The 2014 ARRAYmusic Young Composer's workshop is under way! This year us four young composers are under the mentorship of Vancouver-based composer Rodney Sharman, who brings with him a vast array of compositional knowledge from various forefronts of contemporary music, and Rick Sacks, artistic director of ARRAYmusic. Every year the instrumentation for the Young Composers Workshop varies, and this year the instrumentation has settled on 'cello (Rachel Mercer), clarinet (Colleen Cook) and percussion (David Schotzko).

Click here to listen to a sneak preview of what I'm working on at the 2014 ARRAYmusic Young Composers Workshop.

So far the the workshop has been rewarding and also challenging, as I find myself grappling with a large collection of artistic talent and possibility. The most graceful element of the workshop, is, of course, the extensive amount of TIME we get with such awesome musicians- time to experiment, collaborate, extrapolate and elaborate... anything we can and must do! Certainly countercultural to the limited rehearsal times, hyper-efficiency and overproduction that dominates most new music structures and organizations these days.

You can hear the final product of this workshop on May 31st, at Array Space, 3PM. More info here

On March 26th, University of Toronto's gamUT new music ensemble will perform my new piece, Fantasia, in fulfillment of my residency with this group. The concert will also premiere a piece by Toronto composer, Patrick McGraw.

"Polyphony organizes differences in a deconstructive way; unlike homophony, where voices blend into perceptual unities, polyphony poses the question, ‘does difference function as difference?’ (Mahnkopf, 2002, p. 39). The functioning of difference as difference
affects not only the musical material itself but also the manner in which the listener perceives the material. According to Mahnkopf, polyphony forces the listener towards two phenomenological states: positively, the listener enters a state of diagonal listening as a form of ‘mental compromise’, because the ear cannot simultaneously grasp a synchronic layering and diachronic unfolding of such detail and complexity. Negatively, the listener experiences an apperceptive overload where the ear discovers a quality of ‘too-muchness’, an excess of musical relationships that reach sublime proportions. And like the classical sublime, apperceptive overload reveals the limits
of the subject’s capacities, a limit which both reasserts the power and domain of both the interiority of subject and the externality of nature, its other.”

—  Aspect and Ascription in the Music of Mathias Spahlinger, Brian Kane.

Published in Contemporary Music Review 27(6): 595-610, ©2008 Taylor & Francis.

 Intentionality is an important part of composed music- but I also realize that there are large portions of musical material that flowed from a hidden source- that is, material whose presence cannot be justified through empirical methods. The idea of musical development is, on a basic level, an empirical process because the development springs forth from that which is already “experienced”, or material heard earlier in the piece.

On the other hand, there is the material that falls outside of the empirical process, the “dark matter” which marks its presence through its “unknownness” but justifies its presence through mysterious and ultimately mystical means. One of my professor’s describes these ideas (klangs, motives,chords, etc.) as “sphinxes”, carriers of hidden knowledge whose secrets remain profound but very much shrouded.

A good composer’s music is wholly intentional- they are able, through mystical processes to make their “sphinxes” feel equally as important as their empirical material. Besides the obvious, some composer that effectively utilized the mystical include J.S. and C.P.E. Bach, Schumann, Sibelius, Prokofiev, Dufay, Mozart.