Featured Articles
Graham Flett FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY Trying to get to the heart of Graham Flett’s musical style is a slippery task. “I have a variable aesthetic,” muses the tall, lean, shaggy-haired composer sitting across from me in a modern[...] Read more
New Frequencies This issue of Musicworks comes preloaded with guitars. Hollow, heavy, bowed, cracked, pedalled, flung. Trusty companions. Feedback demons. Easy to pick up, hard to put down. While I do not declare this as The Guitar Issue, I do aver that the guitar informed my aleatoric curatorial process[...] Read more
Philip Glass Most people get presents or have parties thrown for them on special occasions. Philip Glass, however, was in more of a giving mood as he celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday at the end of January. The candles on his cake marked the start of a remarkable year that has the American composer[...] Read more
Akio Suzuki This article was originally published in Spring 2013. The applause following the introduction of Akio Suzuki at his first Toronto performance since 1984 quickly died down to reveal an echo emerging from the concert-hall seats. It was a consistent pattering—not a true[...] Read more
Epa Fassianos' Chromatocosmos Epa Fassianos' Chromatocosmos won third place in Musicworks’ 2018 Electronic Music Composition Contest, and also won first place in Category A of Musica Nova 2018 (the long-running international electroacoustic music composition competition presented by Society for Electroacoustic[...] Read more
John Preus' Slow Sound On a brisk fall afternoon in October, about two dozen people hunkered down in the intimate main room of Chicago’s Experimental Sound Studio. They watched some of the city’s more open-minded musicians—including guitarist Leroy Bach and drummer Mikel Avery—improvise on[...] Read more
Diana Nadia Lawryshyn’s Traditions Made; Stories Told Ukrainian Canadian multidisciplinary artist Diana Nadia Lawryshyn uses technology to layer sounds just as she layers brushstrokes in her paintings. She invites listeners to slip on headphones, sit back, and let the arrangement tell a story full of captivating imagery that will be reshaped[...] Read more
Gayle Young's Gentle Interventions In early October 2021 Gayle Young and I meet in Toronto before heading to her home in Ontario’s Niagara region. The drive is less than two hours, yet somehow, our destination is so much further away. The spaces between buildings grow wider as do those between the little squares of light in[...] Read more
Allison Cameron’s Rarefied Soundworld "I NEVER THOUGHT I WAS DOING ANYTHING DIFFERENT THAN ANYBODY ELSE—I just thought, I’m doing what anybody else would write,” states Allison Cameron, matter-of-factly. Anyone familiar with her music—or her characteristic wry humour—could read this particular[...] Read more
Gong Punks and Culture Bombs Gentle and intense, soothing and exhilarating, traditional Filipino kulintang music provides the kind of richly immersive experience that makes an hour go by in what seems like a minute. The intertwining, hypnotic rhythms of its gongs and drums rise and fall as the players change tempos and[...] Read more
Ohama’s Alternative Dimensions Tona Walt Ohama has lived many lives. Born on a potato farm in Southern Alberta, he has spent the past forty years making passionate, deeply personal music while forging friendly connections with anyone who enters his orbit. Since his debut album, the 1982 cassette release Midnite News,[...] Read more
The Apperceptive Musical Adventures of Taylor Brook Canadian composer Taylor Brook—whose music can strike an unusual balance between challenge and charm, sometimes with an astonishing delicacy—had been based since 2011 in New York City, where he was first a doctoral student and then a lecturer at Columbia University, all the while[...] Read more
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