On a summer evening, outside this art gallery-cum-coffeehouse somewhere on the Gulf Islands, silver-green alders, not yet dry and summer-drab, sway, as deer graze in a meadow beyond, and small birds sing. Inside, a young couple performs. Julia Ulehla has spurned the venue’s microphone and is keening deep into the timber-framed space with a voiceContinue reading “Dálava explores the landscape of song”
Author Archives: Musicworks
Vicky Chow Is Just Warming Up
Against a deep blue, backlit stage, Vicky Chow sat at the baby grand in the Scheuer Auditorium at the Jewish Museum on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in April 2017, flanked by forty speakers hanging from stands. For an uninterrupted hour, she played dizzying sequences of interlocking melodies against a latticework of pulse tones. The pieceContinue reading “Vicky Chow Is Just Warming Up”
Tate Carson’s Before, I wandered as a diversion
Tate Carson is a composer and upright bassist from New Orleans, Louisiana. Before, I wandered as a diversion (2016), for clarinet and live electronics, won second prize in Musicworks’ 2016 electronic music composition contest. Listen to the full piece, streaming on this page. Here’s what Carson has to say about this beautiful composition: “This pieceContinue reading “Tate Carson’s Before, I wandered as a diversion”
Gong Punks and Culture Bombs
Gentle and intense, soothing and exhilarating, traditional Filipino kulintang music provides the kind of richly immersive experience that makes an hour go by in what seems like a minute. The intertwining, hypnotic rhythms of its gongs and drums rise and fall as the players change tempos and improvise together over repeating patterns to create aContinue reading “Gong Punks and Culture Bombs”
Cerro Bellavista Rooftop, Valparaíso
When rain falls, it falls into the open-air stairwell unopposed, rattling metal banisters and pattering on tile. Human sounds congeal below you like wet papier-mâché: gentle voices ricocheting around the stucco walls; kids’ laughter bubbling out of an open window; loose sandals slapping themselves silly on the stairs. A flute that’s been carving filigree inContinue reading “Cerro Bellavista Rooftop, Valparaíso”
Musicworks #128: From the Ancient to the Avant-Garde
GONG PUNKS AND CULTURE BOMBS Traditional Filipino kulintang, a style of orchestral music played on a set of brass gongs, is a mesmerizing and exhilarating mixture of the ancient and the avant-garde. This authentic indigenous music has been played in the southern Philippines for centuries, and it has endured despite the many waves of culturalContinue reading “Musicworks #128: From the Ancient to the Avant-Garde”
GONGS ARE US
My childhood memories of gongs in action are mostly associated with entertainment spectacles: snooze-interrupting crashes at symphony matinees, the bare-chested Gongman swinging a mallet in the Rank Organisation’s film logo, a minor celebrity banishing a contestant on The Gong Show. But during those years—thanks to my globetrotting grandparents, and the photos they took and LPsContinue reading “GONGS ARE US”
MUSICWORKS SEEKS FRESH NEW VOICES
Position: Director on the Musicworks Board of Directors (Volunteer Position) Who We Are Musicworks inspires, connects, and broadens a global community of people with “curious ears,” who want to discover and better understand diverse and venturesome Canadian artists, practices, and ideas in music and sound through reading, following, listening to, or participating in Musicworks content. MusicworksContinue reading “MUSICWORKS SEEKS FRESH NEW VOICES”
Eighty-five scores celebrate Pauline Oliveros
Still Listening: New Works in Honour of Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016) is a project initially conceived to mark Oliveros’ eighty-fifth birthday on May 30, 2017. Eighty-five artists were invited to create eighty-five new compositions, each with a duration of eighty-five seconds. Organized by trumpeter Eric Lewis and flutist Ellen Waterman, with help from McGill University studentsContinue reading “Eighty-five scores celebrate Pauline Oliveros”
Amanda Dawn Christie’s Requiem for Radio
In 2012 the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) began to tear down its Radio-Canada International towers in Sackville, New Brunswick (home to some 6,000 people and best known as the locale of the beloved SappyFest). The dismantling of the towers wasn’t just another chapter in the public broadcaster’s ongoing fight to keep its funding, but somethingContinue reading “Amanda Dawn Christie’s Requiem for Radio”