Bekah Simms’ Skinscape received an honourable mention from the jury of Musicworks’ 2018 Electronic Music Composition Contest.
Skinscape is a work for flute and fixed media inspired by the transformation of something intimately familiar into something processed and alien, particularly through the lens of tattooing.
“Using almost exclusively flute samples for the fixed media part, the sounds capable of being made by the soloist are transformed, and imitate the sometimes-regular, sometimes-chaotic percussive attack of tattoo needles in a busy parlour. The work was commissioned by the Flute New Music Consortium, an American commissioning body, for their Flute Artist Competition. "Skinscape" acted as a test piece, with four finalists each performing the work in March, 2018. Since then, the piece has been performed extensively in the United States by members of the consortium.
Bekah Simms hails from St. John's, Newfoundland and now lives in Toronto. Her music has been featured across North America, and in Italy, Germany, and the UK and been interpreted by a diverse range of top-tier performers including Esprit Orchestra, Continuum Contemporary Music, the Victoria Symphony Orchestra, the Madawaska Quartet, TorQ Percussion Quartet, and Duo Concertante. She is the co-founder and co-artistic director with August Murphy-King of Caution Tape Sound Collective, which has been presenting concerts of new, boundary-pushing repertoire since 2015. Bekah has been the recipient of over 20 awards and prizes, including the 2017 Toronto Emerging Composer Award and the 2018 Karen Kieser Prize in Canadian Music. Her composition Granitic was nominated for the 2019 Juno Award for Classical Composition of the Year.
Elliott Lupp’s Hinge received an honourable mention from the jury of Musicworks’ 2018 Electronic Music Composition Contest.
Hinge joins together acoustic and electroacoustic properties derived from the hammered dulcimer. While creating an overall texture that exemplifies both separately the piece is, for a majority of the time, perceptually unified. The work can also be thought of as a timbral exploration of the instrument; in terms of its traditional timbral capabilities, the hammered-dulcimer can be limiting. By bowing the instrument as well as processing its sound in real time, the instrument’s timbral and gestural identity is expanded. With respect to the interaction between performer and computer, the work is heavily reliant on the performer's ability to make musical decisions according to improvisatory guidelines, as well as their ability to anticipate and respond to the processed sound of the dulcimer.
Elliott Lupp is pursuing a PhD in composition and music technology at Northwestern University. His music has been performed at CHIMEfest, Electronic Music Midwest, Fulcrumpoint New Music Project, N_SEME 2019, MOXsonic 2019, and Electroacoustic Barn Dance among other festivals and venues. He has written the Dutch/American trio Sonic Hedgehog, the Atar Piano Trio, FoundSound New Music Ensemble, various members of MOCREP, The Chicago Composer's Orchestra, Fonema Consort, and Ensemble Dal Niente. He is the winner of the 2019 Fisk: Franklin G. Fisk Composition Award for Chamber Music. His work was featured at the 2019 SEAMUS Conference at Berklee College of Music and Boston Conservatory.
