Featured Articles
Charlemagne Palestine Pulls Out the Stops Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there. What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more. —Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation” [...] Read more
Reclaiming Chinatown In many respects, the year 2020 was a time of reckoning for Asian Americans. Hot on the heels of the landmark Asian ensemble-cast blockbuster Crazy Rich Asians, South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho made history with Parasite, which took home the first Academy Award for Best Picture ever to be[...] Read more
Lina Allemano is Splitting Time If Toronto’s avant-jazz and free-improv community has a living room, it’s the Southern Cross Lounge, the front room of the Tranzac Club—a cluttered bandstand with an ancient upright, a friendly bar in the back corner, a familiar audience—where drummer Nick Fraser[...] Read more
Carmen Vanderveken is full of surprises Quebec-born composer Carmen Vanderveken was commissioned by the Dutch annual festival Gaudeamus Muziekweek to write a piece for a quartet featuring Dutch bass clarinetist Fie Schouten. An earlier piece sheds light on the shape and sound of the music Carmen Vanderveken is[...] Read more
Webber/Morris Big Band On a cold January evening in 2019, Angela Morris approaches the bandstand of Manhattan’s Jazz Gallery and announces that she will be able to conduct her piece that night. A few days ago it was still uncertain. Weeks earlier, on Christmas Eve, she broke her shoulder, making the arm[...] Read more
The Warp and Weft of Kelly Ruth In the history of musical instruments, the questions asked are pretty standard: Who played it? What did they play? How did it evolve? Kelly Ruth’s instrument, the weaving loom, carries an entirely different kind of history. It brings to mind mythology, solitary artisans, beautiful[...] Read more
Xylem Records: Building Community for Live Coding The exploratory, collectivist ethos of the U.K. live-coding scene laid the groundwork for Xylem Records, an experimental electronic music netlabel founded by composer and computer scientist Dr. Norah Lorway. Originally from Vancouver, B.C., Lorway moved to the U.K. in 2010 to pursue a Ph.D.[...] Read more
Three Literary Field Recordings I. White Fang, Chapter I[1] A vast silence reigned over the land on every side was the silence, pressing upon them with a tangible presence a faint far cry arose on the still air. It soared upward with a swift rush, till it reached its topmost[...] Read more
Ian Battenfield Headley “Working with John Chowning at MusicAcoustica in Beijing was like touching history,” confesses a reverent Ian Battenfield Headley during our Skype call. “I had this image of him being this serious composer who doesn't take time to speak to underlings, but he’s[...] Read more
Christine Sun Kim Explores the Politics of Sound “Low frequencies just being abstract and shit — High frequencies be like anal and micromanaging for no good reason — Silence oblivious as ever” These words are handwritten in a drawing that was included in an exhibition of new works by[...] Read more
Gregory Oh On the first Sunday in March 2011, at the Betty Oliphant Theatre in Toronto, Gregory Oh performed in a concert featuring the works of British composer Jonathan Harvey. Oh wore a grey-collared shirt and black pants. His Fluevog shoes were shiny black with aqua laces, which even under his[...] Read more
Barry Truax With a friendly disposition and unassuming personality, Barry Truax would hardly be thought of as a trailblazing radical. But this soft-spoken composer and teacher is a groundbreaking Canadian icon. Not only did Truax pioneer granular synthesis with the PODX computer music system, he is viewed[...] Read more
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