The SOUNDLAB New Music Podcast
Composer and conductor Walter Boudreau has created over sixty works for various types of ensembles, as well as fifteen film scores and two ballets. His works have been performed in Canada, the United States, France, Belgium, Germany, Poland, and Finland. In 1998 he was awarded the prix Opus “Composer of the year” (Conseil québécois de la musique). Since 1988 Boudreau has been artistic director and principal conductor of the Ensemble de la Société de musique contemporaine du Québec (SMCQ). In...
Brian Harman, born in Montral in 1981, is a composer, pianist, teacher and arts promoter. His music has been described as three-dimensional, maybe four-dimensional (Arthur Kaptainis, The [Montreal] Gazette) and effective and chilling (Richard Todd, Ottawa Citizen). Harman's works are frequently inspired by extra-musical elements, such as human speech, architecture, modern dance and technology, with recent works exploring concepts of ritual in music. He has written for a wide variety of...
Daniel Peter Biro is Associate Professor of Composition and Music Theory at the School of Music at the University of Victoria.In July 2004 Dniel Pter Bir completed his Ph.D. in music at Princeton University. He first started his musical studies at the Bartk Conservatory in Budapest, Hungary. From 1991-1992 he was a Fulbright scholar in Frankfurt, Germany where he studied at the Hochschule fr Musik in Frankfurt. He later studied in Wrzburg, Bern, and Vienna. In the years 1995–1996 he...
Paul Steenhuisen (born Vancouver, Canada, 1965) is an independent composer working with a broad range of acoustic and digital media. His concert music consists of orchestral, chamber, solo, and vocal music, and often includes live electronics and soundfiles. Additionally, he creates electroacoustic, radio, and installation pieces.Steenhuisen obtained his Doctor of Musical Arts degree in composition from the University of British Columbia, where he studied with Keith Hamel. Between academic...
Gordon Fitzell is a Canadian composer and media artist. His music has been performed by top international artists including Norwegian group BIT20, Canada’s Ensemble contemporain de Montral, and American sextet eighth blackbird, whose multiple Grammy-winning album strange imaginary animals features two of his works (Fitzell also appears on the album as co-producer and live electronics artist). His work has been presented at major festivals including Festival Synthse Bourges (France), the...
Originally from White Rock, British Columbia, Canadian composer Howard Bashaw is a graduate of the University of British Columbia (DMA, 1989). He is currently Professor of Music at the University of Alberta where he teaches composition, orchestration, theory and analysis. He has also taught at the University of British Columbia and at the Universit Canadienne en France.A composer in the acoustic medium, Bashaw has composed for a range of diverse ensembles including the Hard Rubber Orchestra,...
Toronto composer James Rolfe has been commissioned and performed by ensembles in Canada (including Arraymusic, Continuum, Esprit Orchestra, Soundstreams, and Vancouver New Music), the USA (Bang on a Can All-Stars), Europe (Asko Ensemble, Ensemble Contrechamps de Genve, Ensemble Avant Garde, Ives Ensemble, Ixion Ensemble, Nash Ensemble, Nieuw Ensemble), and New Zealand (175 East). He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000, the K. M. Hunter Music Award in 2003, the 2005 Louis Applebaum...
Aaron Gervais is composer of new classical/avant-garde music, born in Edmonton, Canada, and represented by Art Music Promotion. He received a Bachelor of Music with Honours from the University of Toronto, and a Master’s degree from the University of California at San Diego. He has also pursued studies at the Koninklijk Conservatorium in the Hague, Netherlands. Aaron’s teachers have included Chan Ka Nin (CA), Chinary Ung (US), Philippe Manoury (FR), and Martijn Padding (NL), and he has also...
James Harley, born 1959, Vernon, B.C., Canada, began studying composition in 1980. Prior to that, he had been active as a pianist, jazz and classical, played percussion, and also studied electroacoustics at Western Washington University. After graduating Magna cum laude in 1982, he took up residence in the UK in order to study composition with Paul Patterson at the Royal Academy of Music.Recipient of grants from the Canada Council and the Leverhulme Trust, among others, Harley remained in...
Bob Pritchard’s creative work includes experimental concert music, interactive music and video pieces, direct synthesis, sound installations, video/film, radio sound, and software development. His music is performed and broadcast internationally, and he is often commissioned by some of Canada’s leading performers.His works have twice been selected as Canadian submissions to the ISCM, and in 2007 his interactive piece Strength for saxophone and video received a Unique Award of Merit from the...
A.R. was born in Quebec City (Canada) where he made his basic musical training. He then moved to Montreal where he successively studied piano, harpsichord, composition and mathematics during the 1990s. He then occupied the position of pianist for the Ensemble Contemporain de Montral, the Trio Fibonacci and l’Ensemble Musiques Nouvelles.As a composer, he received a few prizes and stipends in Canada and abroad, and composes rather regularly works that have in common humour and speed,...
Composer, conductor and teacher: the Hungarian Peter Etvs combines all three functions in one very high-profile career.His music features regularly in the programmes of orchestras, contemporary music ensembles and festivals worldwide; and as composer/conductor he has led projects focusing on his work in centres such as Paris, London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Vienna. His most recent operas, Love and Other Demons and Angels in America, are following the lead of his Three Sisters by generating an...
Vinko Globokar was born in 1934 in Anderny, France. From 13 to 21 years of age he lived in Ljubljana, Slovenia, where he made his debut as a jazz musician. He subsequently studied Trombone at the National Conservatory in Paris, completing a diploma in Trombone and Chamber Music. He studied Composition and Conducting with Ren Leibowitz, Counterpoint with Andr Hodeir, and continued his studies with Luciano Berio.He has performed the premieres of many works for trombone. From 1967 to 1976 he...
CHARLES WUORINEN (b. 9 June 1938, New York City) has been composing since he was five and he has been a forceful presence on the American musical scene for more than four decades. In 1970, Wuorinen became the youngest composer to win the Pulitzer Prize in music for Time's Encomium, an electronic composition written on commission from Nonesuch Records. The Pulitzer and the MacArthur Fellowship are just two among many awards, fellowships and other honors to have come his way. Wuorinen has...
Kee Yong CHONG
Chong Kee Yong (1971, Kluang), Malaysia's leading contemporary music composer, is one of the most exciting voices in new music today. Few composers can manage to fashion a truly individual sound from the experimental techniques of today, and Chong belongs to this special class of talents who can turn a melange of exquisite timbres into a compelling piece of music with his own fingerprints. Composer Peter Etvs calls his music imaginative and poetic and composer Jonathan Harvey comments his...
Born in Warwickshire in 1939, Jonathan Harvey was a chorister at St Michael's College, Tenbury and later a major music scholar at St John's College, Cambridge. He gained doctorates from the universities of Glasgow and Cambridge and (on the advice of Benjamin Britten) also studied privately with Erwin Stein and Hans Keller. He was a Harkness Fellow at Princeton (1969-70). An invitation from Boulez to work at IRCAM in the early 1980s has so far resulted in eight realisations at the Institute,...
Rick Sacks received his Masters in Music at the State University of New York at Stony Brook (1976). During his stay at Stony Brook, Rick began freelancing in Manhattan performing with ensembles including The New Orchestra, Newband, The New Jersey Percussion Ensemble and The Composer’s Ensemble under such directors as Arthur Weisberg and Charles Wuorinen. After teaching for two years at Bennington College in Vermont (1979/80), Rick began traveling to Toronto to perform in the art-rock band...
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