Featured Articles
Kaïa Kater and the Creative Power of Letting Go Kaïa Kater is a gifted storyteller. Drawn to history, the Montreal-based musician and composer strings together tales that marry the elusive past with an ever-shifting present. From a young age, Kater, who studied cello and piano as a child, found refuge in songwriting. “I didn[...] Read more
Tosca Terán Has a Brand New Spawn Bag The lobby is cavernous and cool compared to the heat under the blazing mid-afternoon sun outside. It’s mid July, and I’m visiting Toronto’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) on a decidedly peculiar mission: to listen to music made by fungus. As part of the seventh edition[...] Read more
Rocío Cano Valiño’s Okno wins first place in Musicworks' 2020 Electronic Music Composition Contest After following the enigmatic whooshes, dangling creaks, and scene-stealing clunks around the evocative sonic space of Okno, I was not surprised to learn that its composer, Rocío Cano Valiño, has a background in interior design—a talent she employs in the various[...] Read more
The Piano and Erhu Project Expands the Repertoire “Let’s begin with a short history of this instrument,” says Nicole Ge Li, in a video shot at the Vancouver offices of the Canadian Music Centre. She’s speaking to a roomful of composers, gathered there to learn more about writing for PEP (Piano and Erhu Project), her[...] Read more
Nicole Lizée I asked Nicole Lizée, newly commissioned to compose a work to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of John Cage’s birth, if she has ever before composed with that iconic artist in mind. How could she not? She is, after all, known for her nonstandard use of instruments, prepared[...] Read more
Anna Friz Right off Yonge Street, in the midst of Toronto’s all-night Nuit Blanche art festival, I and some others found respite from the revels in the atrium of a relatively nondescript office building. After a short line-up and passage through a revolving door, we found ourselves within a[...] Read more
Ayo Leilani Interrogates the Beats “Eh Yo! Eh Yo, Leilani!,” she heard as she walked down a bustling New York City street. Turning around to see a friend calling out to greet her in the way that only the hip-hop generation can, Leilani (Hawaiian for “gift from the heavens”) realized she’d just[...] Read more
Roxanne Nesbitt’s Sonic Investigations People often describe sound as something that reverberates outward into space, but the music of interdisciplinary artist Roxanne Nesbitt seems to move inward; it has an audiovisual geometry that focuses the eye and the ear, pulling you closer to the source. To perform her 2010 composition[...] Read more
Backxwash—The Healing Music of Productive Rage If you want to win over rapper and producer Backxwash (Ashanti Mutinta), start a conversation with her by talking about the outlier sounds of American rapper–producers Missy Elliot and Timbaland. I’m speaking with her a couple of days after she fired up[...] Read more
Manuella Blackburn’s Landline In the pantheon of sounds, the tone, whirr, and ring of the rotary phone belong in the “gone but not forgotten” gallery. If someone’s mobile phone rings à la Ma Bell—as opposed to the usual pulsating buzz, pop-tune riff, or synthesized animal sound—we[...] Read more
Trase Pa: Choreographing the Soundworld of David Bontemps’s Traces In most cultures there has always been a synergetic interplay between music and dance—one informing and amplifying the other. Music exemplifies the physicality and rhythmicity that exists in a dancing body. The synergy of dance and music is a repertoire of invitations to the spaces in[...] Read more
Barry Truax With a friendly disposition and unassuming personality, Barry Truax would hardly be thought of as a trailblazing radical. But this soft-spoken composer and teacher is a groundbreaking Canadian icon. Not only did Truax pioneer granular synthesis with the PODX computer music system, he is viewed[...] Read more
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