"When Louise Bessette takes her place among the recipients of the 2019 Governor General’s Performing Arts Awards, it will be to accept her Lifetime Artistic Achievement Award for excellence in classical music. And perhaps unofficially, Bessette will also be lauded for her skills in diplomatic relations between Canada’s living composers and their audiences worldwide. “I [...]
"It’s hard to describe an opera without any hard answers to the most basic of questions: Where are we? When are we? Who are these people onstage? And what on earth are they doing? Claude Vivier, the Canadian composer who is as imaginative as he is exasperating, named his opera Kopernikus, after the famed astronomer; [...]
"Many of us know that Calixa Lavallée composed the music for O Canada; few of us know he was a brilliant musician, a performer as well as a composer, whose life foreshadowed modern North American pop culture. Broadcaster and music critic Robert Harris — best known for his brilliant conversations with Michael Enright on CBC [...]
"On April 5, New Works Calgary will mark their 35th anniversary with Alberta Double Bill. In addition to closing out their 2018-19 season, Alberta Double Bill will honour New Works co-founder Quenten Doolittle, who passed in March 2018 at the age of 92. A noted musician and former professor of music at the University of [...]
"The University of British Columbia welcomes Dr. T. Patrick Carrabré as the new Director of the School of Music. An internationally renowned composer, teacher, and media personality, Dr. Carrabré will assume the role starting July 1st, 2019. “I am delighted that Dr. Carrabré will take on the leadership of the School of Music. His [...]
"A film titled Affairs of the Heart: The Music and Life of Marjan Mozetich, produced and directed by Jamie Day Fleck, was given its premiere showing March 1 at the most recent edition of the Kingston Canadian Film Festival. The title of the film borrows from what is arguably Mozetich’s (b.1948) most successful composition, the [...]
We are saddened to learn of the passing of Roger D. Moore, who has been a great supporter of contemporary music in Canada for many years.
"For proof that Vancouver is no longer the wild and crazy place it once was, consider the course of the Sonic Boom festival. In its early, unjuried days, the annual celebration of local composers sometimes strayed into performance-art territory, with pieces that used tarot cards to determine what would be played, or that featured a [...]
"Bekah Simms’s musical life didn’t start by joining a band or getting piano lessons as a kid. Instead, the Mount Pearl, N.L. native obsessed over video game music – the melodies and the electronic pulses. “I loved them – that’s what I went to bed to, humming,” recalls Simms, a PhD candidate in the University [...]
"It may be hard to imagine now, but Vincent Ho says he was initially reluctant to take the life-altering trip that would ultimately inspire his Juno-nominated composition, Arctic Symphony. In 2008, he was asked by prominent environmental scientist David Barber of the University of Manitoba to visit the Arctic as part of a unique “artist [...]