Rings of Beijing I sit staring at the laptop screen in my Beijing hotel room. Writers’ block. Silently trying to formulate words. No sounds enter my consciousness. Only the insistent hum of the laptop. Until my listening body is dropped into a pool of sound. Concentric sonic circles ripple out from the[...] Read more

Sonic Geography Millie Chen Issue 110

Gordan Monahan Gordon Monahan’s voice floats to me across the Internet from his farm, the Funny Farm, his home base in Meaford, Ontario.   Monahan was recently awarded a 2013 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts, and is already planning a series of installations for 2013,[...] Read more

In the Works David McCallum Issue 116

An Inexhaustible Source of Wild Music In the 1970s, electronic music studios at the University of Toronto and McGill University sparked exciting ideas in guitar composition. With a focus on the evolution of Canadian works for guitar and electroacoustics, guitarist and composer Amy Brandon tracks key events and works from[...] Read more

Featured Article Amy Brandon Issue 137

Markus Floats' Motion Emotion How do you think and write about sound outside of metaphor? Is music necessarily tethered to other aspects of our sensuous and interior lives? Or can we appreciate its meaning more essentially—as energy and dynamics, waves and reverberation? These questions come up around the work of[...] Read more

Featured Article Brennan McCracken Issue 137

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

Profile Chaka V. Grier Issue 133

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

Profile Stuart Broomer Issue 132

Pleasure Calls, by Camae Ayewa and Carmel Farahbakhsh Pleasure Calls is a collaborative, interdisciplinary installation and performance by Camae Ayewa and Carmel Farahbakhsh that activates revolutionary ways of loving one another. The installation is the culmination of a week-long residency in early March of 2019 at the Khyber Centre for the[...] Read more

Visions of sound Nicholas Dourado Issue 133

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

Featured Article Sara Constant Issue 134

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

Featured Article Juro Kim Feliz Issue 136

Announcing the Winners of the 2022 Musicworks Electronic Music Composition Contest TORONTO, CANADA, April 20, 2023: Musicworks is thrilled to announce the winners of the 2022 Musicworks Electronic Music Composition Contest.   American composer, sound artist, and educator Leah Reid (left) has won first prize with her composition Reverie. “I am[...] Read more

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