Featured Articles
First-place winner, Musicworks’ 2017 Electronic Music Composition contest The glitchy, vaguely dystopian composition constructed from manipulated vocals is almost widespread enough now to warrant its own genre tag. Laurie Anderson is, of course, its foremother. Recent interesting entries include Holly Herndon’s Platform, Katie Gately’s Pipes, and Giant[...] Read more
The Ondes Martenot is Making New Waves No one knows exactly how many functioning ondes Martenot are in use around the world today, but an informed, conservative estimate puts their number at sixty. In the course of half a century, Maurice Martenot, the creator of this most sensitive electronic musical instrument, was able to[...] Read more
Musicworks Unveils 2021 Contest Winners TORONTO, CANADA, July 21, 2022: Musicworks is thrilled to announce the winners of its 2021 Electronic Music Composition Contest. Portuguese composer Mariana Vieira has won first prize with her composition The Unexpected Encounter with Diversity. “Winning the[...] Read more
Jessie Lausé's Movements Jessie Lausé wins second place in the 2021 Musicworks Electronic Music Composition Contest for Movements, a three-movement work for eight-channel mixed media. “[Movements] explores the melodic and registral capabilities of modified human and spatial[...] Read more
Eve Egoyan and David Rokeby's Surface Tension Surface Tension is a thirty-five-minute collaborative interarts work that the two of us (pianist Eve Egoyan and installation artist David Rokeby) created for Disklavier piano and interactive video. The piece explores the relationship between what we do separately in our respective[...] 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
Joshua Abrams’ Natural Information Society THERE'S AN ENGAGING CATCH-AS-CATCH-CAN LOOK to Joshua Abrams’ Natural Information Society, something that immediately conveys a certain spontaneity, yet disguises—slightly—the complexity of the music. During the band’s North American tour in May 2015, which[...] Read more
Petra Glynt experiments in celebration Ancient rock carvings at Petroglyphs Provincial Park in eastern Ontario inspired Alexandra Mackenzie to call her latest solo musical project Petra Glynt. Evoking rock, ancient cultures, flashes of reflected light, and the enduring power of art, the name seems perfectly apt. Petra Glynt may[...] Read more
The Musical Colours of Dominique Fils-Aimé On the 2004 live-concert recording Tour de Force, the renowned American poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron introduces his 1981 song “Is That Jazz?”: “Go to your record store . . . look at the bottom shelf, you will find a box called miscellaneous. We are miscellaneous. We[...] Read more
David Berezan's Tongue Drum Third place in the 2021 Musicworks Electronic Music Composition Contest was awarded to U.K.-based composer David Berezan's Tongue Drum. The piece premiered online in May 2021 at the European Art Science Technology Network for Digital Creativity (EASTN-DC) in Corfu[...] Read more
Matt Rogalsky It’s supposed to be beautiful, but I can’t shake the feeling of there being something ominous about this. Imagine you’re approaching an installation by Matt Rogalsky, and down the hall you hear whispers of . . . what? something you recognize—or do you?[...] Read more
