Featured Articles
First-place winner, Musicworks’ 2017 Electronic Music Composition contest The glitchy, vaguely dystopian composition constructed from manipulated vocals is almost widespread enough now to warrant its own genre tag. Laurie Anderson is, of course, its foremother. Recent interesting entries include Holly Herndon’s Platform, Katie Gately’s Pipes, and Giant[...] Read more
Nicole Lizée invites us to hear things her way Nicole Lizée is a huge fan of Alfred Hitchcock, science-fiction films, and Lars von Trier, the maverick Danish director whose Dogme (dogma), about film, inspires her own reflection on how to compose music. She says composers should be just as bold and inventive about creating music as von[...] Read more
Clint Conley and Hildegard Westerkamp FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY You haven’t picked up your guitar in weeks, if not months. You stare at the staff paper and the rows of empty lines burn an impression on your retina. Is this just writer’s block, or is it gone for good?[...] 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
Dálava explores the landscape of song On a summer evening, outside this art gallery-cum-coffeehouse somewhere on the Gulf Islands, silver-green alders, not yet dry and summer-drab, sway, as deer graze in a meadow beyond, and small birds sing. Inside, a young couple performs. Julia Ulehla has spurned the venue’s microphone[...] Read more
Kristen Roos FULL-TEXT AVAILABLE IN PRINT EDITION ONLY. Every musician in the world produces invisible waves when making music—such is the nature of sound. Relatively few musicians, however, are concerned with those waves once they are absorbed and processed by the auditory system of[...] Read more
The Shapeshifting Sounds of Gabriel Dharmoo After experiencing Anthropologies Imaginaires, it’s hard to imagine that just a few years ago Gabriel Dharmoo, its creator and performer, was reluctant to use his spectacularly flexible voice to anything like its full extent. In fact, he initially rebelled against[...] 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
A message from the Musicworks Board of Directors The Board of Directors of Musicworks acknowledges that the new and experimental music scenes covered in the magazine are built on a foundation of systemic racism, and that through our content we have facilitated and upheld that system. Musicworks is a long-standing publication dedicated to[...] Read more
The Musical Lightness of Éric Normand The world of improvised music has spawned a core of musician–organizers who have built scenes and networks and record labels to support and extend the music. Few, however, have achieved what Éric Normand has, creating a hotbed of free improvisation in the relatively isolated[...] Read more
Jean-François Laporte A maze of thin, transparent hose bundled by lock ties runs along the walls and floors of a spacious studio painted white from floor to ceiling. At the back of the studio near a tool and supply room, an air compressor kicks into action with a thump. Hissing air begins filling the lengthy[...] Read more
Eve Egoyan and David Rokeby's Surface Tension Surface Tension is a thirty-five-minute collaborative interarts work that the two of us (pianist Eve Egoyan and installation artist David Rokeby) created for Disklavier piano and interactive video. The piece explores the relationship between what we do separately in our respective[...] Read more
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