Urbanvessel and Juliet Palmer Suit-tail-clad Juliet Palmer sits at the top of a stepladder in the middle of the diamond-shaped ring. Tonight, she’s not wearing her Canadian composer hat. Tonight, she’s a sports announcer.   “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to Voice-Box![...] Read more

Featured Article Jonathan Bunce Issue 108

Rebecca Bruton Lets The World In Rebecca Bruton describes her work as an “understated, Surrealist folk music”—music that’s experimental but also simple, with a sensuousness and a weirdness to it. “Music that makes sense,” she says, “but you’re not sure why.”[...] Read more

In the Works Sara Constant Issue 129

MUSICWORKS UNVEILS 2017 CONTEST WINNERS Musicworks is thrilled to announce the winners of its 2017 contests.   Erik Ingalls’ The Gravity of Plim has won first place in Musicworks’ 2017 Electronic Music Composition contest. Ingalls’ winning piece began as an accompaniment to a science-fiction[...] Read more

Sound Notes STAFF

Resequencing Resonances PHOTOGRAPHS BY GREEN YANG   Resonances are ghosts. They accentuate unseen presences of sounding bodies as they amplify frequencies inherent in them. Noted Italian composer Luciano Berio explored the transfer of energy from one body to another in his Sequenza X (1984), which[...] Read more

Featured Article Juro Kim Feliz Issue 143

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 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

Featured Article Ian Crutchley Issue 130

Resonate At first glance, Resonate appears to be a static, glowing, string structure in a dark, drone-filled room. But enter the space and pluck any of the glowing strings and dynamic pools of light suddenly appear, as sound objects form a rhythmic and spatial counterpart to the drones.[...] Read more

Visions of sound Peter Kiefer Issue 115

Paul Walde Subverts Nature as Culture The column of light is beamed directly into the sky. As if intended to summon some celestial visitor, the beam of photons is emitted from a circle of glowing discs, placed in the most unassuming place imaginable—a farmer’s field (don’t ET’s always land there?). This,[...] Read more

Featured Article Jonathan Bunce Issue 109

Sarah Neufeld: Solo Violin, Guerrilla-Style “I COULDN'T EVEN PLAY A NOTE. If you even breathe, your breath becomes this crazy, feathery freight train of echo.”   Sarah Neufeld recalls her first visit to Devil’s Mountain with a mixture of fear and delight. The site of an abandoned array of[...] Read more

Profile Jonathan Bunce Issue 117

The Swedish Sound-Art Scene Nadine Byrne Monochrome images of two young women—evidently sisters—stare out impassively from oval apertures that resemble Victorian cameo brooches. A gauzy ectoplasmic fabric oozes from their mouths while, in an aperture between them, their faces merge in a dreamlike blur[...] Read more

Featured Article Julian Cowley Issue 108