Featured Articles

Stéphane Roy's Avec le temps | Bekah Simms' subsume This is final post in a series about the prize and honourable mention winners of the 2022 Musicworks Electronic Music Composition Contest.   HONOURABLE MENTION:  Stéphane Roy's Avec le temps…   Time passing like a quiet caravan, this[...] Read more

Sound Notes

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

Sound Bite William Littler Issue 117

Avatar Orchestra Metaverse FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY   Avatar Orchestra Metaverse is a global collective making new music within the virtual-reality platform Second Life, an online three-dimensional program that allows users to interact through in-world avatars (users’ digital[...] Read more

Visions of sound Tina M. Pearson Issue 106

Andrew Staniland accelerates toward the next idea IN 2013, NASA CONFIRMED THAT the  Voyager 1 probe had become the first manmade object to cross the heliopause, leaving the bounds of our solar system and entering interstellar space. In addition to its scientific instruments, Voyager 1 was famously carrying a Golden Record entitled[...] Read more

Profile Jonathan Bunce Issue 122

Christine Duncan Unleashes the Elements IT ALL CAME BACK SO FAST: the Whip, the Punch, the Elements. All those gestures unlocked my voice and made it respond exactly as it was supposed to—even after a five-year absence.   Late last year, I embedded myself with the Element Choir, the world’s leading[...] Read more

Featured Article Jonathan Bunce Issue 124

Sarah Peeble`s Audio Bee Booth FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY   Pollination Wunder Station is a wunderkammer—cabinet of curiosities—full of fascinating living things. The piece is part habitat interpretation, part bio art, part sound installation, and part sculpture. It is one in a[...] Read more

Visions of sound Sarah Peebles Issue 111

Richard Marsella “Good evening and welcome to the Friendly Rich Show. My name is Friendly Rich. Thank you. And I’ll be your loyal host this evening. Behind me, my mystery-meat orchestra, the Lollipop People. No need to clap, kids. Tonight’s show is full of the good stuff. We got dirty crank[...] Read more

Featured Article Matthew Pioro Issue 107

Ana Sokolović wants you to enjoy her imagination “Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms / Inside your head, and people in them, acting.”   These lines from “The Old Fools,” English postwar poet Philip Larkin’s fearsome ode to aging, sparked Montreal composer Ana Sokolović’s full-[...] Read more

Featured Article Holly Harris Issue 134

Christopher Mayo In 2005, Christopher Mayo had a summer that unexpectedly changed his approach to composing. The Toronto-born composer spent three weeks at the Bang on a Can Summer Music Institute in North Adams, Massachusetts, where he came into contact with composers Michael Gordon, David Lang, Julia Wolfe[...] Read more

Featured Article Julian Cowley Issue 110

Jean-Sebastien Audet’s Songs of Ephemera Jean-Sebastien Audet and I drink coffee in a café on Toronto’s Queen Street West, as we try to pin down his elusive music. The man who has kindly given us his larger table is now squeezed into a corner with his laptop and is feigning interest in nondescript wall art. He perks up[...] Read more

Featured Article Chaka V. Grier Issue 131

What's Inside Musicworks 136? The Spring 2020 issue is a one-stop, one-of-a-kind sonic journey. Most of the stories were assigned, written, and edited before the lockdown, due to the global COVID-19 health crisis, took hold. Events referred to or advertised in this issue were not yet cancelled at press time but likely[...] Read more

Featured Article Issue 136

The Passion and Curiosity of Barbara Hannigan “An absolute stroke of luck for opera” is just one of the countless accolades Canadian-born, Amsterdam-based soprano Barbara Hannigan has received for her performances of both classical and contemporary music. Composers and musicians she has worked with are unanimous in their[...] Read more

Profile René van Peer Issue 121