MusicWorks

#113 Summer 2012 [MAGAZINE + CD]

Label: Musicworks Country: Canada

FEATURE ARTICLES

Jean-François Laporte-builds quirky acoustic instruments, page 28, tracks 4 and 5
by Richard Simas

Jean-François Laporte is a Montreal artist-explorer of insatiable curiosity and drive. His work is focused on the understanding and manipulation of sound as concrete material. With his production company Totems Contemporains he creates sound-dance works, compositions, and installations using a variety of invented instruments he calls totems. Despite the increasing tendency towards robotic control and refined mechanical gearing in his current projects, nature's physical and sound phenomena remain essential references for Laporte, and he chooses to work with acoustic sound production for his invented instruments, rather than electronic sound.

Derek Charke-writes for Kronos Quartet in the Arctic, page 20, track 3
by WL Altman

Juno-award winning classical composer Derek Charke is an accomplished flautist, composer, and professor at Acadia University in Nova Scotia. His music is characterized by the use of tonal material in unusual ways, his ability to let the musical materials determine the formal structure, and the incorporation the "wrong note" in the right place-a technique he picked up while studying with Louis Andriessen in Amsterdam. What sets his work apart more than anything else is his use of the sounds of the Arctic. A recent commission from the Kronos string quartet had him composing with recorded northern soundscapes and working with throat-singer Tanya Tagaq.
Cassandra Miller-get up close and personal with players, page 38, track 10
by Richard Simas

Montreal-based composer Cassandra Miller, who is also artistic director of Montreal's Innovations en Concert, enters into the act of composing as a true collaboration. In her many commissions she works with performers in equal relationships. Her music balances complex sensations with a direct-not simple-approach, and by adding whimsy and insistence to seemingly basic sound materials often oddly turned. In 2011 Miller won the Canada Council's Jules Léger Chamber Music prize for Bel Canto, a stunning, twenty-eight-minute portrait of ecstasy for mezzo-soprano and ensemble. The uncanny immediacy of Miller's music makes her a singular bright light in the Canadian new-music firmament.

PROFILE

Rose Bolton-composes moments of emotional intensity, page 14, tracks 1 and 2
by Nick Storring

Toronto's Rose Bolton has for some time now been one of our most intriguing composers. Easily considered to be in mid-career a few years ago, Bolton started then to examine her compositional voice and decided that in order to better reflect her own artistic sensibilities she needed to move away from being overtly clever, and to enter more emotional territory to create something both moving and intellectually satisfying. Not one to restrict herself to a single medium, Bolton has variously composed chamber, orchestral, vocal, electroacoustic, installation, multimedia, and soundtrack works. Her change of direction has in fact led her to some very fertile ground, creating a varied and invigorating body of work.

DIY

Build a collection of beachy noise makers, page 48
by Rob Cruickshank

Head back to the beach this summer to make some fun and annoying noise! What better way to experience the summer than to fly a kite? In this DIY we give instructions on how to build an Aeolian kite that captures the sound of the summer wind as it buffets a kite string. The sound a bullroarer makes as it moves through the air has also been used to inspire fear and awe in the listener. Many ancient cultures have used the bullroarer as a ritual instrument, and to this day, many peoples such as the Aborigines of Australia have very strict rules about how and when it can be used. The water whistle is a version of another ancient instrument. Ceramic versions-usually referred to as whistling jars-were highly developed in pre-Columbian South and Central America. We will make two variants of the whistle, both or which are represented in pre-Columbian artifacts.

SOUND NOTES

Sound Bite, page 11: Writer Gloria Lipski profiles electroacoustic composer Eliot Britton.
Sonic Geography, page 8: Writer and composer Paul Steenhuisen takes us on a soundwalk through the streets of Paris during their all-night summer solstice street party called Fête de la Musique.

In the Works, page 12: Composer and circuit bender Jeff Morton talks to media artist David McCallum about the repurposing his childhood toys in his installation All the Horses and All the Egg.
Visions of Sound, page 32: Austrian-based media artist Bartholomäus Traubeck makes an environmental statement with his piece Years-an installation that uses a modified turntable to play an LP-sized cross section of a tree.