Featured Articles
Ana Sokolović wants you to enjoy her imagination “Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms / Inside your head, and people in them, acting.” These lines from “The Old Fools,” English postwar poet Philip Larkin’s fearsome ode to aging, sparked Montreal composer Ana Sokolović’s full-[...] Read more
Rose Bolton Rose Bolton speaks clearly about what she wants. “I think clever would be the word that I would not want to hear people use when speaking about my music—regardless of whether it actually is or not. Ultimately, it’s not music about music; there has to be a bigger[...] 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
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
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
Charlie Morrow, Sonic Nomad “My work is what it is and I move in many worlds. I would have nothing except for being carried on the shoulders of friendship and shared interest.” Intrepid sonic investigator Charlie Morrow’s early-’90s Lower East Side event, Urban[...] Read more
Demian Rudel Rey’s "Theophilus" Argentinian composer and guitarist Demian Rudel Rey has received numerous awards and honorable mentions in various national and international composition compstitions, and his pieces have been selected and programmed at prestigious festivals across Europe and the Americas.[...] Read more
C. Diab’s Cascadian Guitar Music Vancouver-based bowed guitarist Caton Diab (who composes as C. Diab) makes sonorous music that you feel deeply. Primarily crafted on an acoustic guitar with a pickup, effects pedals, a loop station, and bow, Diab’s textured and mournful tones rattle your bones and settle into your heart,[...] 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
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
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
The Idiosyncratic Musicality of Marc Sabat The emergence of Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique in the early 1920s not only presented an altogether new conception of pitch in music, it also prompted a dramatic and widespread shift in the fundamental thinking surrounding Western concert music. Its latent quasiscientific[...] Read more
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