Featured Articles

What's Inside Musicworks 145 ON THE COVER: SIMONE SCHMIDT Simone Schmidt is a visionary artist who consistently finds new possibilities for the country song form. In the Toronto psychedelic country bands One Hundred Dollars and The Highest Order and as Fiver, Schmidt has created some of the most original[...] Read more

Featured Article Issue 145

Tristan Perich’s 1-Bit Symphony Tristan Perich’s 1-Bit Symphony (2009–10) is an electronic composition in five movements on a single microchip housed in a CD jewel case. 1-Bit Symphony is not a recording in the traditional sense; it is a complete electronic circuit that literally performs its music once it is[...] Read more

Visions of sound Tristan Perich Issue 109

Leah Reid’s Jouer U.S. composer Leah Reid’s composition Jouer won the Marcelle Deschênes Prize in Electronic Music / Prix Marcelle Deschênes pour la musique électronique in the 2024 Musicworks Electronic Music Composition (EMC) Contest. This donor-supported annual prize awards $300 to[...] Read more

Featured Article STAFF

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

Nadah El Shazly’s Music from Invented Places You wouldn’t think ’80s punk rock, traditional vocal jazz, electronica, early-twentieth-century Egyptian pop, Ornette Coleman free jazz, and contemporary experimental music could have much in common or mix well with each other in a song. But they all live together quite amicably[...] Read more

Featured Article Mary Dickie Issue 134

What's Inside Musicworks 148?   ON THE COVER                Stefana Fratila is a Toronto-based, Romania-born composer and sound designer whose work in sound and love of sci-fi led her to wonder: “If each planet in our solar system were a different room, what[...] Read more

Featured Article STAFF Issue 148

Dániel Péter Biró FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY     Composer Dániel Péter Biró talks about his work in long, lucid sentences. He takes his time, he doesn’t double back or digress, and he rarely needs to correct himself. But just when you think his explanation[...] Read more

Featured Article Elissa Poole Issue 109

Meet the Winners of the 2023 Musicworks Electronic Music Composition Contest TORONTO, CANADA, April 22, 2024:   San Francisco-based composer Ningxin Zhang has won first prize for her composition Kagemusha: for Pipa and Electronics.   “I am deeply honoured to have received the first prize in the 2023 Musicworks Electronic Music[...] Read more

Featured Article

Ningxin Zhang’s Kagemusha: for Pipa and Electronics At age five, Ningxin Zhang started her classical training on the pipa—a lute-like plucked Chinese instrument in use for more than 2,000 years—and followed the traditional route of practising repertoire (classical and folk songs) and performing in competitions. While studying[...] Read more

Sound Bite Jennie Punter Issue 148

Daniel Blinkhorn's frostbYte—wildflower [ONLINE EXCLUSIVE] Daniel Blinkhorn is an Australian composer and sound and new-media artist currently residing in Sydney. He has worked in a variety of creative, academic, research, and teaching contexts. An ardent location field recordist, he has embarked on many recording expeditions; his sonic travels[...] Read more

Sound Notes

The Unsung Songbooks of Dave Burrell TO SAY THAT PIANIST, COMPOSER, AND—AT THIS POINT—JAZZ ELDER DAVE BURRELL WAS NOT made for these times is a bit of a shortsighted claim. Burrell is a jazz classicist preceded by a reputation for free improvisation. He was present for the fabled Parisian Summer of 1969, when[...] Read more

Sound Notes Kurt Gottschalk Issue 122

Mark Molnar’s alternative trajectories Harrowingly unbridled and unpredictable, yet blatantly meticulous in their construction, Mark Molnar’s compositions frequently emerge as rugged tangles of bowed-string sonorities. Even though their gestural expressivity might suggest that they could’ve been conceived in myriad[...] Read more

Featured Article Nick Storring Issue 118