Featured Articles
Ayelet Rose Gottlieb's Open-Heart Tunings There’s a faint but persistent ringing coming from the southwest corner of Ayelet Rose Gottlieb’s Vancouver apartment. We discover one of her young twins picking purposefully at the keys of a brightly coloured toy piano. The other twin comes over, attracted by this large stranger[...] Read more
Carmen Braden Raises the Volume on the Subarctic “I'M JUST GOING TO TOUCH IT ON THE TOP," SAYS CARMEN BRADEN, LOOKING AT A BLACKENED PORCUPINE-LIKE LUMP OF ICE. "WHAT I THINK WILL HAPPEN: IT'S JUST GOING TO FALL APART. READY?" It’s May 2014, and she’s talking to a camera. Her now-[...] Read more
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
The Restless Sonic Architecture of William Kuo Adjudicating applications for an emerging-composer program is a sort of high-volume evaluation scenario that necessitates a concentrated mode of listening in order to provide fair and sufficiently individualized appraisals. But every so often, you come across a candidate whose music is so[...] Read more
New Age Doom Steps Forward The day of my interview with the Vancouver experimental-metal duo New Age Doom began with the heart-sinking news that legendary dub artist Lee “Scratch” Perry had passed away. After making my way through the winding side streets of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, I arrived[...] Read more
Amy Brandon is Capturing Intimate Chaos The first time I met guitarist-composer Amy Brandon, we talked about the lineage of a particular sound. Her 2019 composition Mimic—written while she participated in the Canadian League of Composers’[...] Read more
Label Profile: Redshift Records We won’t go into the details—because, frankly, we don’t understand them—but in astronomy a redshift is a way to measure an object’s placement in space, and its movement vis-à-vis the earth. “It’s like the Doppler effect, but[...] Read more
Erin Gee Sings the Body Electronic SHOULD YOU EVER FIND YOURSELF IN A CONFINED SPACE WITH ERIN GEE, PREPARE TO BE ENTERTAINED, AND PERHAPS ALSO PUZZLED—AT LEAST BRIEFLY. “If someone meets me in an elevator,” she tells Musicworks in a telephone interview[...] Read more
Neither Here Nor There: Musical Identity in the Global Flow It is impossible to stand still nowadays in the face of worldwide security concerns. With climate change, wars, oppressive political climates, and alarming epidemics, the ability to move around physically has become a humanitarian necessity for many. The commodification and hyperrealism of[...] Read more
Cléo Palacio-Quintin “My work as a composer is eminently solitary. I feel like an island, but each island is a world, and in turn I am composed of these many worlds.” This is how Montreal composer, hyper-flute inventor, and performer Cléo Palacio-Quintin describes her work. Introspective and[...] Read more
Camino De Santiago De Compostela FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY In the spring of 2010 we undertook a walk to Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain, a pilgrimage site since the Middle Ages. It’s the traditional burial site of Santiago, or St. James, one of Christ’s apostles who[...] Read more
What's Inside Musicworks 148? ON THE COVER Stefana Fratila is a Toronto-based, Romania-born composer and sound designer whose work in sound and love of sci-fi led her to wonder: “If each planet in our solar system were a different room, what[...] Read more
