Featured Articles
Arkora’s Cloud Chamber Arkora, a Toronto-based electric, vocal, chamber consort, includes an eight-voice choir and an accompanying ensemble, with irresistible composer bait—the Lumiphone. A giant, three-octave, thirty-one-tone, equal-tempered (31-TET) glass marimba, the Lumiphone was designed and constructed[...] Read more
Video Game Music: New Directions in Play The first time I played PaRappa the Rapper was a struggle. I was with my parents at a novelty deli where each table was outfitted with a television and a PlayStation video-game console. I didn’t have one at home, but a paper-thin, hip-hop cartoon[...] Read more
Vancouver's Intercultural Music Scene Intercultural music-making in British Columbia is nothing new. Gold seekers brought the violin to the province’s north in the 1890s, and their jigs and reels were quickly adapted by the region’s Tahltan musicians into a true hybrid form. In the mid-1960s, Vancouver performers[...] Read more
What's Inside Musicworks 142? The authentic enthusiasm and curiosity of artists writing about artists for whom they feel an affinity propelled Musicworks in its early days. This dynamic is in the magazine’s DNA and continues to inform the storytelling in our pages, as you’ll discover in the Summer 2022 issue[...] Read more
Hyposurface FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY On a 2004 visit to the MIT Media Lab, I encountered a small, flat wall with a skin of silver luminescent triangles covering a background of cables and metal frame. My host, the creator of Hyposurface, Mark Goulthorpe (dECOi Architects[...] Read more
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
Tenzier: History Outside the Margins “There’s a group of students who used a term I really liked: countermemory,” Tenzier founder Eric Fillion tells me over Skype from Montreal. “I almost like that better than counterculture.” He’s talking about Tenzier, the avant-garde label which has put[...] Read more
Kimia Koochakzadeh-Yazdi is just scratching the surface “My relationship to sound is [an] obsession with texture and how sounds affect each other, and also [with] playing with the human psyche.” Kimia Koochakzadeh-Yazdi then bursts out laughing, saying, “That’s a lot in one sentence.” [...] Read more
Tom Wayman’s “Elemental Musics: Selkirk Mountains” 1. ARIA Alpine wind in the stunted firs half whispers an austere wistfulness with overtones of regret at being compelled by a harsh landscape to be mercilessly forthright: a breathy flute-note surging and fading[...] Read more
Spool: Music in the Margins CERTAIN LABELS are very much the product of a particular vision and exude cohesion of an almost iconic order—one that even seems to magically weather shifts in taste and approach. ECM’s elegant black and white photography, sans serif typeset, and crisp, reverberant sonic profile[...] Read more
Bekah Simms’ Music of Discomfort Bekah Simms likes music that challenges. “I don't want to ever get too comfortable,” she tells me, as we sit down to talk about her work. “I don’t want it ever to be super easy to write a piece, because I feel like then I won’t be a better composer when I[...] Read more
Eliot Britton FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY By his own account, Eliot Britton’s music treads dangerous territory. “I represent huge problems with art music and the whole idea of art music,” he says, and goes on to describe how in his compositions within the[...] Read more
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