Featured Articles
João Pedro Oliveira's "La Mer Émeraude" Third place in Musicworks’ 2020 Electronic Music Composition Contest was awarded to João Pedro Oliveira's La Mer Émeraude (The Emerald Sea). The composition has also received awards at SIME Competition, Città di Udine Competition, the Destellos Competition[...] Read more
The Restless Art of Radwan Ghazi Moumneh It’s Friday night in Montreal, and a who’s who of local musicians is packed into the back room of Casa del Popolo to check out the first public appearance of Master of Masters My Master. Nobody knows anything about the music they are about to hear. All they have to go on is an[...] Read more
Bagpipes Blew My Mind My partner Emily and I moved to Glasgow from Toronto a year ago. The first TV shows we saw included a pipe-band championship and a shepherding competition. Both were brilliant to listen to. We thought that’s what TV was going to be here. It isn’t. And aside from the guys on[...] Read more
Artificiel’s "Three Pieces With Titles" “I had never seen such new things before. I didn’t even know what a new object could be,” the poet and art critic André Salmon wrote, after visiting the studio of Pablo Picasso in the spring of 1914. Of particular interest to Salmon was Guitar, a wall-mounted 3-D[...] 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
Music from the New Wilderness What can sound tell us about a place? Listen to British Columbia, and it might sound something like Music from the New Wilderness, a multimedia performance work that conjures B.C.’s past and evolving present by incorporating historical and current field recordings into new compositions[...] Read more
The Complex Stillness of Mark Ellestad “For me, there is a kind of stillness in music that comes from a generous and welcoming place. It has nothing to do with speed or style or tradition or school. It can come from dark or light, from any shade of intensity. It doesn’t need to express anything at all. I love it when[...] Read more
Thin Edge New Music Collective Joins the Circus Last year, pianist Cheryl Duvall and violinist Ilana Waniuk joined the circus. This did not involve playing instruments while hanging from a trapeze, but like many big-top acts, it did require a certain amount of risk. [...] 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
Louis Andriessen brings the noise Louis Andriessen arrived on the international scene with a bang. In 1976 he unleashed De Staat (The Republic) on unsuspecting audiences. The political charge of the composition came from texts of Plato sung by four soprano voices hovering like ethereal apparitions over pounding, iron-fisted[...] Read more
St. John’s, Newfoundland It’s July 2001 in St. John’s, Newfoundland—the one-hundredth anniversary of Marconi’s successful reception of transatlantic wireless transmissions on Signal Hill. In town on a visit, I decide to pay homage to the event by hiking up the Harbour Trail to Signal Hill.[...] Read more
Dasha Rush: Dark Hearts of Space The prospects are grim for a person who has fallen into a black hole. The gravitational forces exerted by these mysterious regions of space are so strong that nothing—not even light—can escape, once it passes a certain proximity threshold. From a safe distance, the unlucky soul[...] Read more
- 24 of 34
- « first
- ‹ previous
- next ›
- last »