Composers From Canada

"I’m a composer living in North Vancouver’s LoLo District. My day gig is a professor of music and technology at Simon Fraser University‘s School for the Contemporary Arts, where I teach some courses. I’m also an Associate Dean in the Faculty of Communication Art and Technology. I recently wrote an article for The Conversation on the impact of AI on artists. I also released a double vinyl album on RedShift Records."

"If you can believe it, this site was actually awarded a “Cool Site of the Day!” by Eye Magazine in 1995! Anyone else remember when the web was small enough that one could award something like that? If nothing else, it shows how long this site has been taking up bandwidth. Not only that, but this site seems to have outlived the Magazine…"

"I’ve written a lot of software for the Mac, all using Max/MSP. Check it out here."

"I used to play squash way too much (formerly a low “A” level player, once ranked in the top 100 of all squash players in BC), but a serious disc injury stopped my competitive play. Then I played keeper for a +50 Men’s football (soccer) team – I’m also a huge fan of Arsenal FC – then had to give that up. Now I play in some bands and collect basses."

"I can’t live without my Mac, (an M1 Max MacBook Pro). I like shiny things, and thus own both an iPhone and several iPads."

"I’m a member of the Canadian League of Composers (CLC), the Canadian Electroacoustic Community (CEC), the International Computer Music Association (ICMA), SOCAN, and an associate composer of the Canadian Music Centre."

"Some of this music is/was available via kolorform records (out of print), as well as on the German netaudio label 2063, the Chicago netlabel stasisfield, two Vancouver net-labels (kikapu and nishi). Writer Marc Weidenbaum of Disquiet went so far as to include Nine Days as one of the albums that changed his life. Huh. Now raemus is on Spotify."

"My one-time alternate persona still has music available online. It received airplay in, of all places, Macedonia, Croatia, Australia, and Michigan: one royalty check of $1.08 came from radio airplay in Vietnam!"

"I used to write a lot of music for Serge Bennathan‘s Dancemakers. An older CD of mine, music for Les Arbres d’Or, is available online. I’ve also got a piece on this CD and this one. But who really buys CDs anymore? Almost all of my music is available here."

"I’ve was funded to work on musebots, which are virtual musical agents that collectively make music together. They have been presented as installations at ICCC, ISEA, Generative Art, NIME, SMC, xCoAx, and TIES, and, we put on a show in which humans played with the musebots. After a musebot code-jam in Byron Bay, Australia, I created an Imaginary Miles ensemble modeled after Miles Davis‘ Filles De Kilimanjaro and In A Silent Way ensemble circa 1969. Ollie Bown asked me to point my musebots towards making trap music (I asked “what’s trap music?”), and eight weeks later, they had an album on Spotify."

"I spend a lot of time trying to make my computer help me compose by making it more intelligent. Specifically I’m involved in the notion of metacreation, which is imbuing computers with creative behaviour. Cycling74’s Gregory Taylor interviewed me. I also make robots – designed and built by Ajay Kapur – play my music. I’ve received some media attention about my work. I was interviewed on CBC Gem as well."

"I love Germany as much as I hate France."

"Mahler is perhaps the musician with whom I have the most in common, an exaggerated sensibility, Schmalz and at the same time a deep desire for purity, but an almost libidinal purity — a harmony of Judeo-Christian opposites, in balance—and moreover a horror of origins, in fact all the inherent complexes of a Jew and a Christian."

"It will be rather sad music. It will also probably be one of my most beautiful and deepest works. I've been thinking a lot about music, and life, but particularly about music because it's only in thinking about music, and about sound, that I can be happy. [...] This piece I'm doing is an important bridge to cross before beginning the opera, technical work, obviously, a rediscovery (A) of counterpoint (B) of more dramatic musical time, closer to speech, with atomic elements of different kinds."

"As I told you on the phone, I'm not going to leave Paris, I'm staying home (I even made my first spaghetti sauce), I listen to the radio a lot (right now to marvelous Iranian vocal music), I compose, go to the cinema, to gay bars, and sleep."

"What is very strange musically is that the only music that can really inspire me now is my own music — and I think that’s perfectly normal.I’ve found what I wanted: solitude and the space to think. [...] Soon my piano will arrive, because for composing I really need my instrument."

"For the first time in my life I feel good in Paris!"

"[It is] a work for Javanese and Balinese gongs and other types of metal that I brought back with me from my journey, here the vision will be fundamentally a religious one."

"As in the story where the master asks the pupil what he has learned and the pupil repeats shyly by heart what the master said, upon which the master responds by giving him a slap and asks the pupil to come back when he understands, I don't want to get a slap and I certainly don't want to write Balinese music![...] How can one not speak of love when a friend, by way of farewell, dances for me, when an old woman offers me a piece of fruit for my journey to Java because for her the furthest you can go from Bali is Java!"

"I've always been passionate, crazy about music, and believe me it's wonderful."

"Already in October at the same time as my course with Stockhausen I will have to learn 2 African languages. Probably around January I will go to South Africa to study African music. This project is terribly important for me because for me to spend one year at the sources of music and to understand the fundamental reasons for music is terribly important, essential to the formation of a composer."

"As a film composer it's not your symphony. You know, that's one of the things you have to get over right away; that you are, as you say, a hired gun. You know, you can inject a lot of yourself into it, but the bottom-line is that you are working for other people. The ideal situation is where you make you happy and you make them happy, and that's usually what happens. But, yeah, ultimately you are answering to someone else and the sooner you figure that out, the longer you'll be around."

"Most simply put, emotions are what influence me the most. I start with a feeling, which could be a feeling of the piece I’d like to write, or the feeling I have for a movie or scene I’m scoring, and then I begin to try to translate that feeling into music. Once I can get the music to give me the same feeling I have by listening to it, then I feel like I’m headed in the right direction and I begin to hone it from there."

"I’m close to nature, and I draw a lot inspiration from nature. And I think my connection to Tolkien was also through nature. I think that’s how I made that connection to his writing: the love of everything green and good."

"I like to read a lot. I like the printed word. I find that structure–of words and sentences and paragraphs and chapters–a very good structure for writing music. Music also has a very linear quality on the page, of those five parallel lines and the bar structure of music. I start on projects always by reading."

"Every piece of music in a way, is like a child, this thing that I’ve given birth to. Every single piece of music that I’ve written, I remember every thing about it. I remember the decisions that I made when I was writing it, and how it was recorded and mixed, and what I’d do different. Every piece becomes personal."

"The hotel wasn't that empty, however. Soon an old man walked unsteadily out of the nearby lounge and plopped himself into a big easy chair beside the piano. There, he slowly sipped his wine and watched me play. I felt distracted and uneasy, trapped on the bench where at any moment he might request one of his favourite tunes, one I most likely did not know how to play. [...] He said me: Who will play your music if you don't do it yourself?"

"Right wing (definition): As with the left wing, half the propulsive force of a flightless bird."

"All that is required of us, in our "new sexual ethic," is that we have sex in a way that favours us more than it favours our diseases."

"The faith that education would destroy intolerance is false. It may be partly true, but people find that intolerance is fun."

"You are a mystery in an enigma in a big ball of fur, An irresistible magnet to every child and flea and burr. Your nose is high-resolution while I live in a near-scentless fog You run at high speed, while I just have to slog (but it's a good ol' slog) So I just want to thank you for being my dog...."

"Butch (definition): Macho with a purse."

"Closet (definition): Basement suite of a heterosexual outhouse."

"Deviant (definition): A person who wanders from the One True Path and is caught urinating somewhere in the midst of the unthinkable. A person taking any exit ramp off the freeway of self-righteousness."

"Unnatural act (definition): Any everyday act not equally typical of cattle, sheep, and horses. Singing, smoking, and various heterosexual and homosexual acts are included."

"Immoral (definition): Obsolete expression meaning "politically incorrect"."

"Erotica: the depiction of naked men. Depictions of naked women are far less innocent and are known as "pornography"."

"Relationship (definition): Liaison usually involving two people and their dirty dishes."

"The mental imagery involved with pianistic tactilia is not related to the striking of individual keys but rather to the rites of passage between notes."

"I think that if I were required to spend the rest of my life on a desert island, and to listen to or play the music of any one composer during all that time, that composer would almost certainly be Bach. I really can't think of any other music which is so all-encompassing, which moves me so deeply and so consistently, and which, to use a rather imprecise word, is valuable beyond all of its skill and brilliance for something more meaningful than that -- its humanity."

"I wasn't motivated to do it [re-record Bach's Goldberg Variations] until rather recently, when it occurred to me, on one of my rare relistenings to that early recording, that it was very nice, but that it was perhaps a little bit like thirty very interesting but somewhat independent-minded pieces, going their own way, and all making a comment on the ground bass on which they are all formed and to which they all conform. And I suddenly felt, not having played it in, well, since I stopped playing concerts, about 20 years, having not played it in all that time, that maybe I wasn't savaged by any over-exposure to it, and that if I looked at it again, I could find a way of making some sort of almost arithmetical correspondence between the theme and the subsequent variations, so that there would be some sort of temporal relationship, I don't want to say just exactly 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, that kind of correspondence, but, you know what I mean, there would be a sense in which, substituting for the fact that Bach had absolutely no melodic design that is continuous but rather a base harmonic design that is continuous, there would be at least a rhythmic design that is continuous, and the sense of pulse that went through it. And that seemed to me sufficient justification [...] to do it all over again."

"I believe that the justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenalin but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity."

"I tend to follow a very nocturnal sort of existence mainly because I don't much care for sunlight. Bright colors of any kind depress me, in fact. And my moods are more or less inversely related to the clarity of the sky, on any given day. A matter of fact, my private motto has always been that behind every silver lining there is a cloud."

"And I think that this is something that we must all do in this day and age: I think if one is going to pursue performance at a time when the greatest performances of the past and of the present have been made permanent in the record catalogues where anyone can hear [them], one must indeed recompose it or find another way to make a living. I don't think there is an excuse for a performance that simply duplicates what's been done before."

"Don't be frightened, Mr. Gould is here. (audience laughter) He will appear in a moment. I am not — as you know — in the habit of speaking on any concert except the Thursday night previews, but a curious situation has arisen, which merits, I think, a word or two. You are about to hear a rather, shall we say, unorthodox performance of the Brahms D Minor Concerto, a performance distinctly different from any I've ever heard, or even dreamt of for that matter, in its remarkably broad tempi and its frequent departures from Brahms' dynamic indications. I cannot say I am in total agreement with Mr. Gould's conception. And this raises the interesting question: "What am I doing conducting it?" (mild laughter from the audience) I'm conducting it because Mr. Gould is so valid and serious an artist, that I must take seriously anything he conceives in good faith, and his conception is interesting enough so that I feel you should hear it, too. But the age-old question still remains: "In a concerto, who is the boss (audience laughter) — the soloist or the conductor?" (Audience laughter grows louder) The answer is, of course, sometimes one and sometimes the other depending on the people involved. But almost always, the two manage to get together, by persuasion or charm or even threats (audience laughs) to achieve a unified performance. I have only once before in my life had to submit to a soloist's wholly new and incompatible concept, and that was the last time I accompanied Mr. Gould. (audience laughs loudly) But this time, the discrepancies between our views are so great that I feel I must make this small disclaimer. Then why, to repeat the question, am I conducting it? Why do I not make a minor scandal — get a substitute soloist, or let an assistant conduct? Because I am fascinated, glad to have the chance for a new look at this much-played work; because, what's more, there are moments in Mr. Gould's performance that emerge with astonishing freshness and conviction. Thirdly, because we can all learn something from this extraordinary artist who is a thinking performer; and finally because there is in music what Dimitri Mitropoulos used to call "the sportive element" (mild audience laughter) — that factor of curiosity, adventure, experiment, and I can assure you that it has been an adventure this week (audience laughter) collaborating with Mr. Gould on this Brahms concerto; and it's in this spirit of adventure that we now present it to you."

"Among pianists, Glenn Gould was the ultimate line guy. He didn’t view the piano as a homophonic instrument, but as a veritable counterpoint machine, from which he coaxed Bach fugues and de-orchestrated Strauss tone poems with remarkable clarity: x-ray vision, some might say. When it came to less polyphonically inclined compositions, like early Mozart sonatas, Gould simply spruced up the left hand accompaniments to give the music a more “Baroque” contrapuntal flavor. And if the results sounded more like Brecht than Gould’s beloved Bach, well, that’s another article!"

"Glenn brought an extraordinary awareness and imagination – he had a very plastic mind - and he was capable of growing, of changing too. Bach offers a very rich field for differentiation of approaches because he was so unspecific about what he did, in terms of performance. But every time one plays a piece, it’s an opportunity not so much to go where the composer didn’t, but to come closer to what one conceives of as being the experience of the composer or the intention of the composer."

"Glenn Gould, 'the greatest interpreter of Bach'. Glenn Gould has found his own approach to Bach and, from this point of view, he deserves his reputation. It seems to me that his principal merit lies on the level of sonority, a sonority that is exactly what suits Bach best. But, in my own view, Bach's music demands more depth and austerity, whereas with Gould everything is just a little too brilliant and superficial. Above all, however, he doesn't play all the repeat, and that's something for which I really can't forgive him. It suggests that he doesn't actually love Bach sufficiently."

"It is as a Bach player that he will live and his recordings constitute his permanent legacy. Sometimes, as in the Partitas, he forced professionals, music lovers and critics to reconsider the music, throwing overboard all preconceived notions. It was not only that he had wonderful fingers and an ability to clarify the linear elements of the music. Other pianists — admittedly, not many — could do that too. But none had his particular kind of firmly centered sonority; a sonority that Piero Rattalino, the Italian specialist on pianists, compares to the sound evoked by the great colorists — Horowitz, Richter and Michelangeli. Above all, Gould's Bach interpretations made the music sound different — different in tempo, in phrase, in dynamics, in conception. Elements nobody previously had paid much attention to suddenly sprang into high relief. But there was nothing eccentric or mannered about the performances. The music was passing through a mind that took nothing for granted. It was an original mind that worked on a different set of premises and principles from other pianists. One could not describe it as traditional Bach playing, or romantic Bach playing, or neoclassic Bach playing, or modern Bach playing, or musicological Bach playing. Whatever it was, it breathed a life and spirit unique in the history of Bach performance."

"The trouble begins when we start to be so impressed by the strategies of our systematized thought that we forget that it does relate to an obverse, that it is hewn from negation, that it is but very small security against the void of negation which surrounds it. And when that happens, when we forget these things, all sorts of mechanical failures begin to disrupt the functions of the human personality. When people who practice an art like music become captives of those positive assumptions of system, when they forget to credit that happening against negation which system is, and when they become disrespectful of the immensity of negation compared to system — then they put themselves out of reach of that replenishment of invention upon which creative ideas depend, because invention is, in fact, a cautious dipping into the negation that lies outside system from a position firmly ensconced in system."