” In fact you’ll search long and hard for the M-word on NAISA’s own website (among such other terms as noise art performance, soundscape composition, multi-channel spatialization and layered listening excursion). Copeland is nevertheless an associate composer with the Canadian Music Centre, and just this month was selected to receive the Harry Freedman Recording Award by a national jury. Named for a pioneering Canadian composer, the award contributes towards the creative costs associated with making an audio recording of Canadian composers’ music, and is administered by the Canadian Music Centre. In Copeland’s case the award goes toward the recording of his piece called Bats and Elephants which will be published by empreintes DIGITALes. The award will be presented at a performance of the piece, at Gallery 345 on June 23.

The work has an interesting premise: humans can’t hear the full range of sounds uttered by bats or elephants unless these sounds are transposed within the range of human hearing (at which point they start to take on the identity of other animal species, such as birds). Copeland and his guest Hector Centeno play with this concept, using echo-location, the way bats do, to bounce sounds, from two hyper-directional speakers, off the Gallery’s walls. It’s a neat variation on the philosophical question posed at the outset of the column: when does a squeak become a song? Or a bellow turn into a bassline? Or noise into music? I suspect that the answer has as much to do with the tuning of the ears of the listener as the tuning of the frequencies from the source. It should make for a fascinating event.

(A brief digression before moving on to talk about our other award winner, Brian Current: it is entirely unsurprising to me that the Copeland concert is taking place at Gallery 345 — the “little gallery that could” just keeps chugging away with one playfully provocative event after another: “Composers Play” (including the aforementioned Brian Current) Friday June 1; “40 years of Foley” on Sunday June 3; “Art of the Piano” with R. Andrew Lee on June 4; the Architek Percussion Quartet on June 6; astonishing violinist Conrad Chow in his debut CD release concert, June 28; … the list goes on.)

Now, to Current. Just today (May 29) the Canada Council for the Arts announced that seven “mid-career arts innovators” were being honoured with Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Awards. The prize carries a $15,000 cash award so it’s “not nuthin,” as these things go. “Sculptor Valérie Blass; contemporary dancer Nova Bhattacharya; interdisciplinary artist Manon De Pauw; playwright, actor and director Denis Lavalou; composer and conductor Brian Current; poet Sylvia Legris; and filmmaker and multimedia artist Graeme Patterson are this year’s winners” the announcement goes. “These seven artists are pushing the envelope in their respective disciplines and are definitely seven to watch” said Canada Council director and CEO Robert Sirman.

Given our focus, Current is the one of the seven we’ve been watching this year, both as a composer and as the conductor of the Royal Conservatory’s New Music Ensemble. His composing and conducting seem to feed off each other. Given the economics of concert music, few contemporary composers get to write for large ensembles; fewer still get the opportunity to explore, using other composers’ works, the creative energy that a composer can alternately harness and unleash in a large ensemble. Some of you may have caught parts of his 2009, 12-hour, 200-person installation-performance of James Tenney’s In a Large Open Space, at the opening of the Conservatory’s new Koerner Hall, or taken in his students’ performance, in the dark, of G.F. Haas’s In Vain last December.

It was while doing some research on Current in the context of this award that I stumbled across the comment from Terauds’ blog with which I started this column. (The blog in question was about Current’s and Anton Piatigorsky’s recently completed chamber opera Airline Icarus).

“It’s no surprise that today’s composers feel … compelled towards the new, the unexplored, the unusual,” Terauds went on to say. “In his recently published memoir, Unheard Of, Toronto composer John Beckwith mentions at least a half-dozen times how he tried to not repeat himself in a new work. It’s a mantra for most contemporary composers. It’s also something I’ve heard many times from the musicians devoted to commissioning and performing new music. But there are two prices to pay for this fetish for the new, I think: Superficiality on the part of the composer, and alienation on the part of a potential audience. … So what does a composer do? Either give in and write film scores, or concert pieces at which serious critics will turn up their noses, or bravely go where their instincts and sense of adventure lead them. It’s a crazy tightrope that, most days, is actually quite thrilling to walk.”

Every living composer must discover his or her own balancing act, on this tightrope between superficiality and alienation. Arguably no one has done a better job of it than Philip Glass, whose Einstein on the Beach is undoubtedly one of the musical talking points of this year’s Luminato. One has only to think of the final aria in his life-of-Ghandi opera Satyagraha where the same eight-note phrase is repeated, but where you’d be hard pressed to persuade a mesmerized audience that all they had listened to was mi fa so la ti do re mi (in the scale of C, no less), 30 times in a row.

One of the truly festive things Luminato does, by the way, is to surround a work of art with opportunities to immerse in the context in which the work arose. Check out our ETCetera listings, on page 44, for example, for some of the screenings and colloquia that will surround the opera itself. And, perhaps best of all, the final moment in the festival will be an outdoor performance by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, in David Pecaut Square, featuring a performance of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, paired with the premiere of a new work by Glass, titled The 2012 Overture.

There’s a shiny intelligence in the idea of it, one has to say. How new the adventure in sound art turns out to be, time will surely tell.

David Perlman has been, for this past season, the patroller of The WholeNote’s new music beat. He can be contacted at publisher@thewholenote.com

One of the inspiring things about the new music scene in Toronto is the plenitude of presenter organizations and collectives that are constantly springing up, each one with their own unique vision and mandate. One of the newer players in this trend is the Caution Tape Sound Collective, formed in the summer of 2015 by composers Bekah Simms and August Murphy-King. On March 24 in Array Space, Caution Tape will present “Spark to Stone” in collaboration with the Association of Canadian Women Composers (ACWC).

The concert features the work of seven Canadian composers, including five world premieres and two Toronto premieres. I invited Bekah Simms to have a conversation about the concert, the collective and her own compositional work.

Caution Tape has a unique combination of elements in their artistic mandate. One focus is on repertoire development for both underused combinations of instruments and instruments that don’t have a lot of solo works. Another strong aspect of their vision is the incorporation of electronics and influences from sound art and drone music into the repertoire they support. As Simms pointed out: “Toronto doesn’t have much concert activity of electroacoustic music, unlike Montreal for example, so Caution Tape seeks to make the technology more available for younger composers, as well as offering mentoring and pedagogical support for those who wish to combine the worlds of sound art and concert music.”

The core membership of the collective is made up of Simms, Murphy-King, Julia Mermelstein and Patrick Arteaga. They also support a rotational membership, since bringing in new voices is important. There is no core performer ensemble, but they generally draw from the same pool of people interested in new and experimental music, with the key goal being to experiment with creating unusual instrumental combinations. An example of this was an ensemble used in their last season that was made up of bassoon/contrabassoon, synthesizer, piano, percussion and viola. “It sounded really great,” Simms commented. And not least, they are committed to representational programming. Simms explains: “If you are working with living composers in a city like Toronto, the demographics of your concert programming should roughly represent the demographic of your city. This includes gender, race, experience, age, emerging and early career.”

Their upcoming March 24 concert is one example of their focus on representational programming as they join forces with the ACWC, which was formed in September of 1981 with the aim of addressing the lack of women composers being programmed in the Canadian music scene. The Caution Tape/ACWC collaboration is a natural one: Simms has served on the board of the ACWC, and together they put out a call for works – both existing as well as proposals for new pieces. As a result of this call, the Spark to Stone concert will include works by composers Amy Brandon, Sarah Reid, Ivana Jokic, Hope Lee and Lesley Hinger, along with Caution Tape core members Simms and Mermelstein.

Mermelstein’s work is an acousmatic piece, a form of electroacoustic music that is specifically created as a listening experience using only speakers, as opposed to a live instrumental performance. She has used the mundane and background sounds of everyday life and through various forms of digital processing brought this world to the forefront of an intriguing listening experience. Brandon’s work uses a soundscape created from unique piano preparations – nylon fishing wire attached to the wall and woven into the lower strings of the piano. Jokic’s piece uses the concept of the palindrome, a sequence of events that reads the same backward as forward. There is an allusion to matryoshka dolls, the Russian nesting dolls, as the snaking palindromes weave their way throughout the ensemble. Reid, a trumpet player who is both an improviser and composer, created a piece for prepared piano, cello, and amplified objects performed by a percussionist. This includes the playing of the grain of a piece of wood that has been covered with contact mics, a pair of vampire-like chattering teeth and a cassette player. Lee’s work …I, Laika…, composed in 1996, will finally receive its Toronto premiere. A 20-minute work for flute, cello and piano, the piece is based on the idea of doomed flight, referencing Laika, the first dog launched in space by the Russians, as well as the loss of Lee’s father who went missing in a military plane in China.

Hinger’s participation is an example of the value of putting out a call and connecting with unfamiliar voices. Once the jury for the concert heard her music, they unanimously agreed that her work must be selected. Hinger’s piece for solo violin is informed by her current studies in spectralism and focuses on slow microtonal unravelling over time.

The concert will also present the world premiere of Simms’ piece Granitic, a word she was initially exposed to a few years ago when used by her composition professor to describe one of her compositions. Surprised by this unfamiliar word which means “unyielding firmness and aversion to soft emotions,” she decided it resonated with her and wanted to explore more of what was stylistically emerging for her. Granitic is her Toronto Emerging Composer Award-winning composition, and is scored for a large ensemble including electric guitar, electric bass, percussion, synthesizer, violin, viola, cello, clarinet, trumpet and flute. In this piece she explores the world of just intonation, a tuning system based on pure or just intervals between the notes of the scale, rather than the standard equal temperament system that uses the same or equal distance between intervals. For the performers, this means playing in microtones, something that is difficult and challenging to do when playing on instruments designed for equal temperament. Simms described her emerging style as “event and sound based. I don’t map out harmonies or melodies, but rather focus on timbre, colour and the unravelling of initial ideas. I’ve become interested in distortion, quotation and using degraded allusions to other styles of music, using noise-based techniques on instruments and transitions from noise to sound. Electronics also help to obscure the original source material.”

As for future directions, what drives her is to integrate more complex and intricate technologies into her music. In a recent mentorship with Montreal acousmatic composer Martin Bédard, she was able to learn a variety of electroacoustic techniques, and had an opportunity to work with live diffusion, the process of moving the sound amongst a multi-speaker system. The next step for Simms will be to work in partnership with a programmer to create an intuitive interface to perform live processing of instrumental sounds. The composition she is creating will be scored for solo cello, electronics and orchestra, and is scheduled to be performed by Esprit Orchestra in February 2019 during their New Wave Festival. Having a skilled electronics performer working alongside her is her ideal situation, for it allows her to focus on composing the electronic component, which can then be realized externally by an expert.

Representational Programming

As mentioned above, Caution Tape is committed to representational programming. One reason for this is that “we found the local programming disappointing” Simms acknowledges. As an example, she mentions the upcoming 21C Music Festival that promotes itself as bringing forward fresh new sounds and ideas. Looking at this year’s press release, of almost three dozen premieres being programmed (which includes both world, Canadian, Ontario and Toronto premieres), there is only one work by a woman composer. (I noted in my February column a similar thing occurring in this years New Creations Festival happening from March 3 to 10, with only one composition by a woman being programmed, despite last year’s festival having highlighted diversity.)

Simms notes the tendency for presenters to be satisfied with having had one successful experience and then to stop thinking about it. “You have to be actively questioning your programming every step of the way. It’s so easy to find good and interesting work by women that if you’re not programming it, you’re just being lazy.” She mentioned a 1990s article in the Toronto Star that noted the lack of programming of works by women amongst the new music organizations – and that was 25 years ago!

Caution Tape attempts to “be steadfast about our programming. If one concert ends up being a 70/30 mix between male and female composers, we shuffle things around in the overall season to get closer to 50/50.” She noted that it’s easier for chamber music groups to have more diverse programming, and that many local groups regularly program music by women on every concert. “The problem is with the larger ensembles, that’s where the numbers are the worst. You hope that your efforts in the chamber music realm will bleed into the larger sphere of orchestral music,” Simms says, mentioning as an example, that the rising star of orchestral composition globally is Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir who was chosen in 2015 as the New York Philharmonic’s Kravis Emerging Composer. The Philharmonic will give the world premiere of Thorvaldsdottir’s latest commissioned work, Metacosmos, on April 4 to 6.

(Coincidentally, during the writing of this column, I received a press release regarding the Chicago Sinfonietta’s concert on March 11 celebrating women composers. This orchestra is dedicated to modelling and promoting diversity, inclusion and racial and cultural equity in the arts. In light of these initiatives, it feels like Toronto is lagging behind; all the more reason why the Caution Tape Sound Collective is a much-needed voice in the city.

An important footnote to this conversation about orchestral programming: I would be remiss not to mention two upcoming orchestral performances of works by composer Vivian Fung. On March 24, the National Arts Centre Orchestra will give the Toronto premiere of her newly commissioned piece Earworms, and on March 3, Fung’s 2011 piece Dust Devils will be performed by the TSO as part of the New Creations Festival. 

Wendalyn Bartley is a Toronto-based composer and electro-vocal sound artist. sounddreaming@gmail.com.

I’m always curious to see what the Royal Conservatory of Music’s 21C Festival will be offering each season; this year being unlike every other performance season, I was even more curious as to what we could expect from this annual offering of new sounds and the latest in contemporary music creation. I was pleased to see that the festival will be moving ahead despite the complexities of producing concerts for limited and virtual audiences. Running from January 15 to 29, this year’s offerings will be a scaled-down version of previous years, but still filled with premieres and outstanding performers, both local and from further afield. 

We will hear concerts by two Toronto-based pianists: Eve Egoyan will perform pieces written for her imagined piano that combines original piano sounds with an extended software-based piano; and Royal Conservatory alumna Morgan-Paige Melbourne will perform two of her own compositions along with pieces by several other composers, including one by Brian Current, the director of The Glenn Gould School New Music Ensemble. The GGS New Music Ensemble will also have a concert of their own with several works combined with projected images. The well-loved Kronos Quartet will make a return visit with three different events to choose from. Their multimedia performance piece, A Thousand Thoughts, blends live music by Kronos, narration, as well as archival footage and filmed interviews. Kronos’ Fifty for the Future initiative, designed to create a repertoire of contemporary works for young string quartets they introduced to 21C audiences in 2016, will be the focus of a concert featuring four quartets from the Glenn Gould School after a two-day mentorship with Kronos. 

On a cold snowy night last November 19, I was happy to be in the warmth of the Music Gallery at 918 Bathurst Street, listening to the bright pulsating music of an inspiring collaboration between Toronto’s Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan and the Spindle Ensemble from Bristol, UK  (a collaboration that arose from a chance meeting in Bali between Evergreen member Christopher Hull and Spindle member Harriet Riley, we had been informed). I was curious.

In early December of 2018, the Canadian Opera Company announced that Ian Cusson had been newly appointed composer-in-residence. A composer of Métis heritage, his work has largely focused on writing vocal music – both art song and opera – as well as orchestral music. Currently he is in residence with the National Arts Centre Orchestra and will begin this new appointment at the COC in August 2019. I spoke with him about what this new position will mean for him, and also about the broader issues he explores in his creative work. Being composer-in-residence will not only offer the opportunity to compose an opera for the COC, but also the opportunity for an inside look at the inner workings of an opera company: observing and participating in rehearsals for main productions; as well as observing vocal coaching and diction sessions. The commissioned opera will be a 50-minute work with librettist Colleen Murphy whom he met this past summer during Tapestry Opera’s Composer-Librettist Laboratory. They connected so well that Cusson invited her to participate in this opera project that will be geared towards families and young audiences. It will be a lively adventure story, he says, based on an urban tale of two young people trying to rescue a mother who has been taken captive.

On March 5, three of Cusson’s vocal works will be presented at the COC’s noon-hour Vocal Series held in the large Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre lobby space. The first work will be a song cycle for mezzo and piano quintet, Five Songs on poems of Marilyn Dumont, a Cree/Metis poet from Edmonton, and sung by mezzo Marion Newman, whose heritage combines Kwagiulth and Stó:lo First Nations, English, Irish and Scottish. The other two works on the program will be sung by Marjorie Maltais, with Cusson at the piano: J’adore les orages, a concert aria with text by Michel Marc Bouchard; and the premiere of Le Récital des anges, a song cycle based on poems of Émile Nelligan, a Quebecois poet whose life straddled the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

For Cusson, finding the natural dramatic arc within the texts he is working with is key, and he makes it a priority to write for the specific singer who will be performing the piece. “I have a great respect for singers and their ability to use their bodies in front of people, and I keep the fact that they are human beings, not machines, in mind while writing,” he said. He chooses to work with texts that are in either English or French, the two languages he speaks. He feels it’s essential for him to know the specific cadences of the language he is working with in order to write well for the voice.

He is also drawn to working with Indigenous texts and stories from his own tradition, seeing this as both an opportunity and a challenge. One topic we explored more deeply was how he approached integrating his classical background with his Métis heritage. He spoke about his current orchestral project, Le Loup de Lafontaine, to be performed by the National Arts Centre Orchestra in late September, and based on a particular personal story from his own community. “As I’m writing it, I’m thinking of the fiddle tradition – how it’s used and how it could exist or be referenced within a larger orchestral piece. This is the most direct connection I’ve had to my own Metis tradition in my composing.” In the past, one key way he has approached Indigenous culture is through texts and story and he has incorporated one such story in this piece. It tells of “a wolf coming to town and terrorizing farmers and people from a community comprised of Métis, First Nations and French settlers, none of whom communicate with each other. Although the wolf is killed in the end, the animal succeeds in bringing the community together.”

This question of integrating Indigenous tradition and classical concert music requires Cusson to think deeply both about how those stories are being told, and about what story his own participation tells. “It sounds wonderful to create an Indigenous opera,” he says, “but as you move into that work, many questions start to reveal themselves, such as the depiction and representation of people, and what it will sound like.”

Many of these pressures are internal and self-imposed. “I want to do this successfully and in a way that honours and doesn’t demean. It takes a process and appropriate consultation, patience, conversation, learning and growing. I’ve been doing that, and will probably continue for the rest of my life, as I think about how to create works within this classical tradition that touch on very difficult, sensitive, painful places, and often involving people who are still alive and have been traumatized by events in the past.”

So the question becomes, what stories should be put on stage, and how should they be told? “These are very complex questions with no quick answers. Also, it’s important to become more aware of the protocols and processes related to specific types of traditional music, like ceremonial songs for example, which are only to be sung at specific times, by specific people, for specific purposes, and not by anyone else. I’m also learning about this, especially within other Indigenous traditions that are not my own. There are many different nations and they all have different processes and protocols.”

Coming up in February, Cusson will be participating in a special ten-day gathering at the Banff Centre for the Arts that will bring together various Indigenous musicians involved in classical music. The goal is twofold: first to have some co-creation time together and second, to think through best practices and protocols for artistic companies, presenters and other artists, when working with Indigenous musicians. “It will be an opportunity to think through how things are, where things could go, and how we can be a part of leading that,” Cusson said. The goal is to come out of this meeting with a tangible document that will outline starting places for the entire classical musical community who want to have better information on how to integrate and support Indigenous culture in their concert productions and creative works. “What are the good steps we can take to insure that we are making well-informed projects that are acts of reconciliation? This seems to be missing in a formal sense, so this document will be helpful in continuing that dialogue.” From my birds-eye perspective of writing this WholeNote column focused on the contemporary music world, I envision that this will be a very rich and valuable conversation that I hope will having lasting impact on how we think, create and engage in building musical culture.

Pauline Oliveros in February:

The Music Gallery will be co-producing three events in February centred around the music of Pauline Oliveros, the well-loved composer, performer and pioneer of the Deep Listening process. For a special Valentine’s Day event on February 14, Oliveros’ longtime partner, IONE, will be presenting a reading titled Today With All Its Hopes And Sorrows where she will reflect on the topics of community, lineage, and the potency of text and sound as forms of remembrance. Two days later on February 16, IONE will join cellist and improviser Anne Bourne for an afternoon workshop experience exploring Oliveros’ text scores. And finally, on February 17 there will be a concert performance of Oliveros’ To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of Their Desperation, written in 1968 as a response to the turbulent political events of the time. Appropriately, it will be performed by a group of local musicians in the City Hall council chambers. In order to give the reader a more personalized account of the impact of these events exploring the ideas within Oliveros’ music, I am planning a follow-up concert report which should be available on The WholeNote’s website during the third week of February. 

IN WITH THE NEW QUICK PICKS

FEB 2, 8PM: Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre. Soundstreams offers up a special performance of Steve Reich’s Different Trains with the Rolston String Quartet performing in tandem with a video realized by Spanish filmmaker Beatriz Caravaggio. Reich wrote this Grammy Award-winning work in 1988 as a musical meditation on the Holocaust. Perhaps the most personal of his works, Reich calls Different Trains a “music documentary” bearing witness to his childhood train journeys across the US in the 1940s, and the realization that as a Jew, had he grown up in Europe, his train journeys would have been very different. The concert will also feature Quartet #2 (Waves) by R. Murray Schafer, Swans Kissing by Rolf Wallin, and Streams by Dorothy Chang.

FEB 13 AND 14, 8PM: The Toronto Symphony Orchestra conducted by Barbara Hannigan. For lovers of the virtuosic contemporary music soprano, this will be an opportunity to experience her work as both conductor and vocal soloist. On the program is a series of mainly early 20th-century works by Debussy, Sibelius, Berg and Gershwin, as well as a classical period work by Haydn.

FEB 15 AND 16, 8PM: Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre. The Toronto Consort concert, “Love, Remixed”, offers a program of contemporary music written for early instruments and voice. James Rolfe’s Breathe uses texts by the 12th-century abbess, composer, poet and healer Hildegard of Bingen. Her texts often speak of rapturous experiences with the divine as well as of the greening life energy of nature. The Consort’s artistic director David Fallis will be presenting his Eurydice Variations, the story Monteverdi’s Orfeo tells, but from the point of view of Eurydice.

FEB 17, 7PM: Gallery 345. New Music Concerts offers this special fundraising event featuring the acclaimed German keyboard virtuoso Moritz Ernst performing the masterpiece Klavierstück X by Karlheinz Stockhausen, along with works by Mike Edgerton, Arthur Lourié, Miklos Maros and Sandeep Bhagwati.

FEB 22 AND 23, 8PM: Factory Theatre. The Music Gallery and Fu Gen Theatre present Foxconn Frequency (no.3) – for three visibly Chinese performers. This interdisciplinary work of “algorithmic theatre” combines real-time game mechanics, piano pedagogy, 3D-printing and the poetry of former Foxconn worker Xu Lizhi. The creative team includes the members of Hong Kong Exile – Natalie Tin Yin Gan, Milton Lim, Remy Siu, and musical performers Vicky Chow, Paul Paroczai and Matt Poon. The goal is to expand awareness beyond the musical instrument itself and bring attention to the performer’s identity by engaging both the eyes and ears, and thereby shifting the audience’s perception to multiple modalities.

FEB 23, 8PM: Gallery 345. Spectrum Music presents “The Rebel: Breaking Down Barriers” with the premiere of seven new works by Spectrum Music members Hanus, McBride, Victoria, Welchner, Wilde and others. This concert will be the second of five concerts this season that are exploring five prominent Jungian archetypes. Continuing in Spectrum’s tradition of pushing genre boundaries, the concert will combine classical and jazz elements.

Wendalyn Bartley is a Toronto-based composer and electro-vocal sound artist. sounddreaming@gmail.com.

The dictionary defines a conflagration as an extensive fire that destroys a great deal of land or property. (The recent Notre Dame fire in Paris on April 15 can be considered such an event.) It is also the very word that the beloved Toronto-born poet and novelist Gwendolyn MacEwen (1941-1987) used, metaphorically, to describe Nikola Tesla, the Serbian-American inventor and electrical engineer who brought us alternating current (AC) – the electricity system we use every day. In the last paragraph of the opening section of Tesla, MacEwen’s verse-play for radio, she states: “He set the entire earth in electrical vibration with a generator that spouted lightning that rivalled the fiery artillery of the heavens….Tesla was a conflagration.”

Tesla was one of two MacEwen verse-plays that were commissioned by and broadcast on CBC’s Anthology program in the early to mid-1960s. The Tesla piece explores Tesla’s achievements and his AC current that was used in the hydroelectric plant at Niagara Falls, the first of its kind. It also covers the highly controversial “War of Currents” he was engaged in with Edison and his direct-current (DC) system to determine which system would power the world. Tesla won. The second was Terror and Erebus, the names of the two ships used in the Franklin expedition to discover the Northwest Passage. Franklin’s Arctic expedition, had a less auspicious outcome: the two ships became icebound for three years, and despite several attempts to find them, the entire crew eventually died. Only the Inuit knew where they were.

TIO at Array: May 26 at the Array Space, the Toronto Improvisers Orchestra (TIO) will present a performance of both of these radio verse-plays, featuring actors Rod Campbell and Randi Helmers with an original score by composer Eugene Martynec for the Tesla piece, in an event that promises to be something of a conflagration of mixed art forms. Using the wireless technology that Tesla himself foresaw, I had a Skype conversation with TIO members Martynec and Campbell to hear more about the TIO in general and about this upcoming performance which is part of a series of events that the TIO has initiated to celebrate great artists and improvisers from Toronto.

The orchestra itself is the inspiration of Martynec who started it up about seven years ago after returning from a three-year stay in London UK where he played several times with the well-seasoned London Improvisers Orchestra. One of the hallmarks of that ensemble is the use of conduction cues, a series of hand signals used by a conductor to guide the musicians through an improvisational performance. These were originally designed by American cornet player and composer Butch Morris and have become a standard system used by many improvising ensembles in Europe and North America.

Currently, the TIO performs twice a month – at the Tranzac Club and the Array Space – and is a very musician-centric ensemble. These gatherings consist of a one-hour rehearsal beforehand to warm up and go over the cues, and then the actual improvisational performance begins. “The hand signals are there to help us out, not to tell people what to do” Martynec explains. The basic guidelines are that players are asked not to play in their usual genre (jazz, classical, blues, etc), melodies are to be atonal only and extended techniques on one’s instrument are highly encouraged.

Listening is key to making the music work, and for improvisers this includes not playing too much or louder than everyone else, enhancing what is happening, and knowing when to stop. Sometimes doing nothing at all can be the most appropriate contribution to the whole. There is a core of about six to eight players; for special events, such as this one in May, the orchestra grows to about 18 players. Instrumentation varies according to who participates, but usually consists of trumpet, piano, classical guitar, zheng (Chinese zither), flute, banjo, soprano sax, electric guitar and Martynec’s unique and custom-made laptop instrument that emulates an old Atari computer. He has designed several digitally based instruments that can be accessed through different types of controllers and mouse gestures.

For the Tesla piece, as I mentioned above, Martynec has created a score, which may seem contradictory for an improvisational ensemble. Martynec, though, describes the score as “a series of cues that are constrained improvisations.” Campbell will be conducting it and although the musicians will have seen the score before arriving, they will not have read the radio scripts and so it will truly be an improvisatory interaction. One aspect Martynec wants to include is the electronic sounds created when one unplugs a guitar from an amplifier, for example. These sounds are at 60 Hz, the frequency of alternating current (AC) and he is also requesting players tune to 60 HZ if possible, which is between B flat and B. The plan is to create a drone-like effect at one point during the Tesla performance. There will be no score for Terror and Erebus, and players will be asked to be ready to play sounds that reflect the ideas of ice and the North. Of course for Tesla, other encouraged sounds will be electronic and crackling in nature. Interestingly, in the original CBC production of Tesla, MacEwen had an instruction in the script that stated: “Wherever sound effects are indicated in the play, I have assumed these would be electronic. Oskar Sala’s Five Improvisations on Magnetic Tape would be an ideal record, although not necessarily the sole possibility.” Apparently, that’s not what was used in the end, and Campbell said when he listened to the archival recording, there were a lot of oscillator-like sounds used.

To conclude our conversation, I asked both Campbell and Martynec why they are drawn to improvisation. Campbell said he enjoys both listening to and playing improvised music and feels it is a natural thing for musicians to want to engage in. He is particularly curious about where it can go and especially those occasions when everyone stops at the same moment. “How did that happen?” they both exclaimed in chorus. Martynec enjoys the conversation that occurs along with the surprises, and due to the nature of his digital instrument, it’s the only situation he can play in, he said. They also both spoke about how sometimes things can go wrong, but that’s okay because it’s improvised music. For example, Campbell said, “The conductor can give a cue to a player, and then it goes somewhere different. It’s not wrong but different enough that everyone will then switch to accompany that person. It takes its own direction and eventually things work out.”

No doubt there will be plenty of surprises, and alternating currents, taking place during the performance of these two legendary radio verse-plays by MacEwen, whom author Michael Ondaatje referred to as “the last great bardic poet” since all her readings were done by memory.

IN WITH THE NEW QUICK PICKS

MAY 2, 8PM: Spectrum Music presents Coding Chaos with compositions inspired by the Creator archetype, with a pre-concert chat with software artist Ryan Kelln at 7:30. New compositions exploring artificial intelligence and a deeper look into the digital world by Spectrum composers Mason Victoria, Chelsea McBride, Jackson Welchner, Suzy Wilde with guest composers Nebyu Yohannes and Harrison Argatoff.

MAY 3, 8PM: The Music Gallery. In this final Emergents concert of the season, the experimental music theatre group Din of Shadows will present their newest project Material Mythology with a team of performers, composers, dancers and visual artists. The piece speculates about the hidden meanings and mythologies behind everyday actions, objects and spaces.

MAY 9, 12PM: Canadian Opera Company presents “Between Sound and Silence,” in their chamber music series, featuring Movement by German composer Helmut Lachenmann. Performed by the Glenn Gould School New Music Ensemble directed by Brian Current. Free.

MAY 10, 7:30PM: Upper Canada Choristers mark their 25th anniversary with the world premiere of Teasdale Love Songs by Canadian composer Stephen Chatman, a song cycle in six movements set to the poetry of Sara Teasdale. The evening includes Five Hebrew Love Songs by American composer Eric Whitacre and performances by the Cantemos Latin Ensemble performing the music of Venezuelan composer César Alejandro Carrillo.

MAY 10, 8PM: Continuum Contemporary Music presents “RADIOfänik” filled with music from various new genres including Sub-Club Drone, Indie Crossover and Gen-X Jams. Canadian works on the program include a new commission by Maxime Corbeil-Perron, two by Nicole Lizée including the world premiere of her Marsh Chapel Experiment and Doubt Is a Distance by James O’Callaghan. Pieces by Israeli composer Yair Klartag, Danish composer Simon Steen-Andersen and Polish composer Jagoda Szmytka complete the program. The Continuum Ensemble will be joined by Rob MacDonald on electric guitar.

MAY 26, 8PM: New Music Concerts presents “Iridescence,” their last concert of the season, featuring works by three Canadian composers: Matthias McIntire’s Cathedral Grove (and the Gray Jay) for solo violin with electronics; Samuel Andreyev’s Iridescent Notation for soprano and ensemble; and Ana Sokolović’s Evta for solo violin and ensemble. Violin soloists Matthias McIntire and Andréa Tyniec will join the New Music Concerts Ensemble directed by Robert Aitken.

Wendalyn Bartley is a Toronto-based composer and electro-vocal sound artist. sounddreaming@gmail.com.

What happens to the new when the weather heats up and the concert seasons have ended? Does the more casual atmosphere of the summer mean that presenters, performers and audiences are ready for something more out of the ordinary? From my discoveries of what lies in store for both the curious and the lover of experimental and innovative sounds, it seems that the boundary lines between musical genres and art forms become a bit more blurred. Musical concerts, outdoor installations, performance art and electronic and sound art are all happening within the traditional and not-so-traditional music, theatre and interdisciplinary festival environments. And often, the regular indoor concert hall has been tossed aside to make room for these sounds in outside spaces or to create a more participatory audience experience. The great thing is that many of these events are happening outside the Metro Toronto area, so be prepared. Your sonic summer listening will require some travelling around the province, but that’s what vacation time is for.

Starting off in June, we are immediately plunged into a series of performances that are full of cross-pollinating and genre-crashing power. The big news is that Toronto’s multi-arts Luminato Festival is headlining Marina Abramović, a New York-based performance artist originally from Serbia who is considered to be the “grandmother” of the performance art genre. Her work explores the limits of the body and states of consciousness, while often putting herself through extreme physical pain or tests of endurance. In 2010 during a retrospective at the MoMA in New York, Abramović performed The Artist is Present during which she sat immobile and in silence all day for almost three months while spectators took turns sitting opposite her. People experienced religious-like transformations as they stared back into her penetrating presence.

You may ask — what does this have to do with music? The answer is, of course, that the story of her life, along with scenes from her performance works, has been made into an opera entitled The Life and Death of Marina Abramović. Premiered in 2011 at the Manchester International Festival and toured to sold-out audiences in several European cities, the opera will receive its North American premiere at Luminato, running June 14 to 17. Conceived and directed by the legendary Robert Wilson in collaboration with Abramović, she also performs as herself and her mother alongside Willem Dafoe as narrator and male counterpart. The music was co-composed by cult pop star Antony Hegarty and ambient minimalist William Basinski, and performed by Antony in his mesmerizing and hypnotic voice. It was his cathartic musical performances and emotional vulnerability that inspired Abramović to invite him to collaborate on this opera that she describes as “a series of births and funerals of the soul.”

Running in conjunction with the opera from June 14 to 23 will be her latest performance work/installation, MAI – Prototype. In seven interconnected pavilions in Trinity Bellwoods Park, four pre-booked participants will wear white lab coats and receive instructions on headphones as they walk through the installation for a period of two hours. Every 30 minutes a new group will begin the journey in which they will undergo the rigours of her performance practice. These encounters will be live-streamed to other locations throughout Toronto, including one at Pearson airport.

Also performing at Luminato will be the inimitable Laurie Anderson appearing as part of The Hub series of free outdoor concerts at David Pecaut Square on June 16. Anderson was one of the first performance artists to bring experimental and art-rock music to a large popular audience. Writing songs full of political edginess and performing with her invented instruments (a tape-bow violin and a computer controlled “talking stick”), she made the UK pop charts back in the early 80s.

The pop/experimental music crossover theme continues over at the Music Gallery, in the last concert of their season’s signature Pop Avant series. Curated by Tad Michalak, known for his programming of under-the-radar pop, noise, jazz and harsh electronic music, his “Burn Down the Capital Showcase” June 8 will feature three different artists. Guaranteed to set your soul on fire, the music will mix up instrumental, vocal and a wide range of electronic and ambient sounds using tape loops and synthesizers to create both an “unacceptable” and sensual evening.

Another major summer music festival happening in Toronto is the NXNE Festival that takes over the downtown streets and clubs. This year, it’s exciting to see their programmers venturing into the world of sound art and co-producing three events with NAISA (New Adventures In Sound Art). These include a sound sculpture performance at the AGO on June 6, an audiovisual machine installation that runs from June 11 to 22 at the Wychwood Barns with a live performance on June 10 and a sound walk through Trinity Square on June 13, where sounds of underwater life will be projected into the outdoor urban space. 

For July, it’s off to Stratford Summer Music. It just so happens that July 18 is R. Murray Schafer’s 80th birthday, and he is being honoured that night with a tribute concert featuring pieces from his Patria cycle of musical dramas. As part of the celebration, Schafer’s visually-based scores will be on display at the Stratford Public Library from July 17 to August 25.

Schafer’s vision has opened up our ears to the soundscape (a term he coined), and so it’s only natural that he would create pieces for specific outdoor environments. His Music for Wilderness Lake from 1979 will be performed at 7am on July 19, 20 and 21 along the shores of the Avon River. Imagine 12 trombones spread amongst the mists of the riverbank, combined with an aria from another sunrise work — Princess of the Stars. Definitely worth an early morning rising. And if you’re up for experiencing something quite out of the ordinary, you could sign up to participate in a workshop performance of Asterion — the latest in his Patria series. The piece is an outdoor labyrinth located near Peterborough that has a series of rooms and passages participants must navigate alone as they encounter both performers and the environment along the way. Designed to be an intense and transformative soul journey, I couldn’t help but connect the dots to the Abramović installation designed with a similar intention. Happening through June and July, go to patria.org if you are drawn to join in.

Returning to Stratford Summer Music, we find that the entire cast and crew for a concert of Canadian contemporary opera excerpts has arrived via bicycle. The Bicycle Opera Project began last summer, touring from town to city via pedal power. This year, not only will they be performing in Stratford, but also in Toronto (July 4 to 7), and on tour from July 11 to 25 in Hamilton, Guelph, Elora, Fergus, Kitchener, Waterloo, Bayfield and London, arriving in Stratford for performances from July 26 to 28. This year’s repertoire focuses on telling the stories of women, featuring works from six different Canadian composers. For further details of the tour, check out bicycleopera.ca. Also appearing at Stratford Summer Music will be the acclaimed accordionist and contemporary music champion Joseph Macerollo in six weekend concerts, starting July 20 to 21 and ending August 24 to 25.

Not far from Stratford is the town of Elora, host to a summer music festival of many different styles. Works by contemporary composers can be heard on July 13 with the New Zealand String Quartet (Jack Body) and on July 14 with the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra (Philip Glass). The Elora Festival Singers will celebrate the 100th anniversary of Benjamin Britten in their concert on July 28.

August takes us back to the leading edges of sound and electronics with two festivals of sound art alongside the well-loved Ottawa Chamberfest. For the last seven years in Meaford, Ontario, over the August long weekend, the award-winning composer Gordon Monahan has been directing the Electric Eclectics festival of experimental music and sound art. With camping on-site, this year’s festival runs from August 2 to 4 and includes an extensive lineup of performances and installations, including New Yorkers Shelley Hirsch (experimental vocals) and Keiko Uenishi (laptop electronics), a long-awaited return by former Musicworks editor Tina Pearson (Victoria), a sound/light performance by Music for Lamps (Montreal) and the Sunda Duo (Toronto) with Bill Parsons and The WholeNote’s Andrew Timar. 

Over in Ottawa, musical experimentation on the long weekend at the Ottawa Chamberfest begins on August 2 with the improvisation-based Element Choir. Led by Christine Duncan, who uses a series of hand cues to sculpt real-time compositions, singers from Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal will be joined by Jim Lewis (trumpet) and Jean Martin (drums) to create a wild and energetic musical ride. This year’s festival also offers the New Music Now series with six concerts offered throughout the daytime hours on August 5 and 6. Performers and composers presented include pianist and multimedia artist Megumi Masaki, the Gryphon Trio (Lutoslawski, Ohana), Ensemble Transmission (Sokolović), the JACK quartet (Zorn, Lachenmann, Butterfield), choral works (Whittall, Kurtág, Berio) and a concert of works by Xenakis. In addition to this series, the festival is offering “snapshot” performances to ticket holders of the evening’s Siskind Concerts, including performances by Lori Freedman and the JACK quartet and presentations on the works of John Weinzweig and Xenakis. And if you are a fan of American composer Eric Whitacre, the Elora Festival Singers will perform three of his works in their concert on August 7, including Sleep — his online virtual choir hit.

Mid-month, from August 14 to 17, it’s the Toronto Electroacoustic Symposium with multiple performances and presentations. Featured this year are two giants of Canadian electroacoustic music: Francis Dhomont (also the keynote speaker) and Barry Truax. Co-produced with NAISA, all concerts will be diffused using a multi-speaker spatialization system. And as the summer days slowly become shorter, the Summer Music in the Garden series presented at Harbourfront’s outdoor Music Garden will feature the sounds of the TorQ Percussion Quartet on August 29. Performing compositions by Steve Reich, John Luther Adams, Richard Burrows and Daniel Morphy and an improvisation on clay instruments by the ensemble, the focus is on the natural elements of earth, water, air and fire. Overall, it’s a great summer lineup for discovering what’s cooking in the experimental sonic stew.

In addition: June 20 at Gallery 345, Kathryn Ladano on bass clarinet has two sets of improvised music including electronics and special guests.

July 19 at 7pm, Soundstreams Salon 21 presents “Summer Sound Walk,” a free tour through the different acoustic spaces of the Gardiner Museum and surrounding area. The event will feature vocalist, cellist and practitioner of Deep Listening, Anne Bourne, who will lead participants in guided listening exercises and invite them to listen to the sounds of the evening mingled with improvised live music. Definitely an event not to miss!  

Wendalyn Bartley is a Toronto-based composer and electro-vocal sound artist. Contact her at sounddreaming@gmail.com.

In the end, listening and creating with sound is totally intertwined with the ear – that part of human anatomy that is always active. It’s not so easy to close our ears when we don’t want to hear something, unless we use earplugs or noise-cancelling headphones. In contrast, it’s relatively straightforward to shut out visual images – we just close our eyes. But just because we’re always hearing something, doesn’t necessarily mean we are actually listening. What happens when we are truly listening is complex, and the stakes can get really high when we’re exposed to sounds that are unusual, unfamiliar or even shocking.

21C: Starting from Skratch. This is exactly one of the driving forces behind the upcoming 21C Music Festival – to create opportunities for the presentation of courageous music, music that stretches the ear beyond what it’s used to. Now in its second year and presented by the Royal Conservatory of Music with its partners, the festival runs from May 20 to 24 and offers 60 works with 34 world, Canadian or Ontario premieres. One of the distinguishing features of this festival will be the bringing together of artists and creators from different genres and backgrounds to generate a lively onstage dialogue of new sounds and ideas.

One of the more fascinating collaborations of 21C is happening on May 23 between Afiara (the Royal Conservatory’s resident string quartet), four composers and DJ artist Skratch Bastid. Afiara violinist Timothy Kantor told me that at the heart of this combination is a meeting along the borders, a place that Bartók believed provided the most fertile ground for innovation. This particular meeting ground seeks to create a remix of what makes Toronto sound unique, given its unique cultural mix.

What is a Toronto sound? is the question under investigation. All four composers, each coming from their own distinctive backgrounds, were originally commissioned to write new works for string quartet that were influenced by popular styles. But what makes this project stand out is that things don’t stop there.

Each of the four pieces was then recorded and handed over to the renowned Maritimes-born, Toronto-based Bastid, who has created a worldwide following based on his versatility in different dance music styles and his capacity to always stretch himself in new directions. He remixed the string quartet recordings using all sorts of sounds, songs and genres as part of his response, including recording snippets of string sounds he needed from the Afiara members. To keep the musical conversation going, his remixes were then given back to the composers, who then created a new piece for string quintet in response. This step gave the composers an opportunity to listen to”the Bastid’s” sonic imaginings and then take specific ideas even further to create a live performance piece for the quartet and Bastid. All three stages of the process will be presented at the concert, so the audience can listen in to how the whole project developed. All twelve pieces will also be available on the upcoming CD Spin Cycle scheduled for release in mid-May.

21C: Saariaho. One of Europe’s leading composers, Finland’s Kaija Saariaho will be the featured artist this year, with five Canadian premieres of her works in two different concerts. Saariaho will also be involved as a mentor in Soundstreams’ week-long Emerging Composers Workshop with the final pieces performed as part of the festival. Saariaho’s music is distinctive for its ability to take the listener deep into the terrain of the subconscious through the use of sound colours or timbres. In an email correspondence I had with her recently, she talked about how different sounds, and the sounds of nature, as well as the acoustics of specific places, have always been important to her, beginning when she was a child. Her brilliance lies in how she has translated environmental sound, as well as aspects of human behaviour such as dreaming, into musical form. Because her sound palette encompasses both instrumental and electronically based sounds, she has devised ways of creating seamless connections and transformations between these two worlds.  Her approach is to use the results of a computer-based analysis of how specific sounds are constructed to create harmonic and timbral structures for her music.

You can hear how this alchemical mix of scientific analysis and creative imagination comes alive on the Koerner Hall stage on May 21 at 8pm. This concert includes three solo instrumental pieces as well as the North American premiere of her piano trio Light and Matter. Saariaho drew inspiration for it while watching the continuous transformation of the colours and light visible on the leaves and tree trunks in a nearby park outside her window. Her vocal work Grammaire des rêves (to be performed May 23 at 5pm) translates research on how our moving body affects our dreams into musical sounds and form. It will also be interesting to hear the results of her mentoring the four composers chosen to participate in Soundstreams’s Emerging Composers Workshop in the After Hours concert on May 22. Saariaho sees her role as encouraging composers “to search for their personal compositional voice, without trying to calculate what could be the most successful path to take.”

21C: At a Glance.Other collaborations that promise stimulating results include the opening 21C concert on May 20 which features a RCM-commissioned work from drum legend Stewart Copeland of The Police – a duet between himself and Canadian pianist Jon Kimura Parker. This work presents another approach to the remixing idea, with Copeland and pianist Kimura Parker combining their own pieces with renditions of the likes of Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Bach and Ravel. And yes, this theme of the mixing up of elements continues on May 22with the 70-minute multimedia work Illusions, which combines new compositions from three different composers (Nicole Lizée, Gabriel Dharmoo and Simon Martin), Ives’ Piano Trio and visuals (projections designed by Jacques Collin, a longtime associate of Robert Lepage).The festival concludes May 24 with a concert of music influenced by Latin American musical styles and rhythms presented in partnership with Soundstreams. Acclaimed guitar virtuosos Grisha Goryachev and Fabio Zanon, Argentine bandoneon player Héctor del Curto, Colombian singer María Mulata and pianist/composer Serouj Kradjian will be setting the tone on stage, along with two world premieres by Canadian composers Andrew Staniland and Mark Duggan.

Because the list of new premieres and featured performers is extensive, I recommend checking out the complete schedule for the festival.

Subtle Technologies Festival. Returning to this article’s opening theme of the human ear, it’s inspiring to see how the scientific world is expanding its reaches into sound. Now in its 18th season, this year’s Subtle Technologies six-day festival, “3rd Ear: Expanded Notions of Sound in Science and Art,” runs May 25 to 31. Combining speaker and panel sessions with performances in sound, music, film and other multidisciplinary works, the festival is exploring the mind- and body-altering properties of sound, including a look at how we can work with sound as a resource for better living and social progress. Toronto’s Continuum Music is a major partner in this endeavour, and will be hosting an evening of team collaborations on May 28 between leading Canadian composers, scientists and contemporary artists. An example of the nature of these collaborations is the piece titled Ice, an immersive mixed-media and sound installation created by media artist Fareena Chanda, composer Jimmie LeBlanc and scientist Stephen Morris. To experience the full sensory process of water slowly transforming into ice, audience members are invited to completely commit their mind and body to the installation space. Other musical performance events include an algorithm-based improvisation piece by Ian Jarvis, and a collaboration of computer music and live video projections with Dafydd Hughes and Rob Cruickshank on May 29. Other highlights include the participation of composer/performers Kathy Kennedy and Nicole Lizée. Again, I encourage you to check out the full listings for the complete lineup.

Other New Music concert and opera events:  May offers new listening ground for innovations in instrumental music and opera.

Tapestry Opera presents a new twist on the traditional Medea myth with a world premiere collaboration between librettist Marjorie Chan and Scottish composer John Harris. Presented at the revamped industrial space Evergreen Brick Works, M’dea Undone runs from May 26 to 29 and offers a gripping investigation into power, influence and identity for the 21st century.

Over at the Music Gallery, the Emergents series continues on May 8 with a concert curated by Ilana Waniuk from the Thin Edge New Music Collective. She offers us an evening that combines a new work by Icelandic cellist-composer Fjóla Evans and a performance by Architek Percussion. Evans’ piece combines Icelandic folk songs, found sound, extended cell, and rímur, a unique way of intoning poetry. Architek Percussion specializes in the performance of experimental, minimalist, multidisciplinary and electroacoustic chamber music.

The veteran New Music Concerts series winds up its concert season on May 17 with a concert curated by Montrealer Michel Gonneville who brings together the music of Henri Pousseur, with whom Gonneville studied in the 1970s, and other influential Belgian composers. One aspect of Pousseur’s legacy was the vision he had for composition – that it will need to go beyond the production of finished objects and move towards a process that is more collective in nature.

Improvisation and Beyond: Certainly the rise of improvisation embodies the spirit of collective creation, and Toronto is becoming increasingly known as a hub for such activities. In May alone, several events demonstrate this trend, many of which are happening at the Arraymusic space and are ongoing monthly events: Arraymusic Improv Sessions on May 5 and June 2, Somewhere There on May 10, Audio Pollination on May 12, coexisDance on May 16, eVoid on May 22, and Toronto Improvisers Orchestra on May 31. Other concert events at the Arraymusic space include a multimedia performance work by Linda Bouchard on May 8, a Martin Arnold Curated Concert on May 18, and the Toy Piano Composers performing with TorQ Percussion Quartet on May 23 and 24. The Arraymusic ensemble presents their own events this month as well: the “Cathy Lewis Sings” concert on May 4, the Arraymusic Ensemble in their fundraising concert on May 6 and the annual Young Composers’ Workshop Concert on May 30 featuring premieres of electronic works with original projections by OCAD students.

Over at the Canadian Music Centre, there are two piano-focused events this month: JunctQin Keyboard Collective with premieres from Canada and around the world on May 3; works by Fung, McIntyre and Murphy on May 13. More Canadian piano works are part of Adam Sherkin’s concert at the Jane Mallet Theatre on May 9, with works by Gougeon, Murphy, Coulthard, Eckhardt-Grammaté and Sherkin. And a special evening of improvisation making use of Gallery 345’s beautiful grand pianos happens on May 7 with Marilyn Lerner, Casey Sokol and others.

New in Choral: To close out this very busy month, I note several contemporary works included in a variety of choral concerts:

May 4: Elmer Iseler Singers: Canadian and international composers.

May 9: Bell’Arte Singers: Hatfield, Somers, Sirett and others.

May 9: Orpheus Choir of Toronto: Enns and Gjeilo.

May 24: Oriana Women’s Choir: Luengen, Chan Ka Nin, Freedman, Healey.

May 29: Exultate Chamber Singers: Henderson, Enns, Somers, Freedman, Healey.

Wendalyn Bartley is a Toronto-based composer and electro-vocal sound artist. sounddreaming@gmail.com.

Music in the Barns

Creating musical events in unusual spaces is one of the signature features of Music in the Barns, an organization founded in 2008 by violist Carol Gimbel. At the time, Gimbel had an artist studio in the Artscape Wychwood Barns building which was renovated from several large early 20th-century TTC streetcar garages to create a multi-use facility that contains individual artist studios, a farmers market, a greenhouse, an event space and arts organization offices. On June 2, Music in the Barns is staging a celebratory post-Covid return with different events happening in the various Barns’ spaces to create a multi-sensory experience for the audience. 

Anchoring the evening will be a concert to finally celebrate their 2019 album – Music in the Barns: Bolton, Godin & Oesterle (newfocusrecordings.com). As Gimbel explained to me during a recent phone conversation, they had previously championed the music on the album during their concerts at the Barns, and after recording it and spending many hours editing it, they never had a chance to do the album-launch concert properly before the lockdowns began. This concert will therefore be the chance for an extended evening of celebration with all those who worked on the album. 

In these days of limited performances, for this month’s column I decided to take up a suggestion made by my ever-inventive editor at The WholeNote, and write a story related to some aspect of my own creative work during this time.  

On New Year’s Day of 2020, I had awoken with the inspiration to start a video-audio blog, something that is very new for me. Titled Earth Soundings, my original vision was that for each blog entry I would select a particular natural environment in which to take photos and videos, andf then create the soundtrack in response to the images and my experiences in each specific environment. My overall intention in creating these short nature-based videos was to invite people to take a brief pause in their day to remember and attune to their connection with the Earth, the elements and all beings. A short time of reflection or meditation. At the heart of the project: my desire to contribute in one way toward the restoration of our relationship with nature, for I believe that one of the root causes behind our climate crisis is due to our cultural disconnect from nature.

The guideline I set for myself for these blog posts was to take the photo and video footage on specific days of celebration, connected to either cultural holidays or days on the Earth calendar related to the passing of seasons or phases of the moon. For the music I would select various members of the wider community to collaborate with me.  Initially, I released these videos on my Facebook page Earth Soundings (facebook.com/wendalynvoice), again on days significant in the calendar. The videos are also available on my website soundingherwisdom.ca/earth-soundings. 

In last month’s column, I wrote about the Music Gallery’s X Avant festival and the vision of the Halluci Nation. From both my personal experience of attending some of the concerts and from talking to other concertgoers, it was an inspiring and exciting four days of listening to a wide and diverse array of music which also helped to further expand the Halluci Nation community. The last set on the Sunday evening (October 14) saw A Tribe Called Red performing together with other featured musicians to bring the whole festival to an exhilarating close. For this month’s column, I’d like to pursue this thread of building community further, and talk about other ways this is happening amongst presenters, composers and performers of new music in the city.

Arraymusic

Starting this fall, Arraymusic has appointed a new artistic director, percussionist David Schotzko. He succeeds Martin Arnold who stepped down to pursue a wonderful opportunity to teach at Trent University. Fortunately, Arnold will be staying on as artistic associate as well as continuing to curate his Rat-drifting series which will happen on December 7 and January 11 of this current season. I had a chance to speak with Schotzko about his vision moving forward for Arraymusic, and also to Allison Cameron whose music will be the focus of a mini-festival occurring on November 23 and 24.

Schotzko moved to Toronto in 2011 and has had an active career as a performer for several new music ensembles including Esprit Orchestra, New Music Concerts and also as a member of the Array Ensemble. Prior to 2011 he performed in New York City where he was a founding member of the acclaimed International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE). In addition to performing, he also has been involved in composer advocacy work throughout his career.

We spoke about where Array has been in the past and the direction that Schotzko would like to take in the future. Historically, the ensemble has generally had composers or composer-performers as artistic directors, and was focused around specific individual performers developing repertoire for a quirky instrumentation of two percussion, piano, violin, double bass, trumpet and clarinet. Once these original players moved on in their careers, it’s been challenging Schotzko said, to replace them.

With both Arnold and Rick Sacks (AD from 2011 to 2016), the process of moving away from the original instrumentation began. Coming from a performing background, Schotzko would like to create an ensemble with a regular group of individuals who are able to perform more and more without a conductor. Essentially, he wishes to move the group towards becoming a true chamber ensemble – an ensemble similar to a string quartet who perform together for years without a conductor and have a unique way of both rehearsing and performing together. This is challenging to achieve with an ever-changing group comprised of freelance musicians.

Schotzko sees adding more artistic associates such as Arnold in the future and broadening the range of voices coming out of Array. One step in this direction has been the signing of the Canadian League of Composers Gender Parity Pledge. The issue of balanced programming has surfaced in several of my columns over the last year or more, making this recent initiative by the CLC all the more welcome. The pledge is intended for presenters across the country to adopt and can be read in full on their website. It begins with these words: “We pledge to achieve or maintain gender parity in our programming and commissioning by our 2022/23 season. We welcome the opportunity to add our voice to a growing international movement that acknowledges artistic choices must be representative of the gender diversity within the community of creators.” This is a direction that Array has already taken on and their programming is already at 50/50, Schotzko said.

Array will also continue its community-based focus through a commitment to co-productions with several resident artists and organizations, such as the Thin Edge New Music Collective, the Evergreen Club Gamelan and Frequency Freaks, amongst others, as well as presenting mini-festivals highlighting the music of specific composers, such as the one featuring Allison Cameron’s music, an event planned during Arnold’s tenure as artistic director.

Allison Cameron

The mini-fest will present a variety of pieces that Cameron has created over the years, including composed works as well as improvised music. Her current group c_RL will perform both nights, first with the Arrayensemble on November 23 and on their own on November. c_RL is an innovative improvising trio featuring Cameron, electronics/found objects/keyboards; Germaine Liu, percussion; and Nicole Rampersaud, trumpet. The composed works on November 23 will include a newly commissioned piece from Array (which for now is remaining untitled), Kid Baltan, and In Memoriam Robert Ashley. Kid Baltan was written for Dutch composer Dick Raaijmakers in 2013; its title is the alias that Raaijmakers gave himself during the late 1950s when he was creating some of the first electropop music ever written. It is a graphic score for mixed ensemble and was first performed at The Music Gallery’s X Avant festival with Trio 7090 and others from Toronto and Amsterdam. Cameron wrote this piece for Louis Andriessen’s 75th birthday and has reworked the piece for the current instrumentation of the Array Ensemble plus c_RL.

We spoke at length about the aesthetic vision behind both the newly commissioned work and the more recent pieces that use graphic scores, and she told me about one inspiring experience she had a few years ago in Amsterdam that has significantly influenced her thinking. It occurred when she met with the performers for a rehearsal of one of her works. The performers had all received their parts ahead of time, but had not had a chance to practise on their own. Cameron was quite surprised by how the music unfolded. “It was like they were coming to the score without preconceptions. It was very refreshing and innocent-like.”

Cameron realized she had structured the score in a more open way, allowing each player to make their own unique contributions. This experience inspired her to create pieces with more flexibility. “I used to write things where everything had to be perfect, where this note had to happen at this time.” With so little time and money for extensive rehearsals, this became a very frustrating experience and she wanted to find a way of moving away from the constraints of the rehearsal environment in order to create pieces that allowed players more freedom to contribute to the overall work.

The newly commissioned piece we will hear on November 23 has several short movements that can be changed around and played in no particular order. Some aspects are fixed and others are mobile, and the graphic score allows the players to make their own decisions. Over the years, Cameron has created various performing ensembles that have given her a platform to develop her own performing skills and to create work for a consistent instrumentation. Participating within the improvisational community in Toronto and developing relationships with performers has been a key aspect of her creative process that has also influenced her compositional practice. The second night of the festival will be dedicated to her improvised music with one set featuring c_RL and one solo set.

A Mini-Tour of Upcoming Concerts

Continuing with the theme of community building, here is a short walk through some of the events happening in November within new music.

First of all, it’s noteworthy to see the influence of Array’s contribution beyond their own activities as two of their resident ensembles will be presenting concerts this month. The Thin Edge New Music Collective are performing at the Canadian Music Centre on November 8 and the Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan will be appearing at the Aga Khan Museum on November 25 with a premiere of a new work by Canadian composer Peter Hatch. Also, c_RL member Germaine Liu will be teaming up with Sarah Hennies for a concert of percussion pieces on December 6 at the CMC.

Veteran composer and influential educator John Beckwith has a new work titled Meanwhile, for marimba and piano, which will be played by percussionist Zac Pulak (who commissioned it) and pianist Edana Higham at the CMC on November 22 at 5:30pm [not in our listings]. The piece, which received its first performance this past July in Ottawa, can be viewed on YouTube.

Esprit Orchestra’s concert on November 28 will feature works by Alexina Louie and Murray Schafer, as well as a piece by Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir, who was chosen in 2015 as the New York Philharmonic’s Kravis Emerging Composer. She is currently composer-in-residence with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra and Esprit will be performing Dreaming, her work from 2008. Schafer’s 1973 composition, North/White, sets the stage for an North-inspired evening, with Louie’s Take the Dog Sled capturing the essence of life in the Arctic.

Early in the month on November 2, Continuum Contemporary Music begins its new season with “Super Hot Sax,” featuring saxophonist Wallace Halladay in a number of works. This new season Continuum’s programming features 60 percent female composers, works that engage with new technologies and their newly expanded ensemble. The November 2 concert is dedicated to the memory of Daniel Cooper, a longtime supporter of contemporary chamber music in Toronto. Cooper’s commissioned work The Wind Wrests My Words by composer Jimmie LeBlanc will receive its world premiere.

On November 11, the Ensemble Contemporain de Montréal will be performing in Toronto as part of their Generation2018 Canadian tour presenting works by four emerging composers. Toronto’s New Music Concerts will be hosting this project as they have since 2000. The featured composers selected from across the country will be interviewed as part of the performance and audiences will be able to vote for their favourite work.

NMC will then continue their season on December 2 with a program of works selected by Michael Koerner who has served on their board since 1978. The concert includes works by several key composers from the 20th century: Igor Stravinsky, Darius Milhaud, Charles Ives, Elliott Carter and Murray Schafer, whose String Quartet No. 6 “Parting Wild Horse’s Mane” was a commissioned work from Koerner.

And finally, a community building workshop on November 25 hosted by the Music Gallery will feature composer-improviser Anne Bourne guiding participants through various text scores by Pauline Oliveros. This will be the first of four opportunities this season to experience Oliveros’ Deep Listening process through listening and sounding and is aimed towards cultivating a shared creative expression. 

Wendalyn Bartley is a Toronto-based composer and electro-vocal sound artist. sounddreaming@gmail.com.

The effect of too many winter days indoors and the budding promise of spring seem to have inspired new music presenters to think of movement in March, and especially of the human desire to dance. Or perhaps it’s my own craving for unbundling weather – where we can move more freely – that’s making me see choreographic connections. Regardless, no fewer than six concerts this month touch on the subject openly or in more subtle ways.

New Music Concerts’ celebration of British composer Jonathan Harvey may be the most tangential to the theme, but I can’t go without mentioning it. Harvey’s remarkable training and unique opportunities for musical exploration have allowed him to gather influences from Berg, Messiaen and Britten to Babbitt and Boulez, which he then infuses with the power of Stockhausen and his own investigation of the mystical. Early successes have since opened doors for Harvey to compose for just about every classical genre, and for some of the world’s best soloists and ensembles. But his skill and imagination seem best applied to electroacoustics, which is the main feature of this March 6 concert at the Betty Oliphant Theatre.

Programme notes for works like The Riot (the only non-premiere here) read like descriptions of choreography. Musical themes bounce about sharply, join in polyphonic ensembles or re-combine in new configurations. Scena for solo violin and large ensemble develops just like a classical ballet. Be sure to arrive early for a pre-concert event, where U of T’s gamUT ensemble will deliver the world premiere of Harvey’s Vajra. Harvey is in constant demand for commissions, meaning his dance card is plenty full, so any chance to catch a new work of his is a special one. To learn more or buy tickets, visit  www.newmusicconcerts.com.

On March 17, pianist Christina Petrowska Quilico will unveil the results of her Glass Houses Revisited recording project in a live concert at the Glenn Gould Studio. The CD, released on Centrediscs, consists of extensive revisions to nine selections from the original 1981 Glass Houses by composer Ann Southam, and was Petrowksa Quilico’s last Southam collaboration before the composer’s sudden passing last November.

In her incomplete programme notes, Southam explained the genesis of the work: “I have called these pieces Glass Houses in order to identify them as minimalist music. The best known composer of this style of music at the time… The tunes in Glass Houses were inspired by… Canadian east coast fiddle music. Generally speaking, these tunes are spun out… until all tunes are present, at which point they wind back to the beginning.”

Petrowska Quilico describes Glass Houses Revisited as “fiendishly difficult,” comparing the cycle to Ligeti’s etudes, Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes and to the complexity of Bach’s counterpoint – fleet, virtuosic dances around the keyboard. It’s interesting to note that Southam was a celebrated composer of music for dance, having written over 40 scores for the likes of Patricia Beatty and the New Dance Group of Canada (now the Toronto Dance Theatre) and for other companies and choreographers such as Danny Grossman, Dancemakers, Rachel Browne and Christopher House, including House’s acclaimed choreography set to Glass Houses. To learn more about Ann Southam and her work, visit www.musiccentre.ca. ickets,

Continuum returns to Toronto from the 2011 Montréal/Nouvelles Musiques Festival for a March 20 concert at the Music Gallery. Titled “Step, Turn, Kick,” the programming here is grounded in the idea of “dancing in the mind.” At its core is a quartet of new pieces by Canadian composers Cassandra Miller, Nicolas Gilbert, Linda C. Smith and Lori Freedman, that, taken together, can be imagined as a French baroque dance suite for the 21st century. Also featured is the Canadian premiere of Marc Sabat’s John Jenkins, a work inspired by the prolific 17th-century English composer and dance master. Rounding out the concert are solos and duos by UK’s Michel Finnissy and Holland’s Martijn Padding that express an impulse to move. To learn more about Continuum, visit www.continuummusic.org. Tickets will be available at the door.

I’m very eager to hear Julie-Anne Derome in recital on March 24 at the Jane Mallett Theatre. This new music specialist presents an ambitious programme rich with Canadian content. She will open with the brief but intense Ivresses, songes, sourdes nuit by Québec composer Jean Lesage. Its percussive sonics and other dramatic effects make it ripe for use as a solo dance soundtrack. Chan Ka Nin’s very popular Soulmate, taken from his figure-skating-inspired Poetry on Ice, will offer a nice counterbalance. And closing the evening is Tracking for solo violin and live video by Laurie Radford. Radford defines “tracking” in the sense of the title as “the coordination of speed and gesture for two points locked in a reciprocal force and action.” Put simply, the act of both leading and following, as in a pas de deux. Radford further explains that tracking implies linked relationships between time, material and action, controlling energy and gravitational force. All very heady stuff, but it sounds very dance-like to me! More details are available through www.music-toronto.com.

The Scarborough Philharmonic carries through the dance theme to April 2 with a new work by their Composer-in-Residence, Alex Eddington. Entitled Dancing about Architecture, Eddington describes the work for nine wind instruments and percussion as “a new way to organize a dance suite”, inspired by Jean Cocteau’s phrase “Give me music I can live in like a house!” This concert at the St. John the Baptist Norway Anglican Church also features world premieres by Toronto’s Phil McConnell and American composer Bruce Broughton. For more details and to reserve tickets, visit www.spo.ca.

We end on a high-energy note on April 3 with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony and their premiere of Brian Current’s Whirling Dervish for sufi whirling and orchestra. If you have never experienced Sufi whirling – a dynamic, dancing form of mystic meditation – then you’re in for a treat. It can be a mesmerizing experience, and I’m sure Current has come up with some excellent new music to make this an event that will spin us right into spring! For more details, visit www.kwsymphony.ca.

From dances of the mind to mystic motion, new music never ceases to move us. So be sure to get in with the new via the WholeNote concert listings here and online at www.thewholenote.com. ν

Jason Van Eyk is the Ontario Regional Director of the Canadian Music Centre. He can be contacted at newmusic@thewholenote.com.

In last month’s column, I spoke about the act of listening, and how music creators have been evolving compositional strategies that bring more awareness to the ways we listen. When we slow down and open our whole being to engage with the sounds our ears are receiving, we truly do enter into a realm of perception that transcends normal everyday life. This can, of course, happen when we are listening to traditional music, but when the creative and artistic intention is focused on creating shifts in our perception of sound, it is easy to feel as if we are slipping into an “alternative universe.” This is how Musical Toronto blog-writer John Terauds describes his experience of listening to Ann Southam’s music as performed by Eve Egoyan — a concert I wrote about in that same column in April.

The Open Ears Festival of Music and Sound on May 31 and June 1 in Kitchener presents a perfect opportunity to stretch our listening awareness even further. This year’s festival, “Between the Ears,” offers a wide range of events including concerts, sound installations, a regatta of origami boats in a reflecting pool, performative sculptures, late night improvisations and a street market. On May 31, some wild things are in store for festival-goers, including the percussion music of Australian composer Erik Griswold. His pieces have been described as the place where music and kinetic sculpture merge. Imagine a percussionist playing an array of temple bells and bowls accompanied by the sounds and rhythms created by a cone-shaped pendulum spilling 50 pounds of rice through a large funnel. This is Griswold’s work Spill. In his piece Strings Attached for six percussionists, the gestures of the performers become a living sculpture. Their mallets are attached with nylon ropes to a lighting rig, thus visually magnifying their movements.

Other features of the Friday evening event include a performance of James Tenney’s Having Never Written A Note for Percussion — a stunning acoustic experience sure to stretch you wide open. In fact, my body can still remember the reverberations I experienced back in 2000 when this piece was performed at the Tenney farewell concert in Toronto. A single note on an instrument of choice is played as a tremelo for “a long time.” It begins at the threshold of hearing and rises in volume to an extreme threshold before returning again to silence. A simple concept yet the complex sonic results are unforgettable.

The festival evening will wind down with Hit Parade by Christof Migone. Participants lie face down and pound the pavement with a microphone. Everyone has their own amplifier positioned as far away as possible and can take breaks after each 100 hits. A sonic playground extraordinaire!

June 1 brings a performance by current and founding members of the legendary improvising ensemble CCMC (who also were the founders of the Music Gallery), and a cutting edge electronic piece, La chambre des machines, created by Martin Messier and Nicolas Bernier who digitally transform sounds made from machine gears and cranks. The night ends at the Walper Hotel with the members of Freedman (Justin Haynes, Jean Martin and Ryan Driver) performing on a ukulele, a suitcase and a street-sweeper bristle.

Xenakis and Beyond: Just preceding “Between the Ears” is another festive gathering called “Random Walks: Music of Xenakis and Beyond” running from May 24 (in Toronto) to May 25 (in Waterloo). Presented by the Fields Institute, the Perimeter Institute and the Institute for Quantum Computing in Waterloo, this two-day event will focus on the music, ideas and influence of Greek composer and architect Iannis Xenakis. Concert presentations of his string quartet, percussion and electroacoustic music will be intermingled with lecture and discussion sessions. Xenakis was a 20th-century “heavy weight,” whose ideas continue to have a profound impact across many disciplines. Part of the festival will be devoted to exploring and taking stock of the range of this influence on, among others, composers, mathematicians, architects and computer scientists.

Xenakis’ music is often quite physically demanding on the performer, requiring a high level of technical prowess. That should bode well for some extraordinary concert experiences. Performers include the JACK Quartet, renowned for its “explosive virtuosity,” and an extensive list of percussion soloists and ensembles, including Montreal’s Aiyun Huang and Toronto’s TorQ Percussion Quartet. For a great essay on Xenakis’ string quartet music, I recommend the article written by James Harley, accessible through a weblink on the festival’s home page (google “Random Walks”). Noted speakers include musician and author Sharon Kanach who worked closely with Xenakis for many years, and composer/computer programmer Curtis Roads, former editor of the Computer Music Journal who also pioneered a form of computer sound creation known as granular synthesis.

More on string quartets: May seems to be the month not only for experimental music festivals, but also for string quartets specializing in contemporary music. Besides the JACK Quartet mentioned above, the Mivos Quartet from New York will be offering two concerts with slightly varying programs on May 24 at Gallery 345 and May 25 at Heliconian Hall. The young players of this quartet came together in 2008 after graduating from the Manhattan School of Music and set out to expand the quartet repertoire by commissioning and collaborating with a wide cross-section of contemporary composers. A third quartet — the Toronto-based Magenta String Quartet — will be presenting works by Toronto composers Eatock, Gfroerer and Vachon on May 25 at Eastminster United Church.

East and West: The East and West musical dialogue continues in two extraordinary events this coming month. First up is a production by the Toronto Masque Theatre of The Lesson of Da Ji written by two of Toronto’s own: composer Alice Ping Yee Ho and librettist Marjorie Chan. Traditionally, masque is a fusion of music, dance and theatre which flourished in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries. This new work, which runs from May 10to 12 at the Al Green Theatre, will be a contemporary take on the older form based on the true story of the Shang dynasty concubine Da Ji and the King who took revenge on her secret lover. The music will blend European baroque instruments with various eastern instruments including the pipa, erhu and guquin, which Da Ji learns to play as part of the narrative. A traditional Peking Opera dance performance will complement the blending.

The second East and West event will be Soundstreams’ season finale concert, “Music for China,” on May 14, which also happens to be their first stop on the way to touring in China. Featuring music for chamber orchestra written by Chinese, North American and European composers, the concert will include performances by the Canadian Accordes String Quartet and the Chai Found Music Workshop — an ensemble from Taiwan that specializes in contemporary classical as well as traditional Chinese and Taiwanese music. I do have to note a heartening feature of this concert program, even though it is not mentioned in any of the media releases (which is not to be taken as a criticism, but rather a sign of progress). All works on the program are written by women, with the exception of the piece composed by Murray Schafer. This fascinating lineup includes composers Dorothy Chang (USA), Fuhong Shi (China), Alexina Louie (Canada) and Kaija Saariaho (Finland).

Contemporary choral: Four concerts of contemporary choral music are in store for lovers of this genre. The Oriana Women’s Choir celebrates the 80th birthday of Ruth Watson Henderson on May 25 with a concert featuring several of her compositions along with premieres by emerging composers. On June 1 the Amadeus Choir joins with the Bach Children’s Chorus to present Henderson’s Voices of Earth and a premiere by Eleanor Daley. And on May 10, the Upper Canada Choristers sing music of the Americas, including pieces by Astor Piazzolla (Fuga y misterio) and Eric Whitacre (Lux Aurumque) sung by their highly accomplished Latin ensemble Cantemos. If you haven’t yet heard the virtual choir version of Lux Aurumque — it’s a must. Go to YouTube and search it out. Whitacre’s music is also included in the Da Capo Chamber Choir’s concerts on May 4 (Kitchener) and May 5 (Waterloo), along with works by Leonard Enns and Glenn Buhr.

Emerging: New sounds by young composers can be experienced at two events, both happening on May 25. At the Music Gallery, the ∆TENT ensemble performs works by emerging local and international composers, while the group called “(insert TITLE)” showcases works for the marimba. Arraymusic presents their annual Young Composers’ Workshop Concert with premieres by four emerging composers who have spent the month workshopping and experimenting with members of the Array ensemble to create their new pieces.

With such an eclectic mix of concerts representing widely diverging aesthetics to choose from, this month offers the perfect time to open your ears to something you may not have encountered before. And in so doing, you will be right in step with the stimulating forces spring offers. 

Wendalyn Bartley is a Toronto-based composer and electro-vocal sound artist. sounddreaming@gmail.com.

More often than not these days I can hear the sounds of new musical ideas coming through my walls, coaxed from the keys of my next-door neighbour’s grand piano. Living next to a composer is one of those curious joys of living in a big city like Toronto. If I’m patient, eventually I can hear those kernels of melody and harmony form into exciting new works that open brand new musical perspectives. But it’s not only my neighbour who’s been busy this winter, as March seems to be packed full with world premieres from local composers.

The month launches off with the TSO’s fifth New Creations Festival, which is focusing on music for string instruments and Far East influences (an odd connection, perhaps, but one that seems to work). This year’s special guest is Tan Dun, one of the world’s most accomplished living composers and perhaps most known for his Grammy Award-winning film score for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The first two dates of this three-concert festival (March 5, 7 and 12) will feature several of Tan’s concerti and large ensemble works, which marry together music of Eastern and Western heritage with avant-garde techniques to explore cultural and spiritual themes. While more concerti from Toru Takemitsu and Toronto-based Gary Kulesha will add to the overall experience, I’m most keen to hear the results of Alexina Louie’s latest commission, a concerto for string quartet and orchestra.

There’s a big show coming to town in June – and it’s all about the apocalypse. The piece I’m referring to – Apocalypsis by Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer – is an epic work divided into two parts, the first being a dramatic retelling of John’s vision from the biblical Book of Revelation and the second a serene multi-choir Credo that leads the listener from chaos into order. The performance of this monumental work, which runs from June 26 to 28, has been taken on by the Luminato Festival and involves an interdisciplinary cast of 1,000. Originally performed in 1980 in London, Ontario, this version will be vastly different in its staging and artistic vision with all sorts of gender-bending happening with the main characters. What I will focus on in my column is the role of the Element Choir and its director Christine Duncan in this production.

I sat down with Christine to talk about Apocalypsis as well as other performances she and the choir will be involved in this summer. Christine defines the Element Choir as “an improvising choir that uses a sonic vocabulary based on a system of hand cues to create instant compositions.” In Apocalypsis the choir will perform the role of The Choir of the Lost which in the 1980 version was performed by drama students. “The choir was a perfect fit for this text-based role, as they are already very comfortable in moving freely in the world of sound texture and non-sung elements,” Duncan said. Their role functions like a Greek chorus, commenting, responding and reacting to the main drama. And even though choir members can utter the text however they like, the structure of both the timing and dynamics of their utterances is very specific, with word comprehensibility being key. This departs from the usual Element Choir practice which is usually “anything is possible.” Before the performance begins however, some members of the choir will be improvising and babbling bits of biblical texts in multiple languages in both the lobby and the hall.

The story of how the Element Choir came into being is fascinating and a testament to the creative and innovative spirit of both Duncan and her partner, drummer and recording producer Jean Martin. Back in 2006, Duncan and Martin were creating an album on the Montreal label Ambiances Magnétiques. For the release concert, Martin came up with the idea of putting together a group of singers to expand and support the voices of the CD’s vocal performers – Duncan and DB Boyko. It was a brilliant move, as this more choral element added possibilities for textural changes and polytonality, giving a counterpoint to the voices and percussion. Inspired by this experience, Duncan pursued her own research on how to develop an articulate vocabulary for an improvising choir. Rather than re-inventing the wheel, she studied the “conduction” methods used in the London Improvisers Orchestra as developed by Butch Morris, as well as picking up ideas from John Zorn’s Cobra, Anthony Braxton, Phil Minton’s Feral Choir and Sarah Weaver’s Soundpainting system. She consulted with various composers to get a better sense of which musical elements this language would need; and she studied different world music-based singing techniques. This wealth of material was workshopped with a volunteer choir in the original Somewhere There space and her own unique language and approach was born. It’s a language that is shared among the choir members, with new ideas for hand cues often coming from the singers. She also credits Jean Martin, who is constantly envisioning new ideas and directions for what is possible, with playing the strongest advisory role. However, Duncan adds, years before any of this began, it was Western Front’s DB Boyko (in Vancouver) who first introduced her to the idea of conducting a vocal improvising ensemble at one of the WF’s community block parties.

The Element Choir’s reputation and performing schedule continues to grow, and this summer’s schedule is no exception, particularly as part of the cultural activities surrounding the Pan Am Games. After the Apocalypsis performance, the choir is right back at it with their involvement in the Singing River project, an interdisciplinary site-specific piece directed by composer Juliet Palmer and her Urbanvessel company. Running on July 4 and 5, the piece is a Pan Am Path event that is all about restoring our relationship with the Wonscotonach (Don) River. Both the Element Choir and Christine Duncan are part of the core performers’ team, along with the TorQ Percussion Quartet. The choir has played a role in developing improv-based material for the piece through a series of community-based workshops with members of Native Earth’s emerging artists program Animikiig, street artist Roadsworth (who will be creating a stencil installation inspired by the improvisations on the Lower Don cycling path) and the Regent Park School of Music Youth Choirs. The project also includes audio installations by Palmer and sound artist Chris Willes and a vast array of interdisciplinary performers, workshops, talks and guided walks. Check out Urbanvessel’s website for all the details.

The second Pan Am-related performance by the Element Choir is with the explosive Tanya Tagaq on August 8 as part of Panamania and the free staged events at Nathan Philips Square. Creating her own unique style based on the traditional Inuk throat singing she grew up with in Nunavut, Tagaq recently won the Polaris Music Prize for her Animism album, stunning audiences with her performance on the awards night. And the Element Choir was right there backing her up, along with Jean Martin and violinist Jesse Zubot, who produced her album. For Duncan, folding the Element Choir into this sea of sound created by Tagaq and her two-man band was not too much of a stretch, as she has performed with Tagaq and knows the arc of her shows with Zubot and Martin. However, in this type of situation, the choir sounds need to be unified and simple, functioning more like a textural device for dramatic impact. Incidentally, Tagaq will be playing the role of the Old Woman in Schafer’s Apocalypsis.

For Duncan, the Element Choir project is all about creating and maintaining relationships, building community and fostering a safe and supportive environment. It offers a playing field for experimenting with a diverse range of sounds and morphing textures, while offering opportunities for choir members to improvise their own solos. She has increasingly found an open door of support for her aesthetic sensibilities and approach to the voice as an instrument in educational environments such as the jazz program at U of T. And at the heart of it all, she is continuing to cultivate improvisational strategies that are more refined, intentional and artful.

More Singing Stories: This summer is turning out to be the season of new dramatic works for the voice in various configurations. Back in the April edition of The WholeNote, I wrote about singer Fides Krucker’s role in creating vocal improvisations for the dancers in Peggy Baker’s locus plot production. This summer, Krucker is presenting and performing in DIVE, a work of sonic theatre set within a cabaret-styled environment, running from July 30 to August 9 and created in collaboration with composer Nik Beeson. DIVE is based on a play by Richard Sanger, which is in turn derived from Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s short story The Professor and the Siren. I spoke to Beeson and Krucker about their collaboration which combines electroacoustic tracks with vocal improvisations. Krucker plays the role of the Mermaid, a character who is “perfectly divine and wild,” an elemental force who shifts into a series of different characters and scenes as she interacts with the two male actors. Her shapeshifting qualities allow for a variety of musical styles to be used throughout, including composed music inspired by Greek Rebetiko protest music, and the Mussolini-era fascist anthem known as the Giovinezza used in the startling aggressive opening. An intimate setting amongst tables enables Krucker to travel around the audience, at times singing gently into their ears while her character’s nonhuman nature embodies such elemental forces as a storm and the animal spirits of whale and wolf. Beeson’s electroacoustic score ranges from recorded instrumental sounds and synthesizer textures to the use of a collection of Harry Partch-inspired cloud bowls made from glass jugs. DIVE is a story that juxtaposes the terrifying forces of fascism with those of the wild, raw and at times equally overwhelming elements of nature, set within a human story of intimacy, regret and the desire for ecstatic union.

Speaking of storms and political power, How it Storms, an erotic opera composed by Allen Cole, will be performed on June 17 and 18 featuring the sounds of the Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan along with four operatic singers. The piece is inspired by a story from the Hindu epic The Mahabharata but set within Canada, with a female protagonist motivated by her desire to be free from patriarchal domination.

On June 13, the Music Gallery presents “Fossegrimen,” a multi-stage event with three main sets that offer various takes on folklore, fairy tales and legend. Included are an opera composed by Chris Thornborrow based on the Grimm fairy tale The Moon, music by members of the fusion band Ensemble Polaris and the premiere of Elliot Cole’s Babinagar, a 20-minute work based on an Afghan folktale.

The final dramatically inspired new work which caught my eye in this summer’s season is Wendake/Huronia, composed by John Beckwith to mark the 400th anniversary of Champlain’s arrival in the southern Georgian Bay area. The concert on July 30 will feature the Toronto Consort, the Brookside Festival Chamber Choir and First Nations singers and drummers.

The Summer Festivals: After a long meandering walk through the voice-based performances of new works for this summer, it’s time to take a quick look at what’s happening at the various summer festivals. I promise you, this will be chronological, just to help with your planning.

Open Ears Festival (Kitchener): June 20 and 21

On June 20, Myaudia, a series of guerilla-styled sound interventions created by Peter Hatch, will take place in Kitchener’s Victoria Park, followed by the Open Ears Regatta with multiple musicians ringed around the civic square for listeners to drift between. On June 21, an offering of music/dance works with scores by Antoine Bédard, Justin Rutledge and Rodney Sharman, and improvisations by Lori Freedman.

Music Mondays (Toronto): June through August

A number of new works will be presented in this downtown Toronto series of lunchtime concerts. Here’s a summary lineup: a piano work by John Burge (June 8); composer and cellist Raphael Weinroth-Browne performing his own compositions (June 29); Jean Coulthard’s Image Astrale (July 6); works by Marjan Mozetich and Jack Behrens performed by Mary Kenedi (July 20); flute and piano works by Marchettini, Beaser and Schafer (July 27) and finally, a specially commissioned work for Music Mondays – Benedicite by Peter-Anthony Togni (August 24).

Ottawa International Chamber Music Festival: July/August

Interspersed amongst the festival concerts are the following premieres and new works: a performance by Dutch cellist, composer and improviser Ernst Reijseger (July 24); a remount of the mixed-media piece Illusions from the recent 21C Festival that intermingles new music by Canadian composers with Charles Ives’ enigmatic Piano Trio (July 26); a performance of James Rolfe’s contemporary masque Aeneas and Dido (July 27); the premiere of Andrew Staniland’s The Ocean is Full of its Own Collapse (July 29); and the performance of Czech composer Sylvie Bodorová’s Three Sonnets (August 2).

The festival also offers their regular six-concert New Music Now series on August 3 and 4. Composers represented in these concerts include Canadians Michael Oesterle, Paul Steenhuisen, Marc Sabat, Nicole Lizée, and Claude Vivier, along with internationally-based Nicolaou, Zorn, Rzewski and Birtwistle, among others.

Summer Music in the Garden (Toronto): July/August

Down at Harbourfront’s Music Garden, the outdoor performances include composer Barbara Croall (Odawa) performing a new commissioned work for pipigwan, a type of cedar flute (July 2); newly commissioned works by Canadian composers Scott Godin and Isaiah Ceccarelli performed by Elinor Frey on her five-string cello (July 5); Toronto’s Ton Beau String Quartet performing Bill Rowson’s String Quartet No.1 (July 30); and the Blythwood Winds performing new works by Lau and Estacio (August 13).

Stratford Summer Music: August 7 to 9

R. Murray Schafer’s music is often featured at this festival and this year, audiences can enjoy three outdoor morning concerts from August 7 to 9 featuring works from his choral nature-themed repertoire works. On the evening of August 7, a number of professional choirs will join together to sing some of his more spiritually-based music within a specially choreographed setting at St. James Anglican Church.

QUICK PICKS

Improvised Music at Array Space:

June 9 and 27: Audiopollination

June 14: Somewhere There/Arraymusic: In Concert

June 19: Evoid Collective

June 28: Toronto Improvisers Orchestra

Canadian Music Centre:

June 4: Opus: Testing Workshop and Concert. Compositions created using sounds from the NASA Audio Archive.

June 11: Jacques Israelievitch/Christina Petrowska Quilico CD Launch, with works by Rolfe and Kulesha.

June 13: A Journey Inwards: Iranian-Canadian Composers of Toronto.

June 24: Elaine Keillor CD Launch. Works by Cardy, Morawetz, Weinzweig, Louie and E. Miller.

July 6: Gryphon Trio CD Release. Works by Current, Oesterle, Staniland and Wright.

July 24: Regent Park SongBook Premiere. Works by Gervais, Hamidi, LeBel and Daniel.

Additional Picks:

June 4, 6 and 7: Toronto Symphony Orchestra – John Adams’ Short Ride in a Fast Machine.

June 13 and 14: Toronto Symphony Orchestra – Gary Kulesha’s Torque.

June 17: Opera by Request – Tremblay’s A Chair in Love.

June 20: Rough Idea – Michael Snow and Ken Vandermark.

July 9: Music and Beyond Festival (Ottawa) – Voces8 concert including works by David Blackwell and John Tavener. 

Wendalyn Bartley is a Toronto-based composer and electro-vocal sound artist. sounddreaming@gmail.com.

Self-isolation, social distancing, stay at home, connected isolation, the new normal, flattening the curve – all phrases that are becoming the latest updates to our current vocabulary. But as I along with everyone else take all this in, I am also listening to those who speak about how what’s also emerging are new levels of global co-operation, and that this is a time for societal reset, even a time that offers a choice for humanity to change or die. 

In a sense we’ve all known somewhere inside us that this was coming, in some form; living in a culture that was killing off the very planet our lives depend upon was not sustainable. It’s almost as if the Earth is presenting a challenge to us to let go of our old and familiar ways. Now is the time to slow down and listen, and to sense what might be emerging and arising out of the old. When a caterpillar forms a chrysalis around itself, everything that once was disintegrates and turns to goo. The only things left are the imaginal cells that come together to form the new template – the emerging butterfly. This image gives us a model for the evolutionary process we are currently in the midst of. 

Although it is early days for this new reality, I found myself looking to the ongoing Emergents Series at the Music Gallery for some hints as to what these emerging changes might forecast for the future of music-making. Flutist Sara Constant (who also does editorial work for the WholeNote website, but has no role in assigning or editing print magazine content such as this) has been the curator of this series since 2018, taking over from Chelsea Shanoff. Even though the April 25 Emergents Series concert, featuring the two string ensembles Vaso and unQuartet has been cancelled, this felt like a good time to find out more about her curatorial vision for the series.

Experiencing music and sound in different places and environments is increasingly becoming a regular part of the summer experience. Starting things off this year in early June will be a new collaboration between Continuum, Jumblies Theatre and Evergreen Brick Works in their event Four Lands, which combines both a concert and an interactive installation on June 3. The concert will feature three new works by composers Jason Doell, Erik Griswold and Juliet Palmer. Palmer is also involved in a few other intriguing projects and collaborations this summer, so I contacted her to find out more about what was new and upcoming. Her piece for the Four Lands project is titled Quarry, an homage to the large quarry hole on site at the Evergreen Brick Works where the performances will occur. At one time in Toronto’s history, stones from this quarry were excavated for both city homes as well as iconic buildings such as Queen’s Park and Massey Hall. Palmer’s piece is created from a series of texts written by participants from Jumblies community projects across the country, as well as Toronto-based participants, with the theme of excavating memory to envision possible worlds as well as describe the current worlds they live in.

Sweat: Envisioning change in one’s life and living circumstances is a theme that carries through into another of Palmer’s works that will be widely performed this summer – her opera, Sweat, with libretto by Anna Chatterton. Originally workshopped in 2013 by Soundstreams and performed in New York in the fall of 2016, the piece has undergone several rewrites, including changes of perspective in the storyline and the addition of more characters. This summer, it will be the intrepid Bicycle Opera Project that takes the piece to the next level, performing the work in eight communities throughout the province, starting in Hamilton on July 15 and 16 and concluding in Toronto from August 3 to 6. The company distinguishes itself by cycling from one performance to the next and is committed to bringing Canadian-written opera into smaller communities in intimate spaces.

Sweat takes on a critical global issue, weaving stories from around the world of women’s experiences working in the garment industry. Palmer was inspired by the questions “who makes my clothes, and what are the dreams and ambitions of those whose hands created the clothes I’m wearing?” It’s a diverse cast, representing the different communities impacted by the garment industry, and is written for nine performers – a chorus of five plus four soloists, with libretto in English, Cantonese, Ukrainian and Hungarian. During the performance in New York, Palmer realized that the “main character” of the piece is really the workers who are portrayed by the chorus – an approach outside the usual expectations for opera, where the focus is typically on soloists. Palmer elaborates: “The chorus is where you experience the sense of collective action and cooperation and the strength that comes from building on each other’s sound. Musically, there are a lot of patterns, some machine-like, reflecting the idea that you’re part of a big process which can be depressing, and then on the other hand, when you’re working for change, your small action builds on the small actions of others, which make a compelling voice that is impossible to ignore.”

Unsilent: The third summer project for Palmer is her involvement in the Unsilent Project, a new work being created through a collaboration with the National Youth Orchestra, Signal Theatre and its artistic director Michael Greyeyes (Plains Cree) and the family of the late Piikani Blackfoot spoken-word artist Zaccheus Jackson. Palmer is writing a piece using one of Jackson’s poems to be performed by two spoken-word Indigenous artists from Saskatchewan, while the other composer, Ian Cusson (Métis), is also creating a piece from one of Jackson’s poems. The project is inspired by the vision that there can be no reconciliation until we all work together, one of the important principles that came from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission process. Orchestral performances will be interpolated among the spoken word compositions, and together with projected images, the end result will be a performance piece celebrating the life and creative power of Zaccheus Jackson and the themes so important to him – healing, empowerment and hope. Palmer is eagerly anticipating the outcome of combining orchestral traditions with Indigenous spoken-word performances. The piece is part of the NYO’s summer tour, with the Toronto performance happening on July 25 at Koerner Hall.

Barbara Croall’s Wiikondiwin: Another opportunity to hear the worlds of Indigenous performance traditions and European musical forms coming together will be in a new opera written by composer Barbara Croall of Odawa First Nation. The work is entitled Wiikondiwin, which means feast or feasting. The idea originated with Valerie Kuinka, one of the directors of the Highlands Opera Studio. In our conversation, she told me that after listening to a lecture by Peter Schleifenbaum, owner of the Haliburton Forest reserve, on the impacts of climate change on the forest, Kuinka imagined an opera that would portray the forest environment of 150 years ago, of current times, and of 150 years into the future. She approached Croall with the idea, as well as production collaborators L’Atelier Lyrique de l’Opéra de Montréal. The first workshop performance will take place this summer on August 19 in the Haliburton Highlands area, with a full premiere to take place in Montreal on December 5.

Croall proceeded first by writing a story from these initial ideas from Kuinka, out of which came the libretto and music. It is set for a core of six performers – three opera singers (drawn from participants in the Highlands Opera Studio Program) and three Indigenous performers who will perform vocally and play drum. One of these performers will be Croall herself, who will also play the pipigwan, an Anishinaabe cedar flute. The libretto for the opera uses Odawa, Métis French and English. The other main performing component will be community choirs: for the performance in August, choirs from the Haliburton Highlands area will participate, with choirs from the Montreal area joining in for the December performance. The story of the opera revolves around the response of forest animals to the earth’s suffering due to the abuses caused by humans. They hold a feast, a wiikondiwin, and decide that their solution will be to infiltrate the human world to effect change. Short excerpts from the opera will be presented as a sneak preview on July 29 at the Elora Festival at the “With Glowing Hearts” concert and at a special private event on June 28 hosted by the Lieutenant Governor.

Stratford Summer Music: Croall will also be appearing at Stratford Summer Music, performing a work titled Morning during the “Music for an Avon Morning – A First Nations Experience” event happening from August 4 to 6. During a lecture she will give on August 4, she will also perform and discuss how the history of the pipigwan guides her creative work. Another intriguing performance at Stratford Summer Music will be the work 100 Very Good Reasons Why_for 100 Spatialised Electric Guitars on July 23, an experience created by composer/guitarist Tim Brady. For this event, 100 local electric guitarists, both amateur and professional, will be joining Brady in an installation-like concert, where the audience is invited to walk amongst the performers on the floor of the Allman Arena.

Other Summer Festival Highlights

Luminato: Continuing with the theme of new music created by Indigenous performers, there are two works at the Luminato Festival that deserve mention. On June 16, Jeremy Dutcher, a Toronto-based composer and vocal artist with Wolastoq First Nation roots will be performing his unique compositions created from melodies he transcribed from the oldest known field recordings of the Indigenous peoples along the St. John (Wolastoq) River basin. Then on June 22-24, Signal Theatre will present a dance-opera entitled Bearing, with Michael Greyeyes (Plains Cree) working as co-director alongside Yvette Nolan (Algonquin) and librettist Spy Dénommé-Welch (Anishnaabe). The music will include works by Claude Vivier, as well as a commissioned work from Dénommé-Welch and Catherine Magowan. The National Youth Orchestra will appear as performers, along with mezzo-soprano Marion Newman (Kwagiulth and Stó:lo).

Ottawa Chamberfest: At the Ottawa Chamberfest, Sweat will be performed twice, on July 23 (Almonte) and 24 (Ottawa). On July 25, the Architek Percussion ensemble will explore the sounds of minimalist electroacoustic music using a range of percussion instruments. On July 31, the festival’s annual New Music Now series returns with three concerts, including works by composers Current, Schafer, Sokolović, Llugdar, Schmidt, Palej, Daniel and others. Performers include the Canadian Art Song Project, Penderecki String Quartet, Land’s End Ensemble and VC2. The Cris Derksen Trio performance on August 1 will include master hoop dancer Nimkii Osawamick and percussionist Jesse Baird. The Canadian premiere of Stewart Goodyear’s Piano Quartet will be performed on August 2 by Ensemble Made in Canada.

Harbourfront and Westben: Summer Music in the Garden at Harbourfront features two concerts of new music. On June 29, cellist Elinor Frey will perform Ricercar by Linda Catlin Smith and, on August 17, the Taktus marimba duo will play arrangements of music by Ann Southam and Philip Glass. On July 21 at the Westben Festival in Campbellford, the emerging pianist Rashaan Allwood’s interest in birdsong will be highlighted. This will include his own interactive performance adaptations of two of Messiaen’s piano works, with further inspiration drawn from artworks he commissioned from Avery Kua. These images will be projected along with other photos and videos during the performance. In addition, on July 21 and 22 the festival will also offer an opportunity to experience a soundwalk led by Parker Finley, an activity focused on listening to the environment.

Music From Scratch: Contact Contemporary Music, in partnership with the Canadian Music Centre, is once again offering Music From Scratch, their free creative workshop for youth from July 10 to 14. This year, guest facilitator Tina Pearson will join Jerry Pergolesi and the Contact ensemble to delve into creative listening, writing, vocal performance, movement and improvisation exercises, with a final concert on July 14. Pearson brings her work influenced by the Deep Listening tradition of Pauline Oliveros and her unique explorations in Biospheric Art Practice and Sonic Mimicry to the participants. She will also lead a Deep Listening workshop for members of the public at the CMC on July 8 and perform on July 16 with the Contact Ensemble in a collaboration entitled Without a Net. Also, come Labour Day weekend, you’ll want to check out Contact’s lineup for their annual INTERsection event.

Additional Summer Quick Picks

June 3: Spectrum Music presents Tales from Turtle Island. Spectrum composers create music to playwright Yolanda Bonnell’s pieces. Performers include members of the Métis Fiddler Quartet, DJ/electronic artist Classic Roots, who will also perform a solo work with Pow Wow dance, and violinist Alyssa Delbaere-Sawchuk performing an excerpt of her own work Memere Colibri.

June 10: Blythwood Winds presents “Voices of Canadian Women,” with works by Höstman, Beecroft, Catlin Smith, Raum, Richardson-Schulte, Simms and Sokolović.

June 17: Canadian Women Composers Project. She’s In the House! Works by Coulthard, Weaver, Sokolović, Duncan, Skarecky and others.

July 10, 17 & 31: Church of the Holy Trinity. Music Mondays. Concerts include works by Canadian composers Burge (10th), Murphy-King (17th) and Doolittle (31st).

Jun 22: “Crossroads.” Works by Ivana Popovic and Michael Gfroerer.

Jun 23 & 25: Jumblies Theatre’s Touching Ground Festival, featuring Under the Concrete composed by Martin van de Ven.

July 5: Music and Beyond Festival. The Kronos Quartet performs original and arranged works including pieces by Canadians Nicole Lizée and Tanya Tagaq (arr. Jacob Garchik).

August 4-6: Electric Eclectics: an outdoor festival with an eclectic program of avant-garde and crossover musicians, as well as art installations, DJs and films.

August 9-12: Toronto International Electroacoustic Symposium (TIES), 2017. The featured artist is Quebec sound artist Chantal Dumas, whose work encompasses production of audio fiction and docufiction, sound installation, composition and sound design.

Wendalyn Bartley is a Toronto-based composer and electro-vocal sound artist. sounddreaming@gmail.com.

Method for the Madness

Toronto weather the third week of October is still comfortably moist and mild. In the park across from my midtown street, mature deciduous trees are still tenuously holding to a blend of burgundy, flaming red, orange, yellow and green – a reminder of the kind of weather that used to signal the fall live music harvest in the times before. Sadly all live concert bets are off during this last quarter of the current year, but The Music Gallery (MG), proudly billing itself as “Toronto’s Centre for Creative Music,” is an example of an organization that continues its programming by all available means. 

Going on 44 years, presenting and promoting “leading-edge contemporary music in all genres,” the MG has its current sights set on an ambitious project involving 15 musicians, six video artists, plus audio and video mixer technicians. Receiving its webcast premiere on November 20, Exquisite Departures is curated by Tad Michalak; the work is part of the MG’s Departures Series which Michalak has been running since 2014. 

The Exquisite Departures title and structure derive from what began as a 1920s Surrealist game – and which is variously seeing new life these days as a way of bringing creative methods to distance madness. As described in “Exquisite Corpse” and Other Coping Strategies in the July/August 2020 WholeNote, the basis of the original Dadaist game was for players in turn to write something, folding the page to hide part of what they had written before passing it on to another player who would have to continue it without seeing all of it. The (sometimes) enriching fun came when the whole thing was presented, with the missing parts revealed. 

And also recently in The WholeNote, in Lessons Learned from the CEE’s COVID-Era Experiences, David Jaeger reported on a Canadian Electronic Ensemble project titled  “Pass the Track” –devised by the six-member CEE in response to not being able physically to meet to make music. Using a process similar to exquisite corpse, Pass the Track relied on a process of layering audio tracks digitally sent from one CEE member to another, each adding another audio layer. It was all mixed and edited by the CEE’s Paul Stillwell who also enhanced two of the pieces with captivating digital animation. (For more details please visit canadianelectronicensemble.com.) 

Why is it that the winter months attract new music festivals? Is it because Canadian artistic directors feel that we contemporary music lovers are a highly dedicated lot, determined to weather the cold, the snow or any storm to experience the latest premiere or discover that new composer? Or is it simply now a matter of tradition? One of our hallmarks – the Winnipeg New Music Festival – celebrates 20 years of new music making this season. Whatever the case, we must all be attending these festivals with enough verve and volume that our country’s music institutions are encouraged to keep offering us more. For, just as Winnipeg, Halifax’s Open Water Festival and the U of T New Music Festival are all wrapping up in the first days of February, the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra is gearing up for the sophomore edition of its What Next? Festival.

In 2011, What Next? expands upon its successful inaugural celebration by placing an emphasis on the multidisciplinary. From February 3 to 6, HPO-invited creators will cross-pollinate, taking to various locations throughout the city to present intriguing collaborations across different genres. Among them are numerous champions of Canadian composers’ music, such as violinist Parmela Attariwala and tablaplayer Shawn Mativetsky, who perform together as the Attar Project, and who often also incorporate South Asian influenced dance. Pianist Eve Egoyan and artist David Rokeby will present their mesmerizing Surface Tension project for disklavier and interactive video at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, where the McMaster Cybernetic Laptop Orchestra and Percussion Ensemble (led by composer DavidOgborn) will also unleash cutting edge sounds. In addition to these collaboration concerts and their related panel discussions, What Next? will also feature three chamber music concerts by HPO musicians. Friday’s “Rain Coming” will celebrate Canadian women composers Abigail Richardson and Nicole Lizée; Saturday’s “Buzz and Hum” will feature chamber music for brass by Jacques Hétu, Jeffrey Ryan, Scott Good and Michael Horwood; and Sunday’s “Kiss On Wood” showcases string music from Kotoka Suzuki, Toru Takemitsu and others inspired by nature, pop and cartoons. For complete details on the 2011 What Next? Festival visit www.whatnextfestival.com.

If you can’t make it to Hamilton for What Next? then there’s a nice duo of concerts in Kitchener-Waterloo that you may want to catch. On February 9, mezzo-soprano Ramona Carmelly will resume the role of famous Canadian painter Emily Carr for a reduced remount of Jana Skarecky’s Emily, the Way You Are at Conrad Grebel University. This one-woman opera, based on a libretto by poet Di Brandt, was premiered by Carmelly and the Talisker Players at the McMichael Gallery in 2008, as part of the New Music in New Places series. An excerpt of this performance, along with programme notes, can be found in Skarecky’s profile as part of the Canadian Music Centre’s Influence of Many Musics online project at http://musiccentre.ca/influences/. Then, on February 12 at Centre in the Square, the Grand Philharmonic Choir, the KW Symphony and violist Rivka Golani, all under the baton of conductor Mark Vuorinen, will premiere Kingston-based John Burge’s latest large-scale work. Entitled Declaration, the score takes its inspiration from the text of the United National Declaration of Human Rights, which was drafted by a Canadian – John Humphreys – during his tenure as the UN’s first Director of the Human Rights Division, and was globally adopted over 60 years ago.

If Hamilton and KW are too far away for you, especially in this winter weather, then there’s a trio of Toronto concerts to consider. First is Trio Voce’s February 17 appearance in the Music Toronto series. Alongside works by Shostakovich and Beethoven, this accomplished, all-female and Canadian piano trio will give the Toronto premiere of American composer Jonathan Berger’s Memory Slips. A Professor of Music at Stanford University, Berger is also an active researcher in a wide range of fields relating to music, science and technology. He’ll be present for this concert at the Jane Mallett Theatre to explain, amongst the music making, his current research and personal experiences with music, memory and aging. To learn more and purchase tickets, visit the St. Lawrence Centre box office at www.stlc.com.

On February 24 Soundstreams invites Les Percussions de Strasbourg to Koerner Hall as part of the ensemble’s 50th anniversary tour. Co-founded in 1962, this sextet is the first known Western percussion group. Their exceptional longevity, artistry and commitment to new music have inspired the creation of hundreds of works. Their anniversary program cradles a world premiere from Canadian composer Andrew Staniland, who has a strong command of percussion writing, between contemporary classics by Xenakis (his iconic Persephassa) and John Cage (Credo in US.) For more details and to purchase tickets visit www.soundstreams.ca.

The Array Ensemble will take to the Music Gallery on February 27 to perform a collection of Canadian works drawn from their extensive score archive. This program of pieces from Martin Arnold, Scott Godin, Michael Oesterle and Rodney Sharman will be complemented by a newer work for the ensemble from past Array Artistic Director Linda Catlin Smith, which was premiered last season as part of the Contemporary Classics concert. Array has been very diligent in cataloguing their extensive score library, which includes over 250 commissioned works. Thankfully, they’ve made this catalogue publicly available online at www.arraymusic.com. It’s a useful tool for new music geeks like me. More information about the upcoming concert and how to buy tickets is also available at the Array website.

As I mentioned, February is bookended by yet another new music festival. This time it’s the TSO’s seventh New Creations, which will focus on cross-border exchanges, with music by guest American composers John Adams and Jennifer Higdon. Canada is represented here not only by TSO Composer Advisor Gary Kulesha, who will have his Torque performed on March 5, but also by Winnipeg-based Vincent Ho, in the form of his percussion concerto, The Shaman, which was premiered by remarkable Dame Evelyn Glennie during this year’s Winnipeg New Music Festival and will be repeated here on March 2. The work’s title is inspired by Ho’s impression of Glennie as a musical shaman, bridging human and spiritual worlds with her spellbinding performances. Adams is well represented with his now classic Short Ride in a Fast Machine and other works, and also with a TSO co-commission, City Noir. However, I’m particularly looking forward to the festival finale concert on March 10 with guest artists eighth blackbird. This dynamic ensemble will join the orchestra in a freshly commissioned chamber concerto from Higdon, which will sit alongside the world premiere of our own R. Murray Schafer’s latest symphonic work, simply titled Symphony No. 1. For more info about the 2011 New Creations Festival and to buy tickets visit www.tso.ca.

From the multidisciplinary to the simply symphonic, new music never ceases to seduce us. So be sure to get in with the new via our concert listings here and online at www.thewholenote.com/listings.

Jason van Eyk is the Ontario Regional Director of the Canadian Music Centre. He can be contacted at newmusic@thewholenote.com.

“A wild idea coming to fruition.” That is how composer Alexina Louie summed up the nature of Esprit Orchestra’s concert on November 27, featuring three exceptional concertmasters all based in Toronto and all sharing the stage, performing four violin concertos as part of Esprit Orchestra’s 40th season (an amazing feat in its own right).

The idea of programming an entire concert of violin concertos was an idea cooked up by Esprit’s conductor and music director Alex Pauk. Louie’s response when Pauk proposed the idea was to push back: “How can you do that? How often have you heard three violinists playing three violin concertos on one concert? In all of my concertgoing days, I’ve never seen a concert like that.” But Pauk persisted. 

The concert will feature Aaron Schwebel from the National Ballet of Canada Orchestra performing José Evangelista’s concerto Violinissimo, written in 1992, which Esprit has performed before; Marie Bérard from the Canadian Opera Company Orchestra performing John Rea’s Figures hâtives written in 2006, a work she has previously performed; and Stephen Sitarski, Esprit Orchestra’s concertmaster, performing a newly commissioned work, Six Enigmas, by Andrew Staniland. The concert will conclude with Louie’s Triple Concerto for Three Violins and Orchestra that was commissioned by three different orchestras in 2017 to celebrate Canada’s sesquicentennial year: The Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the National Arts Centre Orchestra and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, performed, in that case, by each of their respective concert masters. 

October continues to be a crossover month in the new-music calendar, with four festivals overlapping with several season openers.

We start north of Toronto at the closing weekend of Barrie’s Colours of Music Festival, where Toronto composer Rob Teehan is in residence. These two days include no less than three world premieres from the prolific early-career composer. On October 2 in the afternoon the extremely talented Duo Concertante – violinist Nancy Dahn and pianist Timothy Steeves – perform a new work by Teehan alongside pieces by Prokofiev, Schubert and Chan Ka Nin. If you can’t catch them here, you can also hear Duo Concertante at Walter Hall in Toronto on October 7, where they will premiere a new work by Chan, which incidentally also appears on their recently released Wild Bird CD on the Centrediscs label (reviewed in this month’s WholeNote). The following afternoon, the combined forces of the Primus Men’s Choir and Brassroots ensemble deliver an all-Canadian programme, featuring Teehan’s latest creation in combination with work by Western composers Stephen Hatfield and Allan Gilliland. The festival wraps up Sunday evening with a gala concert featuring Sinfonia Toronto and a stellar roster of soloists ranging from harpist Judy Loman to flautist Marc Grauwels and – you guessed it – an orchestral world premiere from Teehan.

Those who can make it to the festival a little earlier should catch violist Rivka Golani’s concert with the fantastic young TorQ percussion ensemble on October 1. Golani single-handedly established the viola and percussion combo as a made-in-Canada genre through her many commissions, and this programme offers some of the best in the bunch. You can find full festival details online at www.coloursofmusic.ca or by calling 705-725-1070.

Scotiabank Nuit Blanche will just be getting underway as Colours of Music closes up. This overwhelmingly successful, all-night contemporary art extravaganza gains more sonic content every year. For its fifth edition, which starts in Toronto at sundown on October 2, there are no less than five new-music projects worth mentioning. The Canadian Music Centre explores the interface between art and music in its Intimate Music project. Berlin-based Chiyoko Szlavnics pursues intimacies through her minimalist composition drawings, while Toronto’s John Oswald creates musical experiences for cozy spaces in Chalmers House.

Over at the ROM, you can find Laurel MacDonald’s sonic video installation XXIX, which depicts 29 singers performing in 29 languages, their voices emanating from 29 speakers. A few doors down, the Royal Conservatory will pulse with live music and projections all night long, including a series of videomusic performances. Travel over to the Miles Nadal Jewish Community Centre to catch the junctQín keyboard collective tackling Douglas C. Wadle’s Invention in Three Parts performance installation. Simultaneously, a sound artist will create a live mix from the sounds of a performing solo cellist.

Push further west to catch Micheline Roi’s Obsolescence at 601 Christie. This sound installation inverts the roles of current and outmoded technologies to question the ever-evolving means by which music reaches us. Loudspeakers become antique ornaments while an antique piano evolves into a transducer for other sounds. Get full details for these and other works at www.scotiabanknuitblanche.ca.

New Adventures in Sound Art’s annual SOUNDplay festival overlaps its opening with Nuit Blanche. Roi’s Obsolescence is just part of their extended line-up of installations and concerts that cross paths between sound art and new media, all leading to new avenues for exploration. As artistic director Darren Copeland explains “Sound artists are continually challenged to reevaluate their artistic practice in the light of changing technologies. SOUNDplay is a starting point for exploring new possibilities of sound in relation to other artistic media and sensory experiences.” To date, confirmed artists include Mike Hansen, the Off-Centre DJ School with Erik Laar, Eric Powell, Helen Verbanz, Deb Sinha, Krista Martynes, Julien-Robert Legault Salvail and the Avatar Orchestra Metaverse with Tina Pearson. More programming details are to be announced, so stay in touch with www.naisa.ca to learn more.

Those who didn’t catch Rick Sacks’ spectacular conveyer belt percussion performance at last year’s Nuit Blanche can get an earful of his unique music creations on October 13 when New Music Concerts gives Rick the stage at Gallery 345 for “The Musical Theatre of Rick Sacks.” This fundraising concert features no less than three Toronto premieres of Sacks’ percussion performance pieces, including Light at the End of the Tunnel, Mbira Sketch for MalletKat and MalletKat Sketch II on a Bohlen Pierce Scale, the last performed with guest Peter Hannan. Details are available through www.newmusicconcerts.com and tickets can be purchased at 416-961-9594.

But the really big talk of October is the Music Gallery’s fifth X-Avant festival, which attempts to answer the question “What is real?” Guest curator Gregory Oh has been brought in to offer an answer through his wide-ranging programming that pulls at the threads of musical authenticity – letting them unravel enough to see what lies behind our presumptions of what makes music “real.”

X-Avant was originally conceived as the Music Gallery’s season-opening celebration, cutting across programming lines to showcase the depth and breadth of its myriad annual offerings. Oh has taken that intent to heart, bringing together a cross-section of artists, but in much more wildly unusual combinations. Take for example the festival-opening concert on October 16, which pairs Detroit techno pioneer Jeff Mills, whose electronic experiments meld with live acoustic performance and IRCAM inspired sound collage, with Montreal percussion band Big Zang, whose repertoire is inspired by the sound of DJ culture that Mills helped invent. It’s this type of cross-pollination that pervades X-Avant from beginning to end.

On October 22, X-Avant presents a madrigal ensemble, the RCM New Music Ensemble, and blues band Deep Dark United who will all join forces to re-interpret Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. The closing “Dance Dance Revolution” collides live choreographic projects inspired by John Oswald’s Plunderphonics, George Aperghis’s dramatic music, and a virtual ballet created for a popular multi-player gaming environment. No convention is safe from Oh’s wild imagination, as you’ll see at www.musicgallery.org.

This is by no means all there is to hear. For example, Esprit Orchestra opens its season on October 17 at Koerner Hall with a long-awaited local premiere of Thomas Ades’ Asyla, among a stack of other great works. So be sure to get in with the new via The WholeNote concert listings here and online at www.thewholenote.com.

Finally, I must end with a correction and a clarification, both for my September column. First, the correction: one of the works appearing on Esprit Orchestra’s May 15 concert is indeed by music director Alex Pauk (not “Paul,” as printed.) The clarification is to say that, despite its longevity, Les Percussion des Strasbourg is a slightly rejuvenated ensemble. In the mid-to-late 70s, the founding members “sold” the name to some of their students. To be accurate, it is these students and their successors who are celebrating the ensemble’s 50th anniversary this year. Many thanks to percussionist Robin Engelman for supplying that detail.

Jason van Eyk is the Ontario Regional Director of the Canadian Music Centre. He can be contacted at: newmusic@thewholenote.com.

As we endure the coldest stretch of the year, anticipating the first signs of thaw around six weeks from the release of this issue, it seems that new music activity in the city is also undergoing a bit of a hibernation, with many of the typical presenters holding off until April to resurge into action. However, as I discovered while perusing the listings, there are some signs of vibrant and percolating life out there. One concert in particular caught my eye – a performance of Morton Feldman’s 80-minute work for piano and cello entitled Patterns in a Chromatic Field, performed and produced by members of Freesound on February 29 and March 1.

Going through the listings, I noticed that this month Continuum Contemporary Music offers an interdisciplinary work, Nuyamł-ił Kulhulmx/Singing the Earth, and Esprit Orchestra features an entire concert of hybrid music. Noticing how these two events reflected the theme of blurred boundaries between musical genres and artforms I’ve been exploring in this column, I then noted no fewer than eight similar instances of fusion in the new music on offer this month.

1. Esprit: Their “O Gamelan” concert on November 17 marks another collaboration between this country’s only orchestra dedicated to new music and the Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan, a Toronto-based ensemble who perform on a series of bronze and wooden instruments from Indonesia, otherwise known as a gamelan. And they too are dedicated to the commissioning of new works from composers alongside performing both traditional and contemporary Indonesian repertoire.

Looking back historically at the rise of the gamelan’s influence within western-based concert music, one can easily see what an enormous effect this music has had. It was Montreal-born composer Colin McPhee’s orchestral work Tabuh-Tabuhan from 1936 that really got the ball rolling. It combined both Balinese and traditional Western elements, but at its core is a small gamelan-like ensemble comprised of western-based percussion instruments. The shimmering timbres and interlocking rhythmic patterns of the gamelan sound also captured the imaginations of pioneers John Cage (prepared piano) and Steve Reich (minimalism). The first western composer to build his own gamelan-inspired instruments and compose for them was Lou Harrison. And that brings us full circle to the Evergreen Club. It was when ECCG founder Jon Siddall met Harrison while a student at Mills College that a vision was spawned to form a gamelan in Canada. Through Harrison’s Indonesian connections, the Evergreen Club eventually was able to acquire their instruments in the early 80s.

By bringing both an orchestra and a gamelan together, the Esprit concert is a perfect reflection of this history and appropriately, is presenting a work that Harrison wrote in tribute to Carlos Chávez, the man who conducted the premiere of McPhee’s groundbreaking work. Alongside this historical piece will be a premiere of O Gamelan, a newly commissioned work by José Evangelista, who followed in McPhee’s footsteps by studying in Bali, and is also responsible for bringing a gamelan to U de Montréal’s Faculty of Music. We will also hear two works originally written by composers Chan Ka Nin and André Ristic for a 2005 concert inspired by the birdsong themes of Olivier Messiaen, as well as a 1983 work by Esprit conductor Alex Pauk.

It should come as no surprise to learn that Pauk himself also studied gamelan music and his work Echo Spirit Isle is a reworking for orchestra of a piece he originally wrote for Gamelan Pacificia based in Seattle. The program rounds out with an orchestral arrangement of Claude Vivier’s Pulau Dewata, composed in 1977 as a tribute to the Balinese people.

2. Continuum Contemporary Music: On December 4 and 5, CCM will present a new work by composer Anna Höstman, Nuyamł-ił Kulhulmx/Singing the Earth, an interdisciplinary piece that arose from the composer’s love of history and storytelling. Rooted in her deep personal connection with the land and communities of Bella Coola, a gem of natural beauty along the central coast of British Columbia, her creative process began with extensive research to discover the deeper layers of the area. And perhaps even more importantly, what guided her in this labyrinthian journey to uncover the stories of people from different cultural origins living side by side was her connection to the land itself. The forest is “never far away in my imagination,” she told me. In fact it is this relationship with the forest’s expansiveness and quiet that helps her find her way with music making. It is like the slipping on of a different jacket, a sensation she keeps close to herself while composing. And just as the nonhuman world of nature permeates Höstman’s creative process, it is also a “North Star,” a navigational guide, for all the peoples of the area — a mixture of the indigenous Nuxalk Nation and the descendents of Norwegian settlers.

Höstman’s piece is structured as a series of 11 modules, each one an artistic response to the beauty and isolation of the area, the changes and losses of its people. During the performance, the audience will be immersed within an installation environment, thus creating a spatial counterpoint between people, objects, video projections and displayed texts. These texts originate from a variety of sources and are in four different languages — Nuxalk, English, Norwegian and Japanese. One source is fragments from anthropological field notes published in the 1940s, while another is a list of words in both English and Nuxalk denoting the area’s flora and fauna. The work is scored for Continuum’s ensemble along with mezzo-soprano, bass, saxophone and accordian. Prior to the 8pm performance will be a 7pm screening of a film.

3. NAISA: Another take on similar themes will occur during New Adventures in Sound Art’s annual SOUNDplay series which presents new fusions between the boundaries of sound art and new media. Fitting into their 2013 programming theme of Sonic Geography, this year’s installations and performances will address concepts of home, space, land, migration, love and the human condition. The main performances are on November 7, 9, 16 and 23 in Toronto and on November 8 in Hamilton. An audio installation, “Whispering Rain,” runs from November 9 to 30 in the NAISA space.

4. 416 TCIF: As always, the improvisation scene is hopping with crossover possibilities. This month is the 12th edition of the 416 Toronto Creative Improvisers Festival with “the best music you’ve never heard.” For four nights from November 6 to 9, at the TRANZAC, the programming includes hand-signal-directed orchestra, laptop mash-ups by the McMaster University-based Cybernetic Orchestra, ambient dreamscapes and free jazz virtuosity with both local and visiting guest artists.

5. and 6. Soundstreams and KWS: Extemporizing even further on the subject of fusion, the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony is programming an evening of rock-inspired music for orchestra on November 7 and 8 in Kitchener and November 9 at Koerner Hall, including Nicole Lizée’s Triple Concerto for Power Trio: Fantasia on Themes by Rush, a virtuosic blast for guitar, bass and drum. And on November 13, you’ll have an opportunity to experience “Reimagining Flamenco” with Soundstreams’ presentation of contemporary perspectives on flamenco works. Blending fire and passion, this concert will offer reinventions for guitar, piano and flamenco singer of the old master Manuel de Falla and Paco de Lucia, among others. Alongside these pieces will be the premiere of a new work by Canadian composer André Ristic, whose music also appears in Esprit Orchestra’s gamelan concert.

7. and 8. Piano virtuosi: On November 24, “Music She Wrote: A Tribute to Canadian Woman Composers” will be another opportunity to hear new orchestral music. This time it’s the Koffler Chamber Orchestra with conductor Jacques Israelievitch featuring pianist Christina Petrowska Quilico, one of Canada’s leading interpreters of contemporary music. She will perform two piano concertos written by two Canadian women composers — Heather Schmidt and Violet Archer. The orchestra, comprised of professional, community and music students, will also perform orchestral works by Ann Southam and Larysa Kuzmenko. Ms. Petrowska Quilico has had a connection with all four composers, having previously given the premiere performances and released CD recordings of the Schmidt and Archer works, as well as a CD release of Southam’s music. Both recordings resulted in JUNO nominations for the three composers. On the same evening (November 24) Eve Egoyan, another virtuosic pianist and interpreter of contemporary music who also enjoyed a close artistic relationship with Ann Southam, will perform works by James Tenney, Piers Hellawell, Linda C. Smith and Michael Finnissy as part of the Kitchener-Waterloo Chamber Music Society series. This program will repeat in Toronto on November 26 presented by Music Toronto.

9. Arraymusic has a busy month with two concerts on November 9 and 10 of “Small Wonders,” their popular minatures series. Numerous composers have written these short moments in time for the ensemble over the years, and this concert will feature several ensemble pieces from the past along with eight new premieres. The Array ensemble will also perform short works by Webern, Feldman and Carter alongside two longer compositions by Jo Kondo and Canadian Ruth Guechtal. I also want to mention an important Array concert on December 6^, “The Signal Itself,” a celebration of the music of James Tenney. Tenney was a visionary and a beloved composer of this city who taught at York University for over two decades. More to come on this in the December issue, but I just wanted people to know well in advance.

10. Additional new music events:

Thin Edge New Music Collective: November 21.

Canadian Music Centre: November 9 – Rosedale Winds; November 13 – junctQin Keyboard Collective.

Canadian Opera Company: November 13 – Piano Virtuoso Series.

Royal Conservatory/Toronto Harp Society: November 10 – Works by Buhr, Schafer and others.

Toronto Mendelssohn Choir: November 20 – Britten at 100. 

Wendalyn Bartley is a Toronto based composer and electro-vocal sound artist. She can be contacted at sounddreaming@gmail.com.

Peggy Baker Dance Projects
Collaborations between choreographers and composers have played a significant part in the creation of some of the most loved pieces of contemporary music. The classic example is, of course, the partnership between composer Igor Stravinsky and Serge Diaghilev, director of the Ballets Russes that resulted in the scores for The Firebird, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring. Among the first of the contemporary dance companies to form in Toronto were Toronto Dance Theatre in 1968 and Dancemakers in 1974, and both companies quickly began to work with contemporary composers, many of them local. One of the early company members of Dancemakers was Peggy Baker, and in 1990 she went on to establish Peggy Baker Dance Projects. Over the years, she has received much praise for her collaborative partnerships with composers such as Michael J. Baker, John Kameel Farah, Ahmed Hassan and Ann Southam as well as with performers Andrew Burashko, Shauna Rolston, Henry Kucharzyk and the Array Ensemble, among many others. Over the last five years, contemporary vocalist innovator and music creator Fides Krucker has collaborated on all of Baker’s new works, bringing to their collaboration her expertise in the creation of non-verbal human sound textures and her commitment to an emotionally integrated vocal practice.

Baker’s latest work, her body as words, will be performed March 19 to 29 at the Theatre Centre. For this piece, Baker has drawn together a unique intergenerational ensemble of dancers and composer/musicians who have taken up the challenge of addressing questions of female and gender identity. I invited one of the composer/musician members of the ensemble, Anne Bourne, who herself has collaborated on past projects with Baker, to have a conversation with me about her contribution to the piece as a composer and how her distinctive performance style of combining vocal toning while playing the cello will contribute to the overall musical score.

In last month’s column, my opening story focused on the upcoming New Creations Festival presented by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, with concerts on March 4, 8 and 11. I featured a conversation with Christine Duncan speaking about a new commission entitled Qiksaaktuq for the March 4 concert, a collaboration between Duncan, Tanya Tagaq, Jean Martin and orchestrator Christopher Mayo that combines both notated score and improvisation. To continue coverage of the New Creations Festival for the March issue, I spoke with guest curator and composer/performer Owen Pallett about his vision for the festival and the highlights of the March 8 and 11 concerts.

 A year ago, a review by Michael Vincent in the March 6 edition of The Toronto Star noted that in the 2016 New Creations Festival there were no female composers featured. The author stated that this omission demonstrated “a lack of awareness towards the diversity of the community,” and he ended his review with a hope that the TSO would listen to this critique. By selecting Owen Pallett as the guest curator for this year’s festival, I think it’s fair to say that they are now listening. When I spoke with Pallett, I began by asking him what his curatorial vision was. “My priority is on critical work,” he began. “There has been a big change in the [cultural] conversation over the last 15 years, and I want to reflect that in the concerts.” For Pallett, this means having representation from both female and male composers, as well as the inclusion of Indigenous and culturally diverse performers. He also wanted to reflect the full spectrum of new music practices that exist outside the traditional concert hall. This goal is evident in both the selection of composers he wanted to include, as well as the choice of performers for the lobby concerts that happen both pre- and post-concert. “There’s an enormous audience in Toronto for new music, but they don’t know it exists. People are interested in listening to challenging music, and I’m also working to address that in this series.” In the end, Pallett is not interested in theoretical ideas of what new music is, but rather in selecting works that are, in his words, BOLD.

As examples, he cites the music of Cassandra Miller that displays “enormous and monolithic gestures, like giant glaciers, which are far removed from other schools of new music composition.” Speaking of glacial landscapes, another composer Pallett selected is Daniel Bjarnason from Iceland who takes Ligeti’s ideas of cloud structures and turns them into a new language. Both Bjarnason and Miller’s works (Round World and Emergence, respectively) will be premiered on March 11. Pallett’s choice to include Tanya Tagaq’s improvised performance will give audiences a chance to experience “the most emotional response you’ll hear from an improvised performer.” Another of his composer selections is American Nico Muhly (Mixed Messages, March 8 concert), whose style is a “concentrated John Adams-inspired tonalism drawing from many different sources and time periods.” Muhly, currently one of the most visible composers in the USA, has worked and recorded with a range of classical and pop/rock musicians and refuses to be pinned down to one specific genre.

Pallett’s own commissioned work, Songs From An Island, will be premiered on March 8. What we will hear that night is a 15-minute excerpt from a 75-minute work he is currently working on. Originally, Pallett began writing a more conventional piece for the festival, but after recently hearing American composer Andrew Norman’s work Play, he decided to shelve it and go full out to create a more edgy piece that “investigates the cross section of folk songwriting and the aspects of modern orchestration that I’m most interested in.” The piece is a series of songs about a man who washes up on an island and gets involved in an assortment of hedonistic activities. One might think that would result in a work with a bawdy flavour, but not so. Rather, Pallett says, the piece has a more spiritual tone and ends with the character circling the planet hearing the prayers of the people below. The music is as much inspired by trends in rock music since Talk Talk, an English new wave band active from 1981 to 1992, as it is by concert music influences such as Ligeti-inspired tone clusters and Grisé’s spectralism. However, Pallett made it clear that his is not a hybrid music as he “draws equally from a number of different languages to arrive at this one unified aesthetic, one unified conclusion. I’m still trying to find the sweet spot,” he said, which is not a space “between the two worlds, but is its own place unrelated to either genre. I am completely allergic to any conversations that distinguish between pop vs. serious music. I find it classist and I reject it.”

The Festival will also feature a lineup of outstanding performers, including violinst James Ehnes performing a new violin concerto by Aaron J. Kernis (March 8) and the Kronos Quartet performing Black MIDI, a new work by Nicole Lizée (March 11). And finally, each symphony concert will begin with the performance of a two-minute Sesquie, commissioned as part of the TSO’s year-long Canada Mosiac project. These include Andrew Staniland’s Reflections on O Canada after Truth and Reconciliation (March 4) Harry Stafylakis’ Shadows Radiant (March 8) and Zeiss After Dark by Nicole Lizée (March 11). Highlights of the lobby concerts include Indigenous performers The Lightning Drum Singers led by Derrick Bressette (March 4), and the Cris Derkson Trio with Derkson on cello, Anishinaabe Hoop Dancer Nimkii Osawamick and drummer Jesse Baird (March 11). The spirit of improvisation will make an appearance as well with the performance on March 8 by the Element Choir led by Christine Duncan.

Nicole Lizée: March 11 will be a busy night for composer Nicole Lizée with her two works at the New Creations Festival along with a piece she composed for a concert featuring the Plumes ensemble at the Music Gallery. Montreal-based Plumes is a six-member group combining pop and classical influences who have invited 13 composers to create pieces inspired by Vision, Canadian producer/singer Grimes’ album. And in the spirit of Owen Pallett’s vision for New Creations, this concert includes a majority of women composers as well as a creative mandate to push genre boundaries. Alongside Lizée, other composers include Emilie LeBel, Tawnie Olson, Monica Pearce and Stephanie Moore. (And later in the month at the Gallery, the all-female Madawaska Quartet along with harpist Sanya Eng and guitarist Rob MacDonald create an immersive performance environment in which to perform works by Omar Daniel, Andrew Staniland, Scott Good and Yoko Ono. This program will also be performed on March 29 in Kitchener as part of the Kitchener-Waterloo Chamber Music Society series.)

Full Spectrum: March continues with a full spectrum of new music events. On March 10 and 11, The Toronto Masque Theatre presents The Man Who Married Himself composed by Juliet Palmer with libretto by Anna Chatterton and choreography by Hari Krishnan. The story is an intriguing one, given the gender issues already discussed. It’s an allegory of the inner battle between male and female parts, played out by the main character who rejects the idea of marrying a woman and instead creates a lover for himself from his own left side. The outcome of that experiment unfolds throughout the piece.

Continuum Contemporary Music’s lineup for their March 25 “Pivot” concert of works by emerging composers is another example of a more diverse representation of composers. The concert will present the creative outcomes of a six-month mentorship with works by four female composers (Rebecca Bruton, Maxime Corbeil-Perron, Evelin Ramon, Bekah Sims) and Philippine-born Juro Kim Feliz. Montrealer Beavan Flanagan rounds out a program of pieces exploring acoustic, electroacoustic and acousmatic traditions.

And finally, the Array Ensemble will perform “The Rainbow of Forgetting” in both Toronto (March 9) and Kingston (March 10) with compositions by Mozetich, Catlin Smith, Komorous, Sherlock, Bouchard and Arnold.

With so much going on also in the early part of March, I have not been able to cover it all here. I recommend you consult my February column for some of the early March events mentioned there.

Finally here are some additional Quick Picks for this month:

Mar 2: Canadian Music Centre. “Of Bow and Breath.” Works by Vivier, Baker, Tenney, Stevenson and Foley.

Mar 5: Oriana Women’s Choir. “Journey Around the Sun.” Includes a work by Estonian composer Veljo Tormis.

Mar 8: U of T Faculty of Music presents “A 90th Celebration of John Beckwith” featuring Beckwith’s works A Game of Bowls, Follow Me and a selection of songs.

Mar 9: Canadian Opera Company. Chamber Music Series: Contemporary Originals in collaboration with the TSO’s New Creations Festival.

Mar 12: Ritual 7 presents “The Announcement Made to Mary,” a miracle play with score by Anne Bourne.

Mar 18: Caution Tape Sound Collective. Array Space.

Mar 18: Scaramella presents. “Tastes: Old and New,” contemporary works by Peter Hannan, Grégoire Jeay and Terri Hron.

Mar 18: TO.U Collective/Music at St. Andrews.presents Radulescu’s Sonatas No.3 and No.6 performed by pianist Stephen Clarke.

Mar 19: Two electroacoustic music concerts presented by U of T Faculty of Music: works by Ciamaga, Staniland, Viñao and Mario Davidovsky, L’adesso infinito for organ, projections and 4-channel sound by Dennis and Barbara Patrick, Stockhausen’s Kontakte, John Chowning’s Turenas and Tomita’s arrangement of Debussy’s Afternoon of a Faun.

Mar 22 and 23: Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Sesquie A Hero’s Welcome by Kati Agócs and North American premiere of a co-commissioned work Accused: Three Interrogations for Soprano and Orchestra byMagnus Lindberg.

Mar 25: Guitar Society of Toronto presents Duo Scarlatti. Their exact program is unknown at press time but will be selected from music from the high Baroque and 20th century works by Bogdanovic, Pisati, Iannarelli, Cascioli and Del Priora, among others.

Mar 26: U of T Faculty of Music presents “There Will Be Stars: Music of Stephen Chatman,” which includes works by Chatman, Ramsay, Parker, Hagen, and Brandon.

Mar 26: New Music Concerts presents György Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments as part of a benefit performance event. Also presented on March 27 by the Kitchener-Waterloo Chamber Music Society.

Apr 7: Music Gallery. “Emergents III: Castle If + Laura Swankey.” Joe Strutt, curator.

Wendalyn Bartley is a Toronto-based composer and electro-vocal sound artist. sounddreaming@gmail.com

Alice Ping Yee Ho’s Dark Tales: On November 9, right after you thought all the pumpkins, goblins and spider webs had been put away for another season, Toronto composer Alice Ping Yee Ho and New Music Concerts will present an innovative evening of ghost stories, with a new work entitled Dark Tales: An Immersive Journey into Music, Light and Legend. During a recent conversation, Ho described this new work, commissioned by Duo Concertante, as a music drama in five movements based on five stories from Tom Dawe’s book An Old Man’s Winter Night.

When September rolls around, there can be a feeling of anticipation in the air. It’s often a time of new opportunities, change and a chance to expand your horizons. And in this column, which is dedicated to the “new” in musical practice, there’s no better place to begin than with the Guelph Jazz Festival, running from September 4 to 8. Over the last 20 years, the festival has blossomed into a “vital social-purpose enterprise” with an artistic mandate rooted in the vision that musical improvisation provides a model for creating social change and building successful communities. This vision is also the driving force behind the innovative research project “Improvisation, Community and Social Practice” headed by Ajay Heble, artistic director of the festival.

Recently, this project just got a huge boost. It was the recipient of a substantial grant to launch the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation at the University of Guelph. And to celebrate, the Guelph Jazz Festival will present an opening concert on September 3, featuring a special one-time improvising percussion quartet of four stellar musicians combining jazz, new music, free improv and world music traditions. This “World Percussion Summit” is yet another demonstration of what makes the festival so special and magical — expanding the meaning of jazz to include creative improvisation from across the musical spectrum. In this column I will be highlighting those concerts which fuse creative improvisation and composition.

A perfect example is a solo performance on September 5 by Matt Brubeck, a composer and performer trained in classical music and raised on jazz, who currently brings his focus on the improvising cello into dialogue with a variety of other musical traditions. Matt will also join Australian composer and saxophonist Sandy Evans in her “Indian Project” concert on September 4 contributing to the musical conversation between jazz and Indian music. On September 6, two of the performers from the opening night event — virtuoso percussionists Hamid Drake (USA) and Jesse Stewart (Ontario) — will reconvene to provide a free-ranging mixture from their eclectic backgrounds. Stewart is a well-loved favourite of the Guełph festival, and for this year’s 20th anniversary, he has composed a lengthy work for the Penderecki String Quartet to be performed on September 8 in duet with himself at the drum set.

Ensemble SuperMusique from Quebec will present its group composition entitled “Pour ne pas désespérer seul” (Not to Despair Alone) on September 7. This diverse group began initially in 1998 with founders Joanne Hétu, Danielle Palardy Roger and Diane Labrosse, and has evolved into an extensive community of musicians combining large group composition, improvisation and “musique actuelle” with multi-media theatre, dance, and songs. Their artistic practice of group improvisation is definitely in step with the broader social vision of the festival, as they see themselves standing in solidarity with communities arising from the anti-globalization movement and the use of social media.

Other festival events of interest to readers of this column include the Colloquium (September 4 to 6), and Nuit Blanche with its dusk-to-dawn events beginning on the evening of September 7. This year’s colloquium provides a wonderful opportunity to dive deeper into the themes of musical improvisation, pedagogy, social justice and activism, through a series of lectures, keynote addresses and workshops by festival artists. Nuit Blanche events include performances by members of SuperMusique — Derome/Hétu and Freedman/Caloïa (12am); Vancouver’s Birds of Paradox exploring elements of jazz and western music with traditional Chinese and Indian music (2am); a Pauline Oliveros tuning meditation (3am); the Ondine Chorus combining improv with scored music (3am) and Grossman/Brubeck interpreting baroque music (4:30am).

And if your free spirit is longing for more, there will be an opportunity on September 28 at Toronto’s Music Gallery to hear from some of the elder statesmen and scene builders of free improv music: USA saxophonist Larry Ochs playing with drummer Don Robinson, followed by Toronto-based poet and “soundsinger” Paul Dutton performing with percussionist Joe Sorbara, known for creating orchestral textures from found objects.

Voice and Mythology

This summer, I had the opportunity to experience what is known as the “eight-octave voice” at the Roy Hart International Artistic Centre located in southern France. This vocal legacy of connecting voice with the inner workings of the psyche stretches back to the early 20th century and the work of Alfred Wolfsohn. In the 1960s this vocal research evolved into a theatre-based artistic practice by one of Wolfsohn’s pupils, Roy Hart. As part of my column during this upcoming season, I’ll be making some links between what inspired me during my time at the Roy Hart Centre and the musical events of our local community.

Since the voice is the most obvious link, I’ll begin with the upcoming Soundstreams concert on October 1 in which they will be presenting two epic choral and orchestral works by the masterful Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. One of these compositions is titled Adam’s Lament, thus plunging us headlong into the territory of one of the most potent myths of the Western world — the story of Adam and Eve. As part of my residency at the Roy Hart Centre, I attended the Myth & Theatre festival which was like being submerged into an alchemical pot stirring the voice together with choreographic movement, image, spoken word and philosophical ideas.

Stories shape us and the institutions of our culture beyond what we might imagine. Initially we create the stories, and then the stories turn around and create us. And certainly this story of Adam and Eve has been one that has determined so much of our collective history. Pärt’s composition begins with the expression of grief at being expelled from Paradise and then expands further into a meditation on the sorrows of all humankind. His music is often referred to as music that comes out of the silence, creating possibilities to hear a different voice. Perhaps this other voice could be a re-examination of this myth itself. Must we collectively continue to hold onto the idea of separation, or can we create a voice, a story that brings us closer to the dream of human connection and peaceful co-existence?

Other works in the program include Pärt’s L’abbé Agathon, which recounts the legend of a fourth-century hermit tested by an angel in disguise, and pieces by two other composers, Riho Maimets and James Rolfe. Choir 21, a local group that specializes in performing contemporary choir music, will be performing alongside a string orchestra conducted by Pärt’s Estonian colleague Tõnu Kaljuste.

And now to opera — the perfect alchemical pot for combining mythic themes with music. Tapestry Opera will be offering up the latest round of opera briefs created at this years Composer-Librettist Lab, an annual gathering that teams up four composers with four writers to create, literally overnight, a series of short opera excerpts. Running from September 19 to 22, this event gives you the opportunity to hear what stories and sounds have risen up in the midst of this hothouse of creativity.

Twentieth-Century Pioneers

It’s hard to imagine that 100 years ago, experiencing strong rhythms and percussion music in the concert hall was scandalous. The music of Igor Stravinsky helped to change all that. Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra from St. Petersburg are returning to Roy Thomson Hall on October 6 to perform the three groundbreaking ballet scores Stravinsky composed between 1910 and 1913: The Firebird, Pétrouchka and The Rite of Spring. Fortunately, that concert will be in the afternoon, giving enough time to attend the evening concert curated by Austin Clarkson for New Music Concerts. You can read and listen to more on this meeting of Wolpe, Webern, Feldman and Cage in both the printed and online editions of The WholeNote.

Additional Concerts

TorQ Percussion Quartet: “A Shift in Time.” September 13.

Thin Edge New Music Collective: “Shaken or Stirred,” fundraising concert and silent auction. September 14.

Canadian Music Centre: Contemporary Works for Piano. September 13 and October 3.

Music Gallery and Burn Down The Capital: Julianna Barwick,
with Christine Duncan and Castle If at Double Double Land. September 26. 

Wendalyn Bartley is a Toronto-based composer and electro-vocal sound artist. Contact her at sounddreaming@gmail.com.

It has now been one year since I wrote my first In With The New column for WholeNote, and in looking back over the past 12 months, I’ve made a short list of what I’ve observed as the leading edge of the new in our local music scene: the continual blurring of lines between musical genres (or the rise of “genreless music”); improvisation anchoring itself as a respected artistic voice and creative process; the role of community building and the creation of composer collectives; the movement out of the concert hall into new listening spaces and environments.

During this reflection process, a memory image came to mind from one of the first new music concerts I ever attended. It was back in the early 70s in Walter Hall at U of T’s Faculty of Music. The concert stage was full of percussion instruments, the lights were dim and candles lined the stage front. A bearded man dressed in white (John Wyre) along with some of his students moved as if in a dance amongst the assembled gongs, bowls, drums and no doubt all sorts of instruments from around the world. The mesmerizing cornucopia of sounds they invoked opened up a new world of possibilities in my imagination. I heard sounds that previously had existed only at the edges of my awareness. I was hooked. Determined to experience more, I immediately signed myself up to attend New Music Concerts, thereby exposing myself to the wild and adventurous sound experiments taking place both here in Canada and internationally.

New Music Concerts: And now 40 years later, New Music Concerts continues to bring these cutting-edge sonic visions honed by composers and performers to its audience members. The program they are presenting on March 2 represents the creative interests of many composers active in the 1970s. It will feature the multi-talented percussionist, improviser and composer Jean-Pierre Drouet playing works by some of these international composers that NMC introduced to Toronto audiences in its early days: the likes of Kagel, Rzewski, Aperghis and Globokar.

Threads common among these composers include the intersection between music and theatre, the use of improvisation and extended techniques, and (the thread I’ll focus on in this month’s column) the practice of creating music that reflects upon socio-political issues.

On the program, two solos from Kagel’s Exotica will be performed. It’s one of his first pieces to focus on musical and political history, and tiptoes that elusive edge that exists between the West and the world beyond. Scored for an array of non-European instruments, Exotica reflects on the issue of what makes the music exotic. Is it because the sounds have been shaped by the pen of a Western composer, or rather is it because with the sounds of these instruments, it’s not possible to produce music with typical Western features? It’s a provocative topic to reflect upon all these years later, especially given the high interest amongst composers steeped in western musical traditions in using  an ever-expanding range of instruments and sound sources. Even my own initiatory experience of new music is implicated in this matter.

Continuing, Globokar’s work Toucher, based on scenes from Bertolt Brecht’s play Life of Galileo raises issues of being silenced by structures of power (the church, government, and tyrannical ideologies). Rzewski, renowned for works that exhibit a deep political conscience, is represented with To The Earth, which stands in solidarity with the growing consciousness of the environmental movement. Drawn to the combination of music and text, Aperghis’ Le corps à corps narrates the thrills of a car racing event from multiple perspectives using both sound and spoken word. It portrays the composer’s practice of transporting everyday events to a poetic, often absurd and satirical world. Rounding out the program is Il libro celibe by Giorgio Battistelli, a composer fascinated by alchemy, psychology and the ideas of Marcel Duchamp.

New Creations Festival: What is compelling about the approach of the composers presented by New Music Concerts is their dialogue with cultural and historical references. It’s fascinating to note that this practice is also evident in many of the works being programmed at this year’s New Creations Festival, the Toronto Symphony’s annual celebration of contemporary orchestral works running March 1 to 7.  Each of the three pieces by featured composer John Adams engages in a conversation with either political/social history or the history of music. Renowned for his post-minimalist style, Adams’ music is full of contrasts and tends to be more directional and climactic than what we usually associate with minimalist music.  His Doctor Atomic Symphony (March 1) is based on orchestral music from his opera Doctor Atomic. With a libretto created by Peter Sellars from a variety of sources (interviews, scientific manuals and poetry), the story centres around the final hours leading up to the first atomic bomb explosion at the Alamagordo test site in New Mexico in June, 1945. The music conveys the epic struggle and moral dilemma surrounding the impact of the force about to be unleashed into the world, which in hindsight, ushered in the atomic age.

Adams’ two other works—Slonimsky’s Earbox (March 5) and Absolute Jest (March 7)—are dialogues with some of the great names of musical history. Nicolas Slonimsky was a witty Russian author whose output included several books on music, including the Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns. Adams makes use of this compendium of modes in his Earbox piece, which arose out of his admiration for another Russian creator—Igor Stravinsky—and the use of modal scales in Stravinsky’s The Song of the Nightingale. And finally, Absolute Jest is an adaptation of the light and energetic style found in Beethoven’s late quartet scherzos composed as a concerto for string quartet and orchestra. Expect to hear a warped sense of time and harmony in this fast-paced dance.

Three other works in the festival also engage in a conversation with musical history. Canadian Vincent Ho’s City Suite (March 7) is inspired by author Eric Siblin’s book The Cello Suites which outlines the history of J.S. Bach’s works for solo cello. In Finnish composer and pianist Magnus Lindberg’s Piano Concerto No.2 (March 1), originally written for the virtuosic capabilities of festival guest performer Yefim Bronfman, we witness his tussle with the complexity of pianistic history. Former Los Angeles Philharmonic conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen took on a similar challenge during the composing of his Violin Concerto (March  5). His solution was to create a deeply personal narrative summing up everything he had learned and experienced in his life as a musician.

More-than-Human Communication: And when it comes to the exchange of ideas, what could be more cutting edge (or to be more historically accurate, steeped in ancient traditions), than inter-species communication? Back in the spring of 2013, the Music Gallery offered audiences an opportunity to listen to two recordings of humpback whale song in combination with electronics that had been released on their Music Gallery Editions label back in the 1970s. As a continuation of that initiative, the Gallery will be presenting an event on February 22 that combines both lecture and music. Bioacoustics researcher Katherine Payne will team up with recording artist Daniela Gesundheit and a group of Toronto-based singers and instrumentalists to create a unique sonic exchange with Payne’s recordings of humpback whales and African elephants.

Improvisation: As mentioned in the opening paragraph, one of the major trends I’ve noticed over the past year is the presence of improvisation as a force to contend with. Improvisation relies on cultivating a listening presence, which is at the heart of all true communication and dialogue. From February 21 to 23 at the Tranzac, the Somewhere There Creative Music Festival offers a full schedule of concerts and lectures by performers and thinkers that reflect the vitality and diversity of what’s happening on the improv scene in the Toronto area. The two festival lectures reflect on the history of experimental music in Canada and the roots of Toronto musical improvisation. Two other improvisation-focused events this month include “The Array Sessions,” a concert of Toronto-based improvisers on February 6 at the Arraymusic studio and the Music Gallery’s Jazz Avant event February 8 featuring the saxophone and electronic improvisations of L.A. based musician Anenon.

Additional Concerts:

Feb. 6: A Soldier’s Tale - a dance theatre work with music by John Gzowski, COC.

Feb. 8: New works created for the Toy Piano Composers ensemble by Doelle, Dupuis, Murphy-King, Versluis, Taylor, Heliconian Hall.

Feb. 13: ∆TENT New Music Ensemble presents works inspired by remembrances of childhood by composers Tsurumoto and Southam, CMC.

Feb. 18: “Women in the Power House” – works by leading female composers, COC.

Feb. 19: Reverb Brass presents works by Ruo, Ridenour, Golijov, Carter, Maimets, Hillborg, Agnas, Lutoslawski, Gallery 345.

Feb. 21: Thin Edge New Music Collective presents new works by Anna Pidgorna (for two violins and antique wooden door) and Anna Höstman, along with performances of compositions by Ana Sokolović and Brian Harman, Gallery 345.

Mar. 2: Orpheus Choir presents the premiere of a new composition by Charles Cozens entitled Tres Bailes Latinos, influenced by the composer’s relationship with Cuban musicians, Grace Church-on-the-Hill.

Wendalyn Bartley is a Toronto-based composer and electro-vocal sound artist. sounddreaming@gmail.com

Back in the December 2013 issue of The WholeNote, I wrote about the developing collaboration amongst new music presenters in Toronto.  This desire to build community and mutual support gets a big boost in early April when the Music Gallery, Continuum Contemporary Music and Arraymusic team up to present “Gaudeamus: Deconstructed and Reconstructed.”  To understand more about the significance of this Dutch-Canadian contemporary music summit, it’s important to look at the legacy of the Gaudeamus Music Week in Holland.  

Right after World War II in 1945, a yearly festival and competition for new music was held in a village called Bilthoven, located near Utrecht. Imagining what Holland must have been like emerging out of the war, I find it remarkable that not only was a festival created to promote Dutch composers in such a climate, but that also it was named “gaudeamus” – from the Latin phrase gaudeamus igitur, meaning “Therefore let us rejoice.” The title of a popular academic song performed at university graduation ceremonies in many European countries since the early 18th century, the phrase is in the same spirit as carpe diem (seize the day) with its exhortation to enjoy life.  So the Gaudeamus festival is a celebration, an invitation for hope, renewal and rejuvenation, an antidote to the fear and terror of the war years. The Gaudeamus Music Week eventually opened up to include international composers and has now become one of the premiere forums for presenting the latest developments in the global contemporary music scene. The prestigious Gaudeamus competition is open to composers under 30 with the prize money going towards a commission for a new work. 

And now this spirit makes its way to Toronto bringing together members from the Continuum and Arraymusic ensembles with several Dutch musicians to present two nights of concerts at the Music Gallery.  On April 3, Gaudeamus will be “Deconstructed” during two sets of improvised music featuring both Canadian and Dutch improvisers.  Part of the evening will feature three comprovised works by Holland’s Michiel van Dijk and Koen Kaptijn, along with Canada’s Allison Cameron.   And in case you aren’t familiar with the term “comprovise,” it refers to a mixture of composed and improvised material and is the name of an American music series in the Boston and New York areas that aims to avoid or shatter genre barriers and explore the boundaries between composition and improvisation. Sounds like a perfect goal for a night of deconstruction.

Then on April 4, Gaudeamus is “Reconstructed” again with composed works by composers who have either won the Gaudemus award or had pieces selected to be performed at the festival.  The lineup includes Louis Andriessen and Yannis Kyriakides from Holland and eldritch priest and Michael Oesterle from Canada. Louis Andriessen who turns 75 this coming April, is one of Holland’s most celebrated composers.   Back in the 1970s, he turned minimalism upside down with his radical musical responses to American experimentalists Reich, Riley and Glass. He challenged these composers’ trance-like states with a European sense of edginess and angularity, creating powerful and aggressive results. Toronto audiences will be able to hear his high-voltage piece Hout, a work that embodies his trademark style of combining the rigours of complex chromaticism with rhythms derived from jazz and pop.  The “reconstruction” continues with Cyprus-born composer and sound artist Yannis Kyriakides’ piece Tinkling, which is based on Thelonius Monk’s Trinkle Tinkle.  Kyriakides left his native Cyprus to live in Holland and study with Andriessen and no doubt was influenced by Andriessen’s embracing of jazz influences. Kyriakides is also drawn to interdisciplinary combinations of musical forms and digital media, as is Canadian Michael Oesterle who will present a newly commissioned work.  Rounding out the evening will be a piece by Canadian composer, sound artist and author eldritch priest whose interests lie in sonic culture and experimental aesthetics.

Another feature of the Gaudeamus summit will be a roundtable conversation during the late afternoon of each evening’s performance to discuss whether there is still such a thing as a local sound identity, given that we can all be so instantly connected in the wired world.  These conversations will include a collection of musicians, composers, programmers and a sociologist to weigh in on the topic. And finally, if you’d like an opportunity to play with some of the visiting Dutch improvisers, a free workshop with members of Trio 7090 will be happening at the Music Gallery on April 5, from 10am to 1pm.

New Opera:  There is a new voice for contemporary opera arising on the scene, and its name is FAWN. Collaborating with emerging composers to create contemporary chamber operas, the opera and new music collective will be presenting excerpts of two of their produced operas by David Foley and Adam Scime, along with a new work by composer Cecilia Livingston on March 14.  This concert is part of the Emergents Series at the Music Galley curated by saxophonist Chelsea Shanoff. Adding to the experience of FAWN’s repetoire will be a selection of compositions by Michael Vincent, who is also writing an opera for FAWN’s upcoming season. One characteristic of this new company’s vision is to foster and support emerging musical and visual Canadian artists. Their “Synesthesia” concerts offer previews of new works in local art galleries. 

And then there is Tapestry which has been championing new Canadian opera for over 30 years. On April 4 and 5, they will be collaborating with Volcano Theatre in a showcase of work titled “Explorations” combining theatre, opera and dance.  Volcano is known for their physical energy and vision of creating work that explores identity, politics, history, and the contemporary human condition.  With both FAWN and Tapestry, we are witnessing another example of genre expansion through the fusion of opera with other artistic sensibilities and forms. 

Arditti String Quartet:  New Music Concerts and Music Toronto present the Arditti String Quartet on March 20.  Well-known for their spirited and technically refined interpretations of contemporary and earlier 20th century music, the contemporary string quartet repertoire would be unimaginable without them. The program includes works by some of the most venerable composers of our times, Elliott Carter, Hilda Paredes, Brian Ferneyhough and Helmut Lachenmann, each of which is part of their standard repertoire.  Carter’s String Quartet No. 5 is a perfect example of his signature technique of metric modulation, which can be described simply as a change in pulse rate or tempo where each of the two tempos have a shared relationship, rather than a sudden shift.   Hilda Paredes, originally from Mexico, wrote her second quartet “Cuerdas del Destino” in 2007-08, dedicating it to the Arditti Quartet.  Brian Ferneyhough, the master of the “new complexity,” wrote his Dum Transisset Quartet in 2006-07; it has been widely performed and recorded by the quartet. 

Additional Noteworthy Concerts (see Listings for Details) :

March 3: Wendalyn Bartley and Tina Pearson:  Tales from the Sonic Labiatory, Musideum.

March 6: AIM Toronto, Musideum.

March 7: Canadian Art Song Project CD launch, with works by Derek Holman. Canadian Music Centre.

March 16 and 18: Talisker Players: “Creature to Creature: A 21st-Century Bestiary.”

March 19: Les Amis: Duo X[iksa] from Japan.

March 19: University of Waterloo: Music by Carol Ann Weaver with Rebecca Campbell.

March 20: University of Guelph:  Time and Space in Time. Slowpitch (turntablism and visual aesthetics). 

April 5: Essential Opera:  Trio of new Canadian works. 

Wendalyn Bartley is a Toronto based composer and electro-vocal sound artist. sounddreaming@gmail.com

February and March bring a vibrant array of new sounds, kicking off with an energetic start of multiple concerts in early February. And right in the middle, in early March, comes International Women’s Day on March 8 – a time to celebrate progress while acknowledging the challenges that persist. While one might hope such a day would no longer be necessary, recent developments south of the border highlight persistent threats to women’s rights and freedoms, underscoring the continued importance of IWD.

Now that september’s TIFF-induced somnolence has receded from the new music scene, October starts to take on more of the shape one might hope for, with the emergence of new ensembles, an entirely new series of instruments, a major John Cage conference, almost back-to-back Koerner concerts by two heavyweight ensembles, both celebrating their 30th anniversaries and a plethora of inventive smaller presenters taking advantage of an ever-increasing range of intimate venues far and near.

It’s a particularly nice coincidence for me to have this column kicking off the Beat by Beat section of the magazine in the very month that Richard Marsella’s Regent Park School of Music moves into its new digs in the spectacular new Regent Park Arts and Cultural Centre (this month’s cover story). It was Marsella, you see, who gave the column the name “In With The New” when he served, energetically and all too briefly, as The WholeNote’s new music columnist. I wish him, and the school, momentum and luck.

Newest of the new:It is always interesting at the start of a new season to look at ensembles at the opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of longevity — at the ones celebrating significant anniversaries and at those just embarking. In the latter category, a group called the Thin Edge Music Collective probably takes the prize as the newest of the new. This time last year the collective was nothing more than a good idea in the minds of pianist Cheryl Duvall and violinist Ilana Waniuk.

“TEMC believes that contemporary music is a powerful medium which has the ability to comment and reflect on modern society in a unique and poignant way,” their manifesto reads. “We recognize that the broad range of musical idioms which new music encompasses functions as an important touchstone for contemporary life and as such are passionately dedicated to supporting our peers through commissions and performance. Ultimately we aspire to bring innovative and challenging 20th and 21st century music to audiences both existing and as yet untapped.”

By spring of 2012, following a Banff Centre residency with Toronto composer Tova Kardonne, they had mounted an inaugural concert, aptly titled “Premieres,” featuring five newly composed works by emerging Canadian composers: Margaret Ashburner, Aura Giles, August Murphy-King, Nick Storring and Kardonne.

Composer/cellist Storring joins them again October 6 for a concert titled “Unusual Spectrum” featuring works by Sokolovic, Bolton, Nobles, J. TV and Storring himself. And the works are not the only thing “unusual” about the event. The venue (The Placebo Space, Apt. A at 1409 Bloor St.W.) is as unfamiliar to us as Gallery 345 was a handful of years ago. For the other three programs in their 2012/13 season, they will take their act to a range of intimate venues across our catchment area: to Gallery 345 and Hamilton’s Artword Artbar November 22 and 25 respectively; back to Gallery 345 in February; and across town to the Tapestry/Nightwood New Work Studio in the Distillery District in June. As Amici did, a quarter of a century ago, TEMC seems to have cottoned on to the fact that commissioning works for larger combinations of instruments, along with themselves, can be the path to building relationships and bridges as they go. Percussion and cello, accordion and flute already feature in this year’s series plans.

Bohlen-Pierce: Speaking of the newest of the new, it’s not often that entirely new instruments come along and even less common when the instruments in question have the potential to reshape entirely the way composers write and audiences listen. So circle Tuesday October 9, 8pm, (at Gallery 345) for a lecture/recital by Nora-Louise Muller on the Bohlen-Pierce Clarinet which, according to its its Toronto maker, master clarinet builder Stephen Fox, is designed to produce “an exotic sequence of tones providing numerous consonant intervals and hence the promise of extensive musical possibilities to those willing to explore non-traditional sounds.” There’s nothing random about it, though. The Bohlen-Pierce Scale, according to Fox “uses an alternative musical system which divides the perfect twelfth into 13 steps.”

This Bohlen-Pierce clarinet project began in 2003, with the goal of designing and building clarinet-type instruments — soprano, tenor and contra — for the purpose of exploring and demonstrating the musical potential of the concept. The premiere concert involving Bohlen-Pierce clarinets took place at the University of Guelph on March 20, 2008, presenting newly composed works by Owen Bloomfield and Todd Harrop, and “future plans involve holding an international composition competition for Bohlen-Pierce instruments.”

New ensemble: Saturday October 27 at Heliconian Hall, the Toy Piano Composers collective unveils something new too, namely its own ensemble. Hence the concert’s title: “We Started a Band.” Featuring works by TPC members Brophy, Floisand, Guechtal, Pearce, Ryan and Thornborrow, the concert also will also unveil the TPC Ensemble: Katherine Watson, flute; Anthony Thompson, clarinet; Sharon Lee, violin;Adam Scime, double bass; Daniel Morphy, percussion; and Wesley Shen on piano and toy piano. Watch for the five-year-old collective to flourish as familiarity with a versatile group of core players breeds content.

Soundstreams and Esprit: It’s hard not to draw parallels between two of Toronto’s most venerable presenters this month. Both are 30 years old this season. Both have been led by one individual since their inception (Lawrence Cherney at Soundstreams, Alex Pauk at Esprit). Both opted early on to take the gamble of upsizing their previous venues and moving their main series to Koerner Hall. Soundtreams launches its Koerner season October 11. Esprit follows October 14. Both will feature new commissions by Murray Schafer, himself striding towards an important anniversary in the spring. But the superficial similarities obscure the fact that the two events promise to be as different as one might imagine, reflecting two very different, if equally single-minded, visions.

The October 11 Soundstreams event offers a veritable smorgasbord of performers, drawn from a wide range of sources specifically for this event. Among them: David Fallis and Joaquin Valdepeñas, conductors; Ryan Scott, percussion; Shannon Mercer, soprano; Julie Ranti, flute; Choir 21; the Gryphon Trio; and NEXUS, in works by Frehner, Llugdar, Pärt; Fuhong Shi and Schafer. Cherney’s presence as artistic director will be almost entirely behind the scenes, evidenced in the careful shaping of the event.

October 14, at the Esprit concert, the surprise will not be in the players, the vast majority of whom are the backbone of the orchestra, appearing year in, year out in almost every Esprit event. Pauk will lead from the front, on the conductor’s podium and the overall thrust will be much more strongly large scale, as befits Canada’s only orchestra solely dedicated to the commissioning and performance of new orchestral works. Schafer’s new work for the concert is titled Wolf Returns, and will feature along with the orchestra a chorus drawn from participants over the years in Schafer’s annual summer Haliburton wilderness project, And Wolf Shall Inherit the Moon.

Works by Esprit perennial composers John Rea, Alexina Louie, Iannis Xenakis and Colin McPhee will round out the event, and Schafer himself will be there in the lobby for the official launch, and signing, of his newly released memoir, My Life On Earth and Elsewhere.

All too briefly: the above barely scratches the surface of an extraordinarily rich month of music which also includes the following, each in its way worthy of an article all on its own (and all referenced in our listings so that you can begin supplying for yourself the missing details in this hasty list):

October 25 4:00 to October 28 1:30: Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto. Future of Cage: Credo. A spectacular conference to mark the 100th birthday of composer John Cage, featuring performances, panel discussions, keynote addresses, lectures and installations. “This interdisciplinary conference is both a celebration of John Cage, 100 years after his birth, and an opportunity to explore Cage’s influence on music, writing, performance and critical scholarship,” says their press release. “Fundamental to the development of innovations in performance art, contemporary music, graphic notation, audience reception and theories of social practice, Cage remains one of the most, if not the most, influential figures in 20th- and 21st-century art and performance. Such a legacy necessarily resonates beyond any single artistic or historical trajectory, and “The Future of Cage: Credo” will explore not only Cage’s output, both artistic and philosophical, but its after-effects through a variety of fields, genres and modes of presentation.”

Monday October 22 8:00: Continuum Contemporary Music. Finding Voice. “Another season of musical and extra musical exploration: influential works reconceived, new works on their way to being influential, revelatory performances, discussion among friends new and old” starts with a concert featuring, at its outset, an old friend of ther ensemble, Dutch composer Martijn Voorvelt and rivetting mezzo soprano Marion Newman. “Finding Voice” is a concert of vocal music about the voice and about communicating. It is also about history, the past given contemporary voice.”

Friday October 12 to Friday October 19: Music Gallery. X Avant New Music Festival VII: Expanding Circuits. Fortunately fellow columnist Andrew Timar has turned some of his erudite attention to this event, in World Music on page 28 and the Music Gallery’s own website gives a very detailed overview of a boundary-testing event that goes from strength to strength every year.

Friday October 19 8:00: Arraymusic. The Poets. A mix of words and music by poets and members of Arraymusic. Fides Krucker, mezzo; Phoebe Tsang, violin; Lydia Munchinsky, cello; Stephen Clarke, piano; Nilan Perera, guitar; Rick Sacks, percussion. and Ideas Studio, 980 O’Connor Dr., 416-778-7535. $10; $20(workshop and evening concert, see listings section A, Oct.13 at 8:00). 

David Perlman has been writing this column for the past season and a bit and is willing to entertain the notion that it’s someone else’s turn. He can be reached at publisher@thewholenote.com.

One thing that has been consistent with the University of Toronto’s annual New Music Festival over the years is the presence of a visiting composer from another country or Canadian city. During last year’s festival in January 2019, it was Toshio Hosokawa, a leading composer from Japan, and the year before that in 2018, Canadian Nicole Lizée was given the honours. This visitorship is named the Roger D. Moore Distinguished Visitor in Composition, and was established by Roger Moore, a longtime supporter and philanthropist of new music. Sadly, Moore passed away in March of this year, and there will be a concert, as part of the festival, to honour him on January 21. More about what is on the program for that night below. This year’s visiting composer is André Mehmari, a leading Brazilian composer, pianist and arranger in both classical and popular music. Because of his diverse artistic accomplishments many of the events of the festival span both the jazz and contemporary music worlds, with the opening concert on January 12 combining electronic jazz, visuals and live electronics.

Two concerts, one in early March, the other in early April, resonate with the day on the calendar set aside to celebrate the historical, cultural and political achievements of women: International Women’s Day (IWD) on March 8. This special day has its origins in Russia, a fact that feels significantly ironic – as I sit writing this column, Russia has begun its invasion of Ukraine. On March 8, 1917, the women textile workers of Petrograd rose up to demand “Bread and Peace” – which meant for these women an end to World War I, to food shortages and to czarism. It remained a holiday primarily in Communist countries until 1967 when second-wave feminists in Western Europe, the UK and North America adopted the date as a day of action, highlighting issues such as equal pay, reproductive rights, and the prevention of violence against women.

On March 8 of 2022, percussionist virtuoso Beverley Johnston will be performing a series of compositions that highlight various mythic and real-life female characters in a concert she is calling Finding HER Voice. When I asked Johnston whose voice she is referring to in the title she responded by saying that it has several meanings. “It can be my own voice because I’ve been incorporating a lot of voice into the percussion works that I’ve been learning, either by singing or speaking. Metaphorically, the title draws attention to how women through the ages have empowered themselves, found their voice and become stronger within themselves.” 

Johnson uses her voice in all of the pieces, and even though she is not a trained singer, she became comfortable using her voice due to her experience as a member of the URGE collective in the 1990s and in workshops with Richard Armstrong, an original member of the Roy Hart Theatre known for its pioneering of extended vocal techniques. These activities “empowered me to know that it’s okay to find that gruff quality in the voice, and allowed me not to be afraid to use my voice,” she said.

Have you spent much time wondering about those mysterious things going on inside your body, and especially those processes that your life is utterly dependent upon such as your heart and circulation system, or your breath and the entire respiratory system? Ever been curious about how a hospital trauma team works together in such a coordinated and precise way while working to save a life?

Whether you have or not, you may now be wondering whatever does all this have to do with music? These are the questions that Toronto-based composer and interdisciplinary artist Juliet Palmer recently pursued during a research residency at Sunnybrook Research Institute in 2018. Arising out of this period are two works that will be performed in a concert on February 9 produced by Continuum Contemporary Music, that will also include a Continuum-commissioned work by composer Martijn Voorvelt from the Netherlands entitled Frederick’s Doctor. I talked with Palmer to find out more about her compositions and how the residency in a hospital informed her creative process.

Toronto is a city of constant musical discoveries. While the concert season is quickly coming to a close, the summer festival season starts to build, bringing with it a range of fresh new experiences. And for lovers of new music, June bursts open in a bouquet of new works and visiting artists.

First up is the Luminato Festival, which opens its 2010 music series to showcase new music that is resonant in both its celebratory nature and serious content.  
In partnership with Soundstreams, and with the help of 684 public voters, Luminato has selected composer Robert Johnson’s Majestic Fanfare to serve as the festival’s official fanfare. This royal flourish will accompany the Rainbow King – the ruler of the world, created by Festival artists FriendsWithYou – throughout Luminato 2010. Keep an ear open for the Luminato brass quintet, appearing throughout the festival, in order to hear this fanfare live!

Soundstreams is certainly no stranger to this ceremonial and celebratory form, engrained in musical cultures throughout the world. In 2006, they presented new works by composers and quartets from Canada, Norway, Iceland, Finland, Denmark, and Sweden in the soaring Barbara Frum Atrium at the CBC Broadcasting Centre. Sixty-plus trumpet players positioned throughout the balconies premiered these short works to usher in the 2006 soundaXis Festival.

In 2009, Soundstreams commissioned James Rolfe for a new fanfare to celebrate the Toronto Arts Foundation Awards, which was also offered as a gift to Mayor David Miller. You can get an advance listen to their latest fanfare project at the Soundstreams’ Salon 21 event on June 7, starting at 7:30pm at the Gardiner Museum. The salon is free, but be sure to reserve your seat in advance. These events fill up fast. You can do so at salonfanfare.eventbrite.com.

On June 11 and 12, we will finally get to experience the world premiere of Dark Star Requiem – the concert-length project from much-in-demand composer Andrew Staniland (winner of the 2009 CBC National Composition Prize) and internationally recognized poet Jill Battson. Staniland and Battson met as participants in Tapestry New Opera Works’ highly successful Composer-Librettist Laboratory. Their early experiments in creating opera scenes sparked an exciting new partnership that led to numerous projects, including LinguaElastic (2006) – an exploration of the contemporary collisions of humanity and electronic media through live vocal performance (by Battson) and interactive electronics (by Staniland) – for the Canadian Music Centre’s New Music in New Places series.

Tapestry invited the duo back in 2006 to write Ashlike on the Cradle of the Wind, a poetic and elegiac mini-opera that reveals our attitudes towards sex and love in the shadow of AIDS. Even in those early days, Staniland and Battson had expressed the desire to collaborate on a much larger work – a secular oratorio that tackles the major issues of our times. The current commission from Tapestry and Luminato has given them the space to bring that desire to fruition.

Tapestry’s decision to re-mount Ashlike this spring for their very first Opera to Go Revival was a prescient move in light of Dark Star Requiem’s world premiere. This full-scale dramatic work traces the 25-year history of AIDS from its origins to the present day. The evocative, poetic content weaves in topics from ecology to myth, politics to family. While the libretto includes fragments from the traditional Latin requiem mass, the overall perspective remains humanistic rather than religious. By focusing on the intimate and personal face of AIDS, Staniland and Battson hope that Dark Star Requiem will resonate with a broad audience. Based on past experiences with this duo’s work, and the remarkable creative team behind this production (The Gryphon Trio and the Elmer Iseler Singers join a quartet of talented vocal soloists conducted by Wayne Strongman), the work should resound strongly. For more information visit www.tapestrynewopera.com. To reserve tickets visit www.luminato.com.

In between the Luminato events, Gallery 345’s concert calendar is really heating up. Here, the new music comes from Edmonton-based pianist Roger Admiral, who delivers a solo recital on June 11. Admiral is a true contemporary music aficionado. He studied piano with Helmut Brauss, Peter Smith and Virginia Blaha, and graduated with a doctorate from the University of Alberta, where he now coaches contemporary chamber music. From 1990 to 1993 he was a member of the unique two-piano/two-percussion Hammerhead Consort. And since 1997 he’s been part of Duo Kovalis with Montreal percussionist Philip Hornsey. For this Toronto performance, Admiral focuses primarily on music of the “Victoria School” of Canadian composition, including works by Alfred Fisher, Linda Catlin Smith, Christopher Butterfield and Howard Bashaw. For more details, visit www.gallery345.com.

Nestled amongst all of the above is the return of the Music Gallery’s Summer Courtyard Series, taking contemporary music out of the concert hall and into the intimate setting of St. George the Martyr’s open-air spaces. Presented in partnership with Wavelength and curated in affiliation with Montreal’s Suoni per il Popolo Festival, these four concerts feature international stars from the worlds of avant-pop and new composed music who have been selected especially to suit this unique setting.

New music lovers will want to take note of the series’ opening concert, which includes New York cellist Julia Kent. After years of playing cello with a myriad of artists and ensembles, from Antony and the Johnsons to the chamber-rock trio Rasputina, Kent retired to her Lower East Side apartment to make music inspired by touring and the disjunctions of travel. Incorporating multi-tracked cello, omnichord, and field recordings from airports around the world, her melancholy compositions ache with “romanticism and rich melodicism.” Much like our own Owen Pallet of Final Fantasy fame, Kent has perfected the art of using live looping and effects to create rich layers of melody and rhythm in her solo cello concerts throughout Europe and the UK. We’ll get to experience the full effect live on June 9.

Another treat will be the double bill featuring classically trained soundscape composer/multimedia artist William Basinski with Toronto-based audio contortionist and collaborative creator Neil Wiernik. Wiernik, who also works under the pseudonym “naw” is creatively concerned with various types of storytelling, using abstract environments and spaces as his tools. We’ll get to hear both composers’ tales on June 12. For more information and to buy tickets, visit www.musicgallery.org.

Jason van Eyk is the Ontario Regional Director of the Canadian Music Centre. He can be contacted at: newmusic@thewholenote.com.

“New music in new places” is the name of a Canadian Music Centre initiative, now in its eighth year, to assist Canadian composers in “taking their music out of the concert hall and into the community where they work and live.” The CMC’s annual contribution to Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, Toronto’s annual all-night contemporary art festival, has been one of these events. This year, from 6:59pm October 1 till sunrise, it’s bells and more bells at Chalmers House (the CMC’s home on St. Joseph) “blended with electronic musical material and video projections in a continuous and evolving flow.” Titled “The “Crown of the Bell,” the installation is by Rose Bolton and video artist Marc de Guerre. Its companion piece, downstairs, by sound artist Barry Prophet is titled “Post Apocalyptic Belfry” and features glass lithophones, percussion, and electronics. For those of you getting October off to a flying start, it will be a great way to untune and retune your ears for what promises to be a chock-a-block new music month.

Gallery 345

“New music in new places” may well be the name of a CMC initiative, but it also describes a trend. Take Gallery 345 for example. South of Dundas Street W. at 345 Sorauren Avenue, five or six blocks west of where Dundas and College meet, this L-shaped gallery space is definitely “on the wrong side of the tracks” for a new music audience that traditionally gets nose bleeds north of St. Clair and fumbles for passports east of Parliament.

The place reminds me of the Music Gallery in some ways; even 30 people feels like a decent crowd, and you can cram a bunch more than that through the doors. It has the advantage of two decent pianos well maintained, a bright sound, and the cheerfully genre-blind, indefatigable curatorship of gallery owner Edward Epstein.

Even a partial list of concerts there gives you some idea: Saturday October 1 is AIM Toronto’s Interface Series with Sylvie Courvoisier, piano and composer, Marilyn Lerner, piano, and others. Wednesday October 5 it’s “The Art of the Piano Duo: Pieces of the Earth,” a CD release concert featuring original compositions and improvisations by John Kameel Farah and Attila Fias, pianos. “Improvisation unfolds over the evening” says their press release. Sounds like just the spot for it.

October 8 its “Trikonasana.” Friday October 14 it’s Arraymusic with “The Piano Music of Ann Southam” (mentioned in this month’s cover story). Saturday October 15 Toy Piano Composers Ensemble is there with “Avant-Guitars,” the 13 member Aventa Ensemble on Friday Oct 21; Jurij Konje on October 27; Vlada Mars on October 28; and the Tova Kardonne Octet on October 29.

Wuorinen

Arraymusic’s October 14 foray into Gallery 345 also provides a neat segue into New Music Concerts’ next big event. It was Arraymusic artistic director and gifted percussionist Rick Sacks who persuaded NMC’s Robert Aitken to take on the challenge of presenting Charles Wuorinen’s “Percussion Symphony for 24 Players,” the work that anchors NMC’s upcoming October 30 concert at the Betty Oliphant Theatre. The work includes two pianos and a celesta (think Sugar Plum Fairy) and an entire platoon of top-flight percussionists, so it’s not that often performed. Rarely enough, in fact that Charles Wuorinen himself is coming to town to direct. (He will, as others before him, be astonished by the depth of musical talent in this town.) If you are going, get there 45 minutes ahead for Aitken’s “Illuminating Introduction.” Aitken is as deeply into the music as his interviewees and it makes for fascinating listening. There’s also a new piece by Eric Morin on the programme, matching Joseph Petric on accordion with the Penderecki String Quartet — that’s three accordionists in two concerts this season already for NMC! And those of you who also take in the Women’s Musical Club concert on October 16 will have an all too rare opportunity — the chance to hear a new work (Chris Paul Harman’s Duo for flute and cello) performed twice in four days!

MassBrass

Betty Oliphant Theatre, 8pm Oct 30, will be the place to hear the drums go bang and the cymbals clang. But for the horns that blaze away, Koerner Hall, five hours earlier, is the place to be. MassBrass promises to be one of those Soundstreams initiatives that Lawrence Cherney is famous for — throwing together players who’d otherwise be more likely to cross paths in an airport, adding a conductor who responds to what he hears, and watching the sparks fly. Copland, Schafer, and works by André Ristic (world premiere), Gabrieli and more will be the ingredients. The Stockholm Chamber Brass, Simón Bolivar Brass Quintet, and True North Brass will provide the heat. And conductor David Fallis will stir the pot.

Esprit’s Stirred So Much

Speaking of Koerner Hall, Alex Pauk’s Esprit Orchestra was the first of the core new music presenters to move its whole season to Koerner. Having an extra 400 seats to sell was a daunting challenge, but with curiosity about the new hall high last season it was a good time to take the plunge. After all, without extra seats how do you take on the challenge of outreach? This year they are taking it a step further, switching from a Sunday night format to include three week nights, making reaching out to a school audience viable.

First of these week nights is Wednesday October 19 and it’s a stirring programme, as befits a band big enough to make some complex noise in a hall big enough to handle it. Douglas Schmidt’s new work on the programme “The Devil’s Sweat” caught my eye: “Carbon Concerto for carbon cello and orchestra” it says. Solo cellist Shauna Rolston’s carbon fibre cello is billed as “indestructible” so it sounds like she’s in for an unorthodox workout!

Women from Space: In last month’s issue, I wrote about the Women from Space festival, which happened from March 8-10. I was delighted to attend some of the events, and came away feeling inspired and energized by what I heard. The festival opener was a spectacular improvisation by Bloop, the duo made up of trumpeter Lina Allemano and her performance partner Mike Smith, whose electronics wizardry was fully on display in the effects processing he conjured from the equipment at hand. At times Allemano also played various gong instruments, such as a large cow-bell with one of her hands, adding different sonorities to the mix.

Of all the concerts I didn’t get out to last month the one I regret most missing was Continuum Contemporary Music’s October 22 program at the Music Gallery titled “Finding Voice.”

“Communication, as well as the historical lens, is at the core of a concert that presents two linked theatrical works by Dutch composer Martijn Voorvelt” read the always entertaining Continuum blurb. “[It is] based on the tangled up story of Sir Morell MacKenzie, inventor of the tracheotomy, and his treatment of the mute and dying German Emperor Friedrich III.”

Because Voorvelt is a self-taught composer, drawing at will on literature and theatre, I was looking forward to an evening of music that dipsy-doodles across the line between genres, using sound in ways that are more instinctual than intellectual. It was a quality that smacked me right between the eyes last year during Vingko Globokar’s visit last season, and I was looking forward to exploring it further: the connections between the innate musicality of voice and the inherent storytelling capacity of music.

Training the ear to listen to new music by invoking the nuances of spoken work — cadence, intonation, pitch, pace — seemed like a fine topic for a rainy day, and may well still be. But I will have to proceed without my prime example, and I’m sorry for it.

That being said, there’s no shortage of material this month for an exploration of the topic. For one thing, I could revisit our cover story’s Maniac Star/Royal Conservatory November 25 co-production of Brian Current’s Airline Icarus. (Current’s final comment on the challenge of educating the new music audience’s ear is certainly a propos). But let’s look for some other examples.

Nine days earlier, on November 16 and 17, in the selfsame venue, for example, the Royal Conservatory Opera School presents a double bill of Ned Rorem’s Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters andJoseph Vézina’s Le Lauréat. In Rorem’s work, in particular, drama and music seem always shyly (or should that be slyly?) fascinated bedfellows, without ever quite figuring out what the attraction is. Three Sisters takes for its libretto a Gertrude Stein play of the same nameand it makes for an interesting match. Bernard Holland, in The New York Times, Oct 1, 1994, writes about the Stein/Rorem work, and makes the following interesting observation: “Stein’s little game of mock murder makes sense of a sort, but making sense is not its business. It is the arrangement of her simple declarative sentences that pleases. Mr. Rorem’s terse music and its skillful, imitative ensembles ... successfully explain a literary art in which form is everything and matter matters little. Every musical gesture Ned Rorem has ever made has something of the human voice behind it.”

“Musical gesture with the human voice behind it” is a good description of the thing I am trying to describe, and it can be found across the musical spectrum. An example: a November 8 noonhour recital at University of Guelph College of Arts titled “Problems with Love.” It features a consummate musical raconteur, mezzo-soprano Patricia Green, wrapping her innate storytelling skills around “songs by Canadian composers, touching on poignant and funny sides of love.” And another example: a Sunday November 18 7:30pm presentation at the Arts and Letters Club by the Toronto Chapter of the American Harp Society titled“A Score to Settle,” written by K. Gonzalez-Risso, and billed as “a musical monologue for solo harp” featuring harpist and comic actress Rita Costanzi.

In entirely different ways, these performances, informed by principles as different as comedy and cabaret, offer opportunities for the willing listener to explore how an understanding of the rituals and cadences of storytelling can inform musical choice, no matter how abstract, by composer and listener alike.

Choral common ground: If music theatre is the most dramatic example of the interplay between different modes of listening, then choral music is the most pervasive. Indeed choirs, more than almost any other presenters, are at the forefront of commissioning new work, of mixing repertoire across generations in the same programs, and putting experiencing a work of music ahead of judging it as good or bad. With an estimated 20,000 individuals participating in choirs in The WholeNote catchment area, this is no small fact, especially given that choristers, more so than concert band members, for example, tend also to be avid concert-goers. Not a bad way of educating people to broaden their understanding of what makes music music!

Nowhere will you see this more clearly illustrated this month than in the November 11 Soundstreams Canada presentation of the Latvian Radio Choir at Koerner Hall, in a program ranging from Rachmaninoff to Cage, to young Canadian composer Nic Gotham and more.

Or take as another example the November 17 Grand Philharmonic Chamber Singers’ “Made in Canada” concert with music ranging from a new commission by Patrick Murray to works by Healey Willan and Harry Somers. And check out the November 10 Cantabile Chamber Singers concert titled “Lux” and described as an “a capella concert on the themes of light, love and night featuring works by L. Silberberg, C. Livingston and B. J. Kim.”

Or, finally, consider the November 3 University of Toronto Faculty of Music concert titled “Choirs in Concert: When Music Sounds: Celebrating the 80th birthday of Ruth Watson Henderson.”

Henderson, one of Canada’s pre-eminent choral composers, talks about the links between text and music in a recent interview (on the Choral Canada website), with Dean Jobin-Bevans, president of Choirs Ontario.

“It is all about taking a text that I find inspiring and thinking about how it can be presented in a way that can express some important feelings and ideas to a large number of listeners” she says. “The most important thing for me when I am writing is the text; if I get a good text, then all of my ideas come from the text. I am not very good at putting things into words, I am much better at hearing things musically, and so when I cannot express myself when speaking with words, I find that I can express myself much better through music; by putting ideas down on paper and writing choral works.”

Follow the Bob! Regular readers of this column will know that I often pick a particular venue and catalogue what’s happening there as a way of providing a cross-section of what is happpening. It’s sometimes equally instructive, though, to follow an individual musician through a month’s worth of perambulation from one venue to another.

Take New Music Concerts’ Robert Aitken for example. The evening of November 11 will find him at the Music Gallery, albeit in the capacity of genial host rather than performer, for a New Music Concerts presentation of Ensemble contemporain de Montréal, Véronique Lacroix, conductor, in a program titled GENERATION 2012: ECM+.

Four days earlier, he features as flutist, along with musical chameleon, accordionist Joseph Macerollo, in a Canadian Music Centre/New Music Concerts event titled “Secret of the Seven Stars.” It’s a CD launch, featuring works by Hope Lee and David Eagle, and providing an early opportunity to check out the new and improved Chalmers House performing space, one which one hopes will join the array of fine little performance venues for cutting edge music.

And, going from little to large, Sunday November 18 Aitken will appear as flutist in Esprit Orchestra’s second Koerner Hall Concert of the season, titled “Exquisite Vibrations,” in a work titled Concerto for Flute and Orchestra by French composer Marc-André Dalbavie.

The universities: mind you, you can’t go wrong by familiarizing yourself with the key venues for new music either. Starting with the universities, I count no fewer than ten concerts at the University of Toronto this month that could be of interest to new music followers, most of them at Walter Hall: November 4 there is a concert, “In Memory of Gustav,” dedicated to the works and legacy of Gustav Ciamaga, composer, educator and electronic music pioneer; composer/teacher Norbert Palej shows up as a composer on November 5 (in another concert featuring accordionist Macerollo), and then on November 21 as conductor of the U of T Faculty of Music’s gamUT Ensemble ... and the list goes on, for U of T as for its Philosopher’s Walk neighbour to the north, the Royal Conservatory. Same goes for York and others.

Small venues: as for the smaller venues, check out the Music Gallery (November 10, 15, 17; December 1 and 7); Gallery 345 (November 4, 8, 10, 16, 18, 22, 23 and 27); the Tranzac (November 7, 8 and 9) for the 416 Toronto Creative Improvisers Festival; and the Wychwood Barns (November 10, 24 and December 1) for New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA)’s 11th Annual SOUNDplay Series.

And make a special point of checking out the newest intimate space on the map, the Array Space at 155 Walnut St. On November 19 at 7pm, it’s a concert titled “Passport Duo,” featuring works by Hatzis, Wilson, Forsythe and O’Connor. And on November 26 it’s the 14th in a series of evenings of improvised music, with Array director Rick Sacks and a roster of always interesting guests.

Subversion: I started by talking about how spoken language potentially provides different, sometimes less daunting and even enriching access points to new music. It’s not the only tool in the shed, though. There’s also the thoroughly mixed program (such as that promised by Scaramella on December 1, in the Victoria College Chapel, which offers “animal-themed music, from baroque to the 21st century”). Or perhaps even more to the point, consider a November 9 offering from a collective, group of twenty-seven, called “The Subversion Project” which on this occasion, at Grace Church on-the-Hill, offers works by Beethoven, Prokofiev, Zorn and Buhr in a deliberate effort to enable listeners to hear the familiar anew, and to modulate the strange through the familiar.

Sounds like a fine idea, don’t you think? 

David Perlman has been writing this column for the past season (and a bit) and is willing to entertain the notion that it’s someone else’s turn. He can be reached at publisher@thewholenote.com.

When we attend any sort of concert, listening is automatically assumed. That’s what we go for — to listen. But the question can be asked — how do we listen? What happens to our attention while the musicians on stage are busily engaged in their performance? Do we watch their body movements, analyze the audience around us, listen to the thoughts inside the music, or wonder about what we’ll do after the concert? What do those sounds we are hearing have to do with the actual soundscape we are experiencing? How do we distinguish between hearing and listening?

One composer who has spent her lifetime creating and reflecting on the question of listening is Pauline Oliveros. She sought a balanced approach that includes both attention and awareness. Think of a circle with a dot in the middle. “Attention is narrow, pointed and selective — that’s the dot in the middle. Awareness is broad, diffuse and inclusive — that’s the circle. Both have a tunable range: attention can be honed to a finer and finer point. Awareness can be expanded until it seems all-inclusive.” [Pauline Oliveros “On Sonic Meditation” in Software for People, 1984, Smith Publications, p. 139]

It is a heightened and pure experience when suddenly attention and awareness meld together in concert. That is what comes to mind when I think of the music of Ann Southam, a pioneering soul who was passionately committed to creating music that opened up the listening ear, creating that wide expansive field of both inner and outer reality of which Oliveros speaks. Southam’s aesthetic was influenced by the minimalist ideas of drawing the listener’s attention to a gradual unfolding process of change, which allows space for the perception of subtle modulations and alterations in the music.

In Southam’s works written specifically for Toronto pianist Eve Egoyan, the elements of simplicity and mystery abound. On April 19 at a concert presented by Earwitness Productions at the Glenn Gould Studio, Egoyan will be launching her ninth solo disc, and her third of Southam’s compositions. The album, 5, will certainly raise interest internationally, as it features world premiere recordings of five posthumously discovered pieces composed by Southam. As a performer specializing in performing the works of contemporary composers, Egoyan’s repertoire covers a wide range, and this concert is no exception. Egoyan will be premiering Southam’s Returnings II which she describes as filling our ears with its magnetic pull, alongside the complexities of SKRYABIN in itself by Michael Finnissy. Works by composers Claude Vivier (Canada), Taylan Susam (Netherlands) and Piers Hellawell (Ireland) are also included in the program.

Another opportunity to hear an outstanding ambassador for contemporary concert music on the piano will be Continuum Contemporary Music’s presentation of UK pianist Philip Thomas in back to back concerts titled “Out of the Apartment,” on April 24 at Gallery 345, and “Correlation Street,” on April 25 at the Music Gallery. The first of these concerts will feature four specially commissioned works by Canadians Martin Arnold and Cassandra Miller and English composers Christopher Fox and Bryn Harrison.

Thomas is drawn to both freely improvised music as well as the experimental music of John Cage, and those working within a Cageian aesthetic such as Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff. He is known for designing concert programs that create connections between different composers, and when looking at the repertoire of the upcoming Continuum concert, one can definitely see his curatorial interests in action. In addition to the composers mentioned above, Thomas will be performing works by Canadians Michael Oesterle and Linda C. Smith.

Cage, of course, is renowned for 4’33” in which the pianist sits in silence on the stool, thus drawing the attention of the listener to the sounds in the room. As an aside, I made a fascinating discovery this past fall in one of the presentations made at The Future of Cage: Credo festival in October, 2012. Apparently, the premiere of that work took place in late August in an outdoor venue with the late summer tree-frog concert in full chorus. Thus Cage’s intention was not so much that we experience the coughs, shuffles and hums of the concert hall, as is the usual experience of hearing this work, but to bring attention and awareness to the rich soundscape in the natural environment and to include these sounds as part of what we consider to be music. I mention this because the act of creating this piece by Cage was a revolutionary step in expanding our conception of listening and one that continued to evolve in Oliveros’ work.

Yet another leading pianist in the interpretation of 20th-century music to visit Toronto this month will be Louise Bessette from Montreal. She will be performing works by fellow Montrealer Gilles Tremblay in New Music Concerts’ tribute to Tremblay on April 27. Bessette has cultivated an international career performing contemporary works from leading composers throughout Europe, Asia and the Americas, while releasing 20 recordings. She will perform two of Tremblay’s piano works from the 1950s among others.

Taking a leap beyond the solo pianist in concert, Soundstreams will be bringing together nine Canadian virtuoso pianists in “Piano Ecstasy,” its April 26 concert. These artists will perform in a wide range of styles: from Cage’s The Beatles to minimalist Steve Reich’s Six Pianos, as well as a newly commissioned work — Two Pieces for Three Pianos by Glenn Buhr. Cage and Reich come together again in TorQ Percussion Quartet’s concert “New Manoeuvers” for percussion and dance on May 3. Reich’s Mallet Quartet and Cage’s Third Construction will be complemented by new works from composers James Rolfe and Daniel Morphy.

April marks the end of the university school year and there is one noteworthy event: composer Cecilia Livingston presents her doctoral composition recital at the University of Toronto on April 14. Given the focus that composers such as Southam and Cage place on awareness as integral to the listening process, it is interesting that this young composer has titled her topic of compositional research “A Still Point: Music for Voices.”

And finally, the Canadian Opera Company will join with Queen of Puddings Music Theatre in presenting a new vocal work by Chris Paul Harman on April 30. Earlier this year, Queen of Puddings announced the closure of their company as of August 31, 2013. Their inventive way of staging chamber opera and music theatre works incorporated elements from physical theatre as well as placing the instrumentalists on stage. In reflecting back on their legacy, founding co-artistic directors Dáirine Ní Mheadhra and John Hess had this to say: “With Queen of Puddings, we’ve achieved what we set out to do, which was to commission and produce original Canadian opera to a high artistic standard, and to develop an international profile for this work.” Certainly one of their highlights was the launching of soprano Measha Brueggergosman in the 1999 production of Beatrice Chancy. For their swan song, Queen of Puddings will stage La selva de los relojes (The Forest of Clocks), Harman’s vocal work based on texts by Federico García Lorca. Lorca was a Spanish poet, dramatist and theatre director who died during the Spanish Civil War in 1936. It will be fascinating to see how Queen of Puddings stages what will most likely be an intensely dramatic work.

Additional concerts featuring contemporary piano music

April 13: Works by Hétu, Sherkin, Steven and Vivier. Canadian Music Centre.

April 23: “The Unruly Music of the Present.” Gallery 345.

April 27: Works by Gougeon, Morlock, Jaeger and Schafer. Canadian Music Centre.

May 3: Works by Mozetich, Kenins, Weinzweig, Behrens and Baker, performed by Mary Kenedi. Canadian Music Centre.

May 4: “Signposts.” Poetry and improvised music. Music by Gilliam and Ringas. Gallery 345. 

Wendalyn Bartley is a Toronto-based composer and electro-vocal sound artist. She can be contacted at sounddreaming@gmail.com.

Music is like a creature that needs certain conditions and ingredients in order to thrive. Two essential components to create a sustainable environment for musicmaking are a space for the sound to exist within and a community of receivers open to listening in that space.

In the summer issue, I spoke about the upcoming visit to Toronto of composer Pauline Oliveros and her longstanding practice of “Deep Listening.” Having recently witnessed her keynote address, performance and deep listening workshop at the various events organized by New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA) in mid-August, I was struck by how much her work as a composer, both in the pioneering days of electronic music and in promoting an awareness and practice of listening, has had a wide impact on the musical community.

One event I was able to experience was an outdoor participatory performance of her piece Extreme Slow Walk, a piece I had experienced back in the late 1970s at the original Music Gallery space on St. Patrick Street. The piece requires an opening up of one’s awareness to the vibratory resonance of the earth, the electrical sensations in the body and the pull of the gravitational field – all while listening to the surrounding soundscape and slowly placing one foot in front of the other. Not only did each participant experience something personally meaningful but as Oliveros commented after we completed the walk, the whole environment was responding and sounding back in its own way because of our listening. This is an example of what she calls “quantum listening.”

Arraymusic: A few years back, Toronto’s Arraymusic produced a concert of some of Oliveros’ music. In a recent interview I had with Array’s artistic director and percussionist Rick Sacks, I asked what it had required of him as a performer to realize the intentions of one of Oliveros’ pieces. His answer (that it was a process of “revelation”) underscores the difference of perspective that deep listening is built upon. Revelation, he explained, was the experience of allowing things to unfold while playing, instead of relying on the traditional performance practice of having things under control (as much as one ever can). It was an opportunity for personal growth beyond ego by following an intuitive process. Oliveros’ entire aesthetic points towards a holistic approach to life, Sacks said: when sound is given a chance to live and breathe, it follows its own course and we are taken along for the ride. But it requires the professional musician to trust that all the learned musical impulses and skills will be there when called upon by the unfolding music.

As I mentioned above, though, music also needs a supportive and thriving environment within which to do its living and breathing. Since the 1970s, Arraymusic has been an important contributor to the creation and performance of new music in Toronto and the rest of the world. With its recent change of location, Array is now uniquely positioned to offer its new venue at 155 Walnut Street as one such living space. During my conversation with both Sacks and Array’s administrative director Sandra Bell, they talked about the vision that the new space has enabled. One of the major results of the re-visioning process has been an expansion of their participation with other organizations in a series of co-productions. As well, they are equipping their space as a DIY (do it yourself) studio environment, where community members can rent the space and record audio or video on their own without having to hire a technical assistant. This keeps the costs low and accessible, helping to support young and underemployed artists. And building on their current online YouTube channel, the space will be equipped with a high definition video system to offer live streaming of concerts and events to a worldwide audience as well as creating a musical archive.

This conveniently located and great-sounding space has also expanded to incorporate other arts organizations, including plans for a future rooftop deck. It’s becoming a hub that can foster a growing community, which will in turn generate artistic synergies that arise from a common meeting space.

Although Array has always been a grassroots community organization, that trend has now snowballed, and the space come alive, with many community events. These include regular improvisation jams with local and visiting guests, lectures and composer talks (Allison Cameron, October 18 and Tamara Bernstein, November 20), a collaboration with the Evergreen Club Gamelan that includes evenings for people to gather and play the EGC instruments now housed in the Array Space, co-presentations with other music organizations, free outreach community workshops and participation in the New Music 101 library series. On Toronto’s improvising scene, Array is teaming up with both Somewhere There (September 20) and Audio Pollination (September 9 and 13). The first of Array’s own improvisation jams happens on September 10. The days of September also offer two opportunities to participate in community events: September 21 launches the first Gamelan Meetup event and September 27 provides an opportunity for a free percussion workshop.

Array is of course more than a space, for at its roots, it is a performing ensemble. Now able to enjoy their own performing space, this season’s concert series includes works by Gerald Barry, Udo Kasemets, John Sherlock, Michael Oesterle and Linda Catlin Smith. Beyond the Walnut Street address, the Array ensemble will be performing a series of miniatures composed by Nic Gotham at the book launch of Martha Baillie’s novel The Search for Heinrich Schlögel on September 16 at the Gladstone. Gotham’s miniatures were originally written for an online installation of postcards written by Baillie and read by members of the literary community.

INTERsections: Earlier in the month, Array along with other new music ensembles will participate in Contact Contemporary Music’s annual new music event “INTERsection: Music From Every Direction” from September 5 to 7, which will include a day of free performances and interactive installations at Yonge-Dundas Square on September 6. Also included in INTERsection are concert performances at both the Tranzac Club (September 5) and the Music Gallery (September 7).

Other “intersections” also occurring in September feature two of the new music groups who are also participating in Contact’s weekend event. On September 28 the Thin Edge Music Collective performs at the Array Space with guest artist Nilan Perera, and the Toy Piano Composers present a night of “inventions, oddities and hidden treasures” on September 20 at the Music Gallery. In a bit of a space switch-up, the Music Gallery is presenting an event at the Array Space on September 5 curated by Tad Michalak as part of their Departures series featuring Battle Trance + King Weather + Not the Wind Not the Flag.

Canadian Music Centre: Alongside Array and the Music Gallery, Toronto is fortunate to have the Canadian Music Centre as a space that supports new musical sounds. September events include a concert of North American music for flute and piano on September 13; an evening of words and music (texts by Gwendolyn MacEwen and Linda Hogan) on September 27; and a special event for Culture Days entitled “Create Your Own Graphic Score” with junctQín keyboard collective on September 28. The CMC has also announced their Nuit Blanche event on October 4, which will showcase the integration of global traditions into Canadian new music.

Guelph Jazz Festival: Jumping over now to the annual Guelph Jazz festival that runs September 3 to 7, there are a few performances that will no doubt be strong draws for musical experimenters. To celebrate the 100th anniversary of pioneering jazz artist Sun Ra’s arrival on planet Earth, the Sun Ra Arkestra offers a free performance at 2pm on September 6, followed by an evening performance of “Hymn to the Universe” along with the Coleman Lemieux & Company dance ensemble. The Ugly Beauties, featuring Marilyn Lerner, Matt Brubeck and Nick Fraser perform on the same day at 4pm, followed by a show on September 7 at 10:30am by renowned composer and keyboard genius Lui Pui Ming performing with Korean composer and vocalist Don-Won Kim. See also Ken Waxman’s Something in the Air column on page 73 in this issue.

On a final note for this month, the good news is that the possibilities and opportunities for the nurturing and growth of new and experimental music through thriving musical spaces is well underway. Now it’s up to the listeners to go out and experience the feast.

Additional Concerts:

Scott Thomson and Susanna Hood: “The Muted Note.” Premieres of new music, dance and poetry based on P.K. Page poems. September 5 to 7 and 27. (See next page.)

Composer Barbara Croall performs original works for traditional First Nations flutes, piano and other instruments. September 12 at Musideum.

Soundstreams: Violinist Daniel Hope is the soloist in Max Richter’s reinvention of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, September 30. See this month’s Classical and Beyond column, beginning on page 20.

Groundswell Festival with Nightwood Theatre: workshop production of Obeah Opera by composer Nicole Brooks. September 10 to 14.  See GTA Listings for details.

Wendalyn Bartley is a Toronto-based composer and electro-vocal sound artist. sounddreaming@gmail.com

Emerging and early career composers are making their mark all over the November concert calendar. No less than half a dozen upcoming Toronto events feature fresh and fascinating works by new, international and increasingly noticeable local names – sometimes in showcase formats, but just as often tucked into more traditional programming.

One of those more noticeable locals is composer Kevin Lau, who will have his symphonic work Artemis performed by the Sneak Peek Orchestra on November 6 at the Calvin Presbyterian Church. Lau is a remarkably prolific young composer, gifted with a strong control of his craft and an easily approachable musical voice. As a result, he already holds to his credit commissions and premieres from the likes of the Esprit Orchestra, the Toronto Symphony Youth Orchestra, the Toronto Philharmonia and the Cecilia String Quartet. He’s also co-founder with conductor Victor Cheng of Sneak Peek, one of Toronto’s fastest-rising symphonic ensembles, and one that specifically showcases the talents of this city’s emerging professionals.

Lau describes Artemis as “a musical portrait of the Greek goddess in the manner of Holst’s The Planets, whose seven movements are based on the Greek deities’ Roman counterparts. The movement “Mars, the Bringer of War” was particularly influential in the conception of this piece. At the same time, I sought to emphasize qualities which I thought would befit a more feminine warrior: speed and swiftness, lightness, agility.” Artemis will sit alongside Glenn Buhr’s slow and spacious symphonic miniature Akasha, and more classical fare from Brahms and Berlioz. For more info visit www.sneakpeekorchestra.com.

The following afternoon marks the beginning of Alain Trudel’s appointment as the Hannaford Street Silver Band’s principal guest conductor. Oddly enough, the programme will include a brass band arrangement of Holst’s The Planets and a new work from another of our local emerging talent, composer Rob Teehan. We heard a lot about Teehan last month during his residency at the Colours of Music Festival in Barrie, where he had no less than three world premieres, including two for major choral and orchestral forces.

When I asked him about his latest work, titled Wildfire, he explained “It’s very fast, very rhythmic, aggressive, somewhat dark, and it will push the players to their limit. I think I wrote it because I spent the summer writing beautiful, slow music and I needed a change of pace. It was nice to get back to brass writing, since that’s my original background, as a tuba player.” This is Teehan’s second time working with Trudel. The first was for his orchestral work Dream of Flying, which was premiered and recorded by the National Youth Orchestra of Canada, and subsequently nominated for a 2010 Juno. For more info about the concert and to get tickets, visit
www.hssb.ca.

On November 10 and 11, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra brings back the distinctive voice of early-career composer Krystof Maratka. We first heard of Maratka in 2004 with the world premiere of his Otisk, a TSO commission that came only two years after this Czech-born, Paris-based composer started making a significant mark in Europe. Now 38 years old – still an early age in any composer’s creative development cycle – Maratka has amassed commissions, premieres and residencies with some of the world’s leading cultural institutions, not to mention two CDs dedicated to his music. He returns to Toronto with his 2002 viola concerto Astrophonia, which has been described as a “poetic voyage on the origins of the cosmos.” The two-movement work is dedicated to his wife, violist Karine Lethiec, whose strong interest in the alliance between music and the universe has clearly inspired the concerto’s theme. At 23 minutes in length, it’s a substantial work around which Peter Oundjian has built this Slavic Celebration concert, including works by Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev and Janáček. For more details and to purchase tickets, visit www.tso.ca.

The centerpiece of this month’s emerging composer theme falls on November 14, when New Music Concerts plays host to Ensemble contemporain de Montréal +, and their biennial “Generation” tour. Building on its mandate to encourage and support musical creativity, ECM+’s project offers a unique and extensive professional development platform for composers under the age of 35. Since 1994, it has been discovering and nurturing the next generation of Canadian music creators, most of whom go on to make significant marks on the national and international music scene. The only project of its kind in Canada, Generation encourages musical research through live experimentation. Over the course of two years, four carefully selected young composers explore their musical voices by developing new works in collaboration with the ECM+ ensemble and their remarkable director Véronique Lacroix. The results are then presented in a cross-Canada tour, which – in addition to creating major exposure – builds new professional networks for these emerging talents.

The 2010 Generation composers are Simon Martin (Montreal), Christopher Mayo (Toronto/London, UK), Cassandra Miller (Victoria) and Gordon Williamson (Toronto/Bloomington, Indiana). Despite their young age, all of them are Associate Composers of the Canadian Music Centre, and many carry a cache of international experience and high-level accolades. For example, Gordon Williamson was a finalist in the CBC’s recent “Evolution” Young Composers Competition and Simon Martin has been a finalist in the prestigious Jules Léger Prize for Chamber Music. Chris Mayo and Cassandra Miller both already have international careers, most notably in the UK and the Netherlands respectively. Consequently, the Generation tour is a rare chance to hear some of the absolute best up-and-coming Canadian voices. For more info about the Generation program visit www.ecm.qc.ca. To purchase tickets for the November 14 concert at the Music Gallery visit www.musicgallery.org.

But the discovery of new musical voices doesn’t stop there. Both York University and the University of Toronto showcase new music by their student composers on November 16 and 30 respectively. On November 18, 32-year-old Polish-American (and now Canadian) composer Norbert Palej – a recent addition to the U of T faculty – joins clarinetist Peter Stoll on stage at Walter Hall in a free lunchtime concert of his works for clarinet. That same evening, the Gryphon Trio performs selections from their Young Composers Program alongside core repertoire by Ives, Beethoven and Dvorak for the Music Toronto series. So be sure to get in with the new via The WholeNote’s concert listings here.

Jason van Eyk is the Ontario Regional Director of the Canadian Music Centre. He can be contacted at newmusic@thewholenote.com.

Recent world events, and particularly what’s happening to our southern neighbours in the US, have had a great impact on most of us. I’ve been reflecting on the question that always seems to resurface throughout the ages during times of chaos and disturbance: how can music (and other creative arts) affect and support social change, transformation and even revolution? I agree with the notion that pursuing the creative act itself is one form of resistance. Yet I wonder what these times are asking of us regarding the creative process itself.

On November 23, I attended the Rainbow Nation concert presented by Soundstreams. It was a tribute to the legacy of Nelson Mandela and included a beautiful array of artistic styles and performers from South Africa, Canada and the US. During one of the short theatre skits that functioned as interludes between musical numbers, a conversation between a father and daughter brought home a profound truth. The father was distraught that his daughter was involved in student protests, particularly since his generation had struggled so much for the right to education. Her ringing reply was “Just listen.” The importance of listening is a message I’ve seen written over and over again in the numerous articles that have flooded my social media pages since the US election.

Warbler’s Roost

In my September column, I wrote about New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA)’s programming of three sound installations as part of the in/future Festival at Ontario Place, noting how the practice of creating site-responsive works requires attention to the multi-layered elements of any given environment.

A few weeks ago, I travelled to a place called Warbler’s Roost to participate in a listening and soundscape weekend. A small group of sound artists gathered at this artist retreat and performance space, located about one hour north of Huntsville, to engage in the process of listening, recording and creating. Organized by the Toronto Soundhackers Meetup group in tandem with Darren Copeland, artistic director of NAISA, we began early on Saturday morning with a soundwalk – a collective act of walking in silence and listening to the environment. We then spent time both individually and in small groups making recordings of both the soundscape and of our sonic interactions with the environment. Back in the Warbler’s Roost studio, we listened to the recordings and then, again collectively, created a short composition from them that was performed later that evening as part of a NAISA concert. Within one day, we went from the simple act of being present with the sounds around us to a form of witnessing through recording and interacting to the act of creation and sharing. In a sense, this is the heartbeat that drives the musical creative act: cultivating presence and witnessing through creativity. These simple actions point to a way forward in generating listening behaviours that can inform and model how to live in a complex and diverse world.

I often find myself writing in this column about the culture and practice of listening. For example, in the October column, I spoke about the listening legacies of both R. Murray Schafer and Pauline Oliveros, along with the next-generation approach of Oliveros’ collaborator Doug Van Nort.

Dealing with these larger questions of social impact is an ongoing process of paying attention to what is emerging from the grist of what is being offered by those committed practitioners involved in the day to day music-making world. So with these thoughts as a background, let’s turn now to what is happening locally in the upcoming months of December and January.

Stephen Clarke

Early in the new year, at Gallery 345 on January 8, Arraymusic Ensemble member Stephen Clarke will present a concert of solo piano works by four composers, each of whom has a very distinctive voice: Giacinto Scelsi (Italy) Udo Kasemets (Canada), Horatiu Rădulescu (Romania/France) and Gerald Barry (Ireland). I talked with Clarke about the repertoire and his interest in the music of these composers, two of whom he has had personal friendships with.

It is the more mystical approach that both Schelsi and Rădulescu share that intrigues Clarke, as both these composers incorporate different influences from Eastern philosophies and religions. In fact it was Rădulescu’s interest in Hindu and Byzantine music and the way it works with natural resonances that sent him in the direction of pursuing what is known as spectral composition, a style that focuses on working with the overtone or harmonic series. Clarke will be performing Rădulescu’s 1968 piano sonata, Cradle to Abysses, a tightly structured atonal work with a mystical atmosphere, which was written just before the composer made his shift to spectral-based music. It is often thought that spectral composition began in the mid 1970s with French composers such as Grisey and Murail. However, Rădulescu’s forays into working with overtones, which can take one into a deeper relationship with the natural acoustic world, predate the French school.

To highlight the contrast between spectral and non-spectral approaches, Clarke chose to include Udo Kasemets’ Feigenbaum Cascades (1995) in the program. Hence the title of the concert: “Cascades and Abysses.” The Kasemets piece, a spectral work written originally for Clarke, works with the harmonic series in a “beautifully pure mathematical way that speaks for itself.” In sharp contrast to this simplicity, Clarke will perform two works by Gerald Barry, a composer known for his more hyperactive and ironic approach as demonstrated in his ability to use banal material and infuse it with a highly charged energy. In Humiliated and Insulted, Barry’s piece written for Clarke in 2013, the audience will hear a work that sounds like a congregation singing a hymn, yet something has gone terribly wrong. Everyone is singing together, but not from the same spot in the score and, to make it more pronounced, no one even seems to notice.

Other opportunities to hear Clarke perform include a concert in early March where he will present a complete program of Rădulescu’s music on the Bosendorfer piano at St. Andrew’s Church. This piano comes equipped with extended lower notes, which are called for by the composer in these works. This concert will give fans of spectral composition ample opportunity to hear Rădulescu’s masterful approach. Clarke will also be performing on February 5 in a concert of works by Italy’s Salvatore Sciarrino, this year’s visiting composer at the University of Toronto’s New Music Festival. This final concert of the festival is a collaboration with New Music Concerts during which four of Sciarrino’s works spanning 1981 to 2015 will be heard.

U of T New Music Festival

Sciarrino, one of Europe’s leading composers, writes music that seeks to portray the fragility of life, often creating pieces that are on the edge of audibility and pushing the instruments to their extreme limits. In his biography, he describes his style as “leading to a different way of listening, a global emotional realization, of reality as well as of one’s self.” Sciarrino’s music can also be heard during the festival at a concert featuring music for piano on January 30, which will also include works by Nono, Fedele and Berio.

The festival highlight will be the performance on February 1 of Sciarrino’s opera The Killing Flower (Luci mie traditrici) produced by Wallace Halladay and Toronto New Music Projects. The libretto is based upon the play Il tradimento per l’onore, which was first performed in Rome in 1664. A story of intrigue, love, betrayal and murder, the opera has become Sciarrino’s most often performed work out of his 14 music-theatre pieces composed to date. He recognizes the influence cinema plays in the creation of works for the stage and approaches his own creative process with this in mind. He openly declares that what he really wants through his composing is “to change the world.” Additional festival events include the performance of the Karen Kieser Prize-winning work by Sophie Dupuis, Perceptions de La Fontaine, a noontime lecture by Sciarrino on February 2, and a concert of music by contemporary Italian composers on February 4.

Electroacoustic Technologies

Turning now to innovative performers using electroacoustic technologies, two women making waves in this field will be visiting Toronto over the next two months. First, American composer and sound artist Andrea Parkins, along with her ensemble, will be performing at the Music Gallery on December 20, using interactive electronics to create relationships and contrasts between the real and the ephemeral. She will collaborate in this performance with local artists Lina Allemano, Germaine Liu and Jason Doell. On January 7, theremin virtuoso Carolina Eyck from Germany will perform the world premiere of her latest composition as part of a New Music Concerts program. She will also be in town to celebrate the release of hew new CD, Fantasias for Theremin and String Quartet. Other composers whose works will be presented at the NMC event include Canadians D. Andrew Stewart and Omar Daniel, Bohuslav Martinů from Czechoslovakia and Maurice Ravel.

Two events that Soundstreams will be offering will be the return of the popular “Electric Messiah,” December 5 to 7, featuring wild and wacky renditions of Handel’s classic with singers Christine Duncan, Carla Huhtanen, Gabriel Dharmoo and Jeremy Dutcher, with electronic backup from Cheldon “Slowpitch” Paterson on turntables, Jeff McLeod on organ and John Gzowski on guitar. Moving ahead to February, Soundstreams is celebrating 100 years of Estonia’s independence by bringing the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir to town on February 2, performing world premieres by Canadian composers Omar Daniel and Toronto-born Riho Esko Maimets (who is of Estonian heritage), along with compositions by Arvo Pärt.

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Canadian Music Centre

Dec 12: Centrediscs CD Launch: Canadian Flute Masterpieces.

Dec 15: “Class Axe” – a concert of new works for classical guitar by M. Côté, J. Denenberg, M. Horrigan, A. Jang, T. Kardonne and S. Marwood.

Canadian Opera Company

Jan 5: “Vocal Series” – First Nations mezzo-soprano Marion Newman presents a concert on the theme of reconciliation, featuring works by Canadian composers.

Feb 1: “Dance Series” – Peggy Baker Dance Projects; music by Debashis Sinha.

Other

Dec 12: Toronto Masque Theatre – No Tongue Will Tally by Harry Somers and Claude Bissell.

Jan 10: Music Toronto – Sean Chen plays two works by Ligeti, as well as his own piano transcriptions.

Jan 21: Music Gallery – “The New Flesh.”

Wendalyn Bartley is a Toronto-based composer and electro-vocal sound artist. sounddreaming@gmail.com.