Newsfeed
August 11 2023
In 2015, Steve Cowan and I began a collaborative project creating music from the dialects of Newfoundland. We had no idea that this project would take eight years to complete, but here we are! Our work is culminating in an album, One Foot in the Past, that is scheduled for release by Centrediscs in November 2023. It involved many different influences and many strains of research, which we have documented here.
March 23 2023
I'm delighted to share a new video of the guitar-flute version of my piece Folk Suite, performed by the incredible Adam Cicchillitti and Lara Deutsch! This piece was originally commissioned by the marimba-cello duo Stick&Bow, and it's been amazing to see it take on a life of its own with performances around the world by several different ensembles. Folk Suite will be featured on Adam and Lara’s album Wanderlust, which will be released this summer by Leaf Music. https://youtu.be/WDgFEeeib_E
March 7 2023
I'm happy to share a cartoon that I helped create! It's an educational video produced by the ACTOR Project about how people associate musical sounds with colours. The star of the show is Cameron Chameleon, a character from one of my compositions, and a lot of the music in the soundtrack is mine as well. Many thanks to Ben Duinker and the ACTOR team for all your great work on this! https://youtu.be/WwaoH-JVoeE
February 13 2023
My newest academic publication is out! I'm proud to have been part of this project with the amazing team of Lindsey Reymore, Caroline Traube, Zach Wallmark, and Charis Saitis, chipping away at the enormous question of how musical sound becomes meaningful. In this paper, we report a large online experiment that studied the words people use to describe musical sounds. We were specifically interested in how those descriptive words change in relation to musical instruments, registers, and pitches. Many thanks to the ACTOR Project for funding this project! https://online.ucpress.edu/mp/article/40/3/253/195233/Timbre-Semantic-Associations-Vary-Both-Between-and
January 18 2023
Steve Cowan and I are thrilled to present a concert of all-original music for guitar, electronics, and recorded speech, with me doing a cameo on piano. 5pm in Tanna Schulich Hall at McGill, free admission. We are so proud of the program we have put together, and so excited to share it publicly for the first time. Featuring three brand new pieces, two new versions of older pieces, and two new folksong arrangements. https://www.mcgill.ca/music/channels/event/words-and-music-music-dialect-compositions-guitar-electronics-and-recorded-speech-342109
January 16 2023
My concert with Steve Cowan is this Wednesday, 5pm in Tanna Schulich Hall at McGill! We are so excited to present this program, which we have been developing for literally eight years. There is a great range of music incorporating both traditional and experimental elements, with lots of themes growing out of our Newfoundland heritage. Here is one of the simpler, prettier tunes: my arrangement of River Driver, a traditional folksong collected in Newfoundland in the 1950s. https://youtu.be/bMABuvc-brE
July 10 2022
Happy to have my piece The Sky is Always Young featured on CBC Choral Concert, hosted by Frédéricka Petit-Homme! Performed by Lady Cove under the direction of Kellie Walsh. https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-419-choral-concert/clip/15924070-choral-concert-fredericka-petit-homme
June 16 2022
My paper "Comparing Temporal Fictions in Tonality and Triadic Post-Tonality: Chopin's Fourth Ballade as a Link Between the Ages" is now published in Music and Time: Psychology, Philosophy, Practice, edited by Michelle Phillips and Matthew Sargeant! There are many interesting contributions in this volume; I had the pleasure of reading some of them while we were working on the book. Highly recommend if you are interested in music and time. https://boydellandbrewer.com/9781783277087/music-and-time/
May 27 2022
I'm happy to share the video recording of the first scene of my new chamber opera! "Denise," from What Mommy Needs, was just premiered this afternoon at the Watershed Festival - Reimagining Music Theatre. Many thanks and congratulations to all involved! I am proud of the work we have done, and excited for next steps of the project. https://vimeo.com/712445368
May 29 2022
Many thanks to Martin D'aigle for premiering my piece Freeze! (2022, augmented drum kit) last Thursday, and to Edu Meneses for his amazing work on gesture control and mappings. In this piece, the electronics are controlled gesturally with wrist bands, giving the drummer the power to conduct and sculpt the sound with his hands in real time. It also gives him control of things like melody, harmony, and sustain, which are not usually associated with the drum kit sounds but are drawn out of them electronically. Here is a recording of the dress rehearsal: https://youtu.be/Ib16r6o3uHE
April 25 2022
My student piano piece Wasps is included in the Royal Conservatory’s Celebration Series, level 3 études! https://shop.rcmusic.com/products/piano-etudes-level-3
April 9 2022
Many thanks to Megaria Halim, Frangel López Ceseña, and Joel Robertson for their recent performance of my old piece Urban Nocturne No. 2! This was the first piece I composed in my masters degree, and was originally premiered by Perri Lo, Josh Wood, and Christina Barry. So nice to be reminded of this music from another stage in my life, and also a nice coincidence that both performances were at Western University! The piece itself attempts to capture a series of feelings I associate with the nighttime. https://youtu.be/rmvUqm1IhJk
March 17 2022
My latest academic article "The career of metaphor hypothesis and vocality in contemporary music" is now published in Interdisciplinary Science Reviews! Many thanks to J Marchand Knight and Rolf Wallin for providing figures for the paper. https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/S7DDMPAMGB6KQUXVSEPH/full
Nov 22 2021
Super excited for the release of Martin D'aigle's new CD Mossy Cobblestone, featuring my percussion quartet arrangement of Andy Akiho's awesome piece Karakurenai! (Martin is the quartet ) Check it out on Bandcamp, https://martindrum.bandcamp.com/album/mossy-cobblestone
15th June 2021
Huge congratulations to Steve Cowan and Adam Cicchillitti, who just won the East Coast Music Award for Classical Recording of the Year!! The winning recording is their album Focus, which features my piece River and Cave.
23rd April 2021
Michael Ibsen premiered this incredible video of my piece Shadow Prism at the recent 21st Century Guitar conference. Amazing work integrating the geometrical graphics in the notation with beautiful colour schemes, lighting, and subtle filtering in the video. Fantastic musical interpretation of the piece as well!
23rd April 2021
LCSNA SPRING 2021 VIRTUAL MEETING – LEWIS CARROLL SOCIETY OF NORTH AMERICA
I’m stoked to be presenting my piece Furiouser and Spuriouser at the meeting of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America this weekend, alongside fellow Newfoundlander and Alice in Wonderland enthusiast Kathleen Allan, who conducted the premiere!
22nd April 2021
Lots of exciting stuff happening this year with my friends Stick&Bow (Juan Sebastian Delgado and Krystina Marcoux). I love this beautiful video that they made of the piece I composed for them, Folk Suite, produced by the fine folks at Leaf Music. The Facebook video has over 40k views! And coming soon, we will be doing the first live performances of their show Bavela, for which I composed a lot of the music and provide some narration.
22nd April 2021
My friends in Bathurst, NB did a concert of my music last July and it was an amazing treat, especially at a time when most performances were shuttered due to the pandemic. Jaeyoung Chong’s performance of my cello solo Séläh was a highlight, and I’m excited to share the video!
8th October 2020
Hey folks! This has been a year of lots of instability and uncertainty, but there’s still lots of exciting stuff happening. It’s been a while since I posted, so I’ll use this one to catch up on a few different fronts. See below for some links to new recordings and media!
I started a new postdoctoral position at Université de Montréal in September 2020, where I am very lucky to have the support of FRQSC to continue composing and researching for the next two years.
I have a bunch of new composition projects in the works, including a 3D audio recording and VR experience of my guitar orchestra piece fantaisie harmonique with all twelve parts played by the inimitable Steve Cowan (coming soon)! I’m composing music for a brand new show by my good friends Juan Sebastian Delgado and Krystina Marcoux (Stick & Bow), and working on a cello concerto that is scheduled to be premiered next year (if the pandemic fates allow).
I’ve also got several upcoming academic publications, which follow two articles from earlier this year, in Journal of New Music Research and Organised Sound. I’ll post the new ones as they are released in the coming months.
Thanks for reading, and best wishes to everybody through all the challenges we’re all facing right now. As kids have taken to painting in the windows of Montreal - ça va bien aller!
7th October 2020
I was proud to compose ‘Reunion’ for The Convolution Project, an initiative of Choir Alberta that used used the digital technique of convolution reverb to virtually simulate the resonance of churches and concert halls in Alberta. Singers recorded their parts individually, and we used convolution to virtually return them to their choral spaces. Video footage was shot in those same spaces, as well as in beautiful natural landscapes in Alberta.
7th October 2020
One of the things I really loved about my postdoc with the ACTOR project was producing content for their website. Two of the last major ones I did were a research-creation module about speech and speech-transcription in contemporary music, focusing on my piece Seven Beginnings, and a video presentation about my approach to Timbre-Based Composition for Guitar. Check them out, and while you’re there, check out the great content being produced by the new postdocs Lindsey Reymore and Matt Zeller!
7th October 2020
Cameron Chameleon was my last large ensemble performance before the Covid-19 pandemic hit. I’m proud to share this beautiful video of the premiere. The piece began as a colourful story designed to teach children about combining musical sounds, but it wound up having a powerful moral message as well, about not being afraid to show your true colours. I’m so thankful for the great experience of working with Florence Blain Mbaye, Guillaume Bourgogne, and the McGill Contemporary Music Ensemble!
5th February 2020
I’m super excited for the premiere of my new piece for narrator and 20-piece orchestra, Cameron Chameleon! It’s a kids story intended to introduce concepts of orchestration through colourful characters, images, and events, and it’s full of theatrics and colourful accessories. It will be premiered by the McGill Contemporary Music Ensemble, conducted by Guillaume Bourgogne, and narrated by Florence Blain-Mbaye.
Nice piece on the project on the McGill webpage here!