Featured Articles
Fuhong Shi Closes the Distance If Canada has any meaning to most Chinese, it is likely through a widely read essay written by the late Chairman Mao in praise of Dr. Norman Bethune, the Montreal doctor who ministered to Mao’s suffering soldiers during the Long March of the late 1930s. Musically,[...] Read more
What's inside Musicworks 134? The artists in the Fall 2019 issue expand their perspectives through innovative collaborations and combos—they just can’t get enough! Order Musicworks 134 now. Ana Sokolović Serbian-born Canadian composer Ana Sokolović's fantastical,[...] Read more
The Astral Excursions of John Mills-Cockell The imagination of electronic composer John Mills-Cockell exists in a liminal space. His music, with its neon-pastoral glow, feels neither jarringly futuristic nor soothingly nostalgic. Nevertheless, as the very first Canadian owner of a Moog synthesizer (purchased the same day Wendy Carlos[...] Read more
Nicole Lizée invites us to hear things her way Nicole Lizée is a huge fan of Alfred Hitchcock, science-fiction films, and Lars von Trier, the maverick Danish director whose Dogme (dogma), about film, inspires her own reflection on how to compose music. She says composers should be just as bold and inventive about creating music as von[...] Read more
Backward Music What function do record labels fulfill in an era of streaming and algorithmic music discovery? What do labels offer artists and listeners when the means of music access and distribution are changing at a rapid clip? Kyle Cunjak, who is a musician and the owner-operator of[...] Read more
The Idiosyncratic Musicality of Marc Sabat The emergence of Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique in the early 1920s not only presented an altogether new conception of pitch in music, it also prompted a dramatic and widespread shift in the fundamental thinking surrounding Western concert music. Its latent quasiscientific[...] Read more
Jeff Morton FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY I imagine that what I hear echoing off the walls of the white-cube gallery is the proceedings of a robot congress, a cacophonous, fevered debate on robot rights—and not a single little robot agrees with any other. I detect[...] Read more
Shift Your Frequency! Ready to submit to our twelfth annual Electronic Music Composition Contest? Read the rules below and ENTER here. Please share this announcement with your friends, audiences, and communities. Our annual juried contest spotlights new[...] Read more
What's Inside Musicworks 143? Settle into an autumnal groove with our Fall 2022 issue and direct your curious ears toward new aesthetic coordinates. ORDER YOUR PHYSICAL COPY OF MUSICWORKS 143 FROM OUR SHOP. or SUPPORT MUSICWORKS, A REGISTERED NON-PROFIT, WITH AN ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTION. ON[...] Read more
Jean-Philippe Jullin's Nadir and Diana Lawryshyn's Streams of Consciousness The 2021 Musicworks Electronic Music Composition Contest awarded two artists with honourable mentions: Jean-Philippe Jullin for Nadir and Diana Nadia Lawryshyn for Streams of Consciousness. JEAN-PHILIPPE JULLIN Born in 1995 in Marseille, France, Jean-Philippe[...] Read more
James Rolfe FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY. I first met James Rolfe nearly twenty years ago, when we were finalists in the 1990 edition of the CBC National Radio Competition for Young Composers. As a frequent visitor to Rolfe’s Toronto apartment at that time, I was afforded an insider[...] Read more
A message from the Musicworks Board of Directors The Board of Directors of Musicworks acknowledges that the new and experimental music scenes covered in the magazine are built on a foundation of systemic racism, and that through our content we have facilitated and upheld that system. Musicworks is a long-standing publication dedicated to[...] Read more
