Featured Articles
Di Mainstone Fashions a New Sonic Future Di Mainstone, inventor of the Human Harp, describes herself as a “bridge botherer.” But to be accurate, her bridge-bothering activities are fairly recent. Before bridges (the Human Harp has, to date, played bridges in Brooklyn, Omaha, and Bristol) came mood-sensitive kinetic[...] Read more
Myk Freedman Makes Room for an Ensemble of One (This article was originally published in Spring 2015.) Myk Freedman is best known as the lap-steel-wielding leader of the nonet St. Dirt Elementary School, whose idiosyncratically tuneful music (released on Rat Drifting and on Barnyard Records) is nestled in the crevice[...] Read more
Glenn Buhr FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY Definitions of personal style don’t get any clearer with life experience. This becomes obvious during my interview with Canadian composer and pianist Glenn Buhr. It also becomes clear however, that personal style[...] Read more
Winners of Musicworks' 2019 Electronic Music Composition Contest Announced . . . at Last! After a month delay due to challenges presented by the coronavirus pandemic, Musicworks is thrilled to announce the winners of its 2019 Electronic Music Composition Contest. We thank composer entrants for their patience. Brazilian composer Alex Buck, who is currently based[...] Read more
Victor Gama builds a brave new soundworld Wherever Victor Gama plays, you can be sure clusters of people will be jostling to percuss the upturned metal bowls of his tipaw (so called because the surface of the instrument looks like the pads of a tiger paw), to bow the eight metal strings of the tahra, or simply to wander the length[...] 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
Field Notes From Fort McMurray in the damp morning air: rain pitter-patters on whispering leaves. inherited onomatopoeic vocabulary; true but tried tropes carrying with them vague echoes of that singular safety known to the time when board books taught us to affix words to sounds, predictably, repeatably. a wind sighs,[...] Read more
The Ondes Martenot is Making New Waves No one knows exactly how many functioning ondes Martenot are in use around the world today, but an informed, conservative estimate puts their number at sixty. In the course of half a century, Maurice Martenot, the creator of this most sensitive electronic musical instrument, was able to[...] Read more
Reclaiming Chinatown In many respects, the year 2020 was a time of reckoning for Asian Americans. Hot on the heels of the landmark Asian ensemble-cast blockbuster Crazy Rich Asians, South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho made history with Parasite, which took home the first Academy Award for Best Picture ever to be[...] Read more
Anthony Pateras: Sonic Phenomena in Real Time The music of Anthony Pateras covers vast expanses of composition and improvisation, of acoustic and electronic instrumentation, and combinations of these. He is also a virtuosic pianist. Between 2012 and 2019 he created Immediata, an ambitious series of fifteen albums, self-released[...] Read more
Derek Charke Derek Charke is irresistibly attracted to the North. In 2006 he found himself in the Yukon, dogsledding with the Kronos Quartet. For a composer with a love of the Arctic it doesn’t get better, or more surreal, than this. A few days earlier he had been in a Whitehorse hotel room where[...] Read more
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
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