Artists: Mark Anderson Recording details: Nimbus Records, April 4th, 2025
This recording provides the listener with a chronological overview of Julius Rontgen’s creative output, from his earliest published composition, written in 1864-when he was just nine years old-to pieces written as a mature composer five decades later. The latter reveals a composer of outstanding skill, diverse influences, and a master of musical forms and compositional techniques. It has been said that “One would look in vain for anything truly original or shocking in Rontgen’s output…”. However, there are works included on this recording that dispel that assumption. This pianist would argue that three works stand out, which are truly unique and powerfully original. The first is a short Toccata, which is something of a mystery work having never been published and lacking a date of composition. The others are the Sonata in C Minor from 1877 and the Passacaglia and Fugue of 1911. It is the latter that most decidedly distinguishes Rontgen as having a truly original voice. Julius Rontgen composed over 600 works and is especially known for his concertos, symphonies and chamber music. His piano music has remained unjustifiably neglected since he died in 1932.
Publication details: In East Asian Voices of Resistance Against Racism in Music, edited by Maiko Kawabata and Ken Ueno, 138–149. Cambridge: Ethics Press, 2025.
The negative racialization of East Asian musicians in Western classical music manifests through tropes of othering such as “Yellow Peril,” Orientalism, and various harmful stereotypes. This volume centers East Asian voices – in collaboration with our allies – as narrators of our own racialized experiences in music.
Featuring eleven contributions, in a mixture of tone that is academic and personal or reflective – thus deliberately disrupting conventional linguistic norms – the volume brings together our voices in a creative act of resistance against racism in music, and in solidarity with activism that targets inequalities in the arts more broadly. The volume is, to our knowledge, the first of its kind. Intended for musicians and artists, academics and students, it will dynamize topical conversations circling around issues of equality, diversity and inclusion so as to contribute towards positive change.
Featured UBC Alumni: Jaelem Bhate (conductor, artistic director, and featured composer), Matheus Moraes (trumpet), Albert Wu (horn), Emily Daily (horn), Maddie Davis (horn), Tyrell Loster (horn), Alan Li (tuba), Jacob Kryger (percussion), Kaiya Gazley (percussion), Chris Baldwin (trumpet), Duane Kirkpatrick (horn), Albert Wu (horn), Marina Antoniou (trombone), Kevin Jackson (trombone), Nick Francis (euphonium), Stephen Franklin (euphonium), Luke Hildebrandt (percussion), Dasa Silhova (trumpet)
Recording/mix engineer: Vince Renaud
Recording details:
As an alloy is a metal of combinations, so too is the Vancouver Brass Collective; an ensemble for the community, by the community. Acoustic Alloy celebrates our diversity and identities through the people behind the record, and the composers whose music we are celebrating. Featuring 2 commissioned works, 3 Canadian composers, 8 living composers, and 25 musicians, Acoustic Alloy is our now, and our future.
Abstract: Although a great deal of research has delved into the perception of rhythm and metre, relatively few studies have focused on how listeners perceive and aesthetically evaluate complex musical rhythms. Here, we ask what it means to perceive something as rhythmically complex, and whether there are affective, cognitive, and motoric correlates of rhythmic complexity in the context of twentieth-century music from Europe and North America. This paper examines how listeners respond to complex polyrhythms in terms of how they convey ‘mood’, ‘energy’, and ‘movement’, as well as three descriptors borrowed from Bartel’s (1992) Cognitive-Affective Response Test (‘exciting’, ‘structured’, and ‘complex’). Listeners’ ratings are compared with features derived from a corpus of short polyrhythmic examples analysed using a number of possible metrics for structural ‘complexity’. The findings point to significant effects of selected rhythmic variables, such as composite event density (notes per seconds in human performance), nested ratio (proportion of coinciding events across parts), as well as the ratio of event density and the differential in note-to-note variability between component rhythmic layers. Composite event density and nested ratio were positively correlated with most rated qualities, while event density ratio and note-to-note variability had variegated effects. Effects of several pitch-related features such as pitch height and sonority dissonance, as well as more basic aspects (duration and number of staves) were also observed. This paper argues that elements of rhythmic complexity play a significant role on perceived affective, cognitive, and motoric qualities of music, and proposes methods and measurements for further investigation.
Composer: T. Patrick Carrabré Artists: Vancouver Chamber Choir, Kari Turunen (director)
Recording details: WinterWind Records, 2024. Recorded by James Perrella at the Chan Centre for Performing Arts.
The story of the Métis people is not so well known. Jean Teillet’s amazing book, The North-West Is Our Mother has been a big step in documenting our truths, so I was beyond excited to work with her on Histoires des Métis: The Freedom Songs. In addition to five of Jean’s poems, we decided to include the texts from two traditional Métis songs (La Montagne Tortue and Pierre Falcon’s Chanson de la Gornouillèr).
The collection was commissioned by Kari Turunen and the Vancouver Chamber Choir with funding support from thee British Columbia Arts Council. It was premiered on June 8th, 2024 during a concert in the Sty-Wet-Tan Great Hall in the First Nations Longhouse at the University of British Columbia and recorded on June 11th in the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts.
I hope that our work is up to the task of representing both our community’s vitality and the challenges we have faced. The songs explore not only our love of the wide-open prairies, but also the battles to protect our homeland, the need to change our way of life as the Buffalo disappeared and above all our quest for the freedom to make our own destiny.
Composer/Performer: Jack Campbell, violin (alumni, BMus ’24) and Hank Bull, piano
Recording details: Engineer: Kris Fearon; Recorded At: Hipposonic Studios, Vancouver, CA
Notes: Jack and Hank’s philosophy as a musical duo can be summed up in a comment by Hank: “we never perform, we only rehearse.” Jack is a classically trained violinist, but it is only through his training that he knows just how to break the rules. Jack’s passion for avant-garde art and music led him to Hank, a practicing multimedia artist and pianist active since the 1970s. I met up with both Jack and Hank to see them play pieces from Inventions at Western Front, the Vancouver artist-run centre that Bull has been associated with since the beginning of his career, in the hallowed performance space of the Grand Luxe Hall.
When the two of them rehearse, there is never such a thing as a mistake. Each piece starts out with an event score, a sentence setting out the conditions and parameters of the composition (i.e. using pot-lids to play the piano as in “Pots and Plunks,” etc.), and the pair takes it from there. Hank says he tries to play the piano like a violin and Jack says he tries to play the violin like a piano. Each man thinks about his respective “texture” before playing and improvises—practicing a form of “heavy listening” in which one artist responds to the other, in real time, in an open flow between them. The emphasis on a sound’s texture often makes their music visceral and tactile—dislodging a listener’s preconceived notions of the senses. While Jack and Hank may perform these compositions again, they will be never performed the same way twice. The music you will hear on this album is endlessly surprising, tactile and visceral—a result of the pair’s deep artistic and personal rapport.
Publication details:Hesselink, Nathan. 2024. “ Space Fantasy: Nagaoka Shusei’s Contributions to Afrofuturist Visual Culture.” The Journal of American Culture00(0): 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1111/jacc.13598.
UBC Faculty and Alumni: Alfredo Santa Ana (MMus’05, DMA’10), composer; Miranda Wong, pianist
Label: Redshift Records
Recording details:
Much of the inspiration behind the music in Before the World Sleeps is rooted in the overwhelming sense that the world continues to be on a steady course toward ecological, political, and technological disaster. As the expanding rift between human experience and political reality becomes the norm, I have begun considering more deeply, that the end of human existence is perhaps more of an inevitable outcome rather than a possibility. I’m no longer feeling like investing my time in having an unrealistic hope about an un-knowable future, and subsequently, I wanted to re-think my process as a composer and find a new way of generating meaning while in the act of creating music, and find a way to embrace the lack of certainty for the time beyond the present day.
I made the decision to create this album during the fall of 2023, wanting to spend the following year writing and organizing music for piano from within this context—using some sort of post-hope perspective—where there was no assumption of control, or even an expectation of having a long-term future. The goal was not to celebrate feelings of despair or calamity and to come up with music filled with ideas about the end of the world and humanity’s demise, but rather, it was to reorient the compositional process to create small pieces of music that I could finish quickly, and using an archiver’s mindset, commit them to a recording rather than prepare them for public performance.
Although at this particular point in time, it seems that life is being defined as having an inherent loss of meaning and a pervasive existential anxiety, for me, locating the value and meaning in composition felt like a useful way of spending a few months concerned with the experience of the here and the now. Composing this music for Miranda felt like I was engaging in an act of preservation rather than an act of self-expression. And upon completion, the 18 compositions included in this album were organized into four main “chapters” that I consider to be germane concepts to writing music during this period of human existence: narrative, memory, colour, and weather.
Publication details: In Listening to Confraternities: Spaces for Performance, Patronage and Urban Musical Experience, edited by Tess Knighton, 272–304. Leiden: Brill, 2024.
The fate of confraternities in post-Reformation Germany was profoundly shaped by the history of religious division. On the eve of the Reformation, major cities like Cologne and Augsburg enjoyed a vibrant confraternal tradition balancing spiritual devotion and public charity, but the advancement of Lutheranism would undermine confraternities alongside traditional clerical, monastic and devotional culture. The Council of Trent would lay the groundwork for a revival in confraternities in the German-speaking lands (as elsewhere), but a crucial question would be the degree to which they would be instrumentalised in the service of Catholic reform and renewal. If some late-medieval confraternities managed to persist, many new confraternities emerging in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries devoted themselves to potentially divisive spiritual objects – the Virgin Mary, the Eucharist, the Rosary, and the communion of Saints – and explicitly embraced a Tridentine agenda. The most striking development was the Jesuit establishment of Marian Congregations whose membership cut across lines of social class and, eventually, gender as well. The marked increase in confraternities and Jesuit-led congregations in German cities was accompanied by a soundscape that embraced songs, litanies, polyphony and a variety of other acoustic phenomena. The periodic meetings of confraternities were a locus for music of varying sophistication, while the processions that increasingly shaped urban space featured sounds ranging from songs, litanies and polyphony to bell-ringing and even gunfire. Songs were prescribed in confraternal statutes and handbooks, and some confraternities (such as the Andernach Confraternity of St. Cecilia and the Ingolstadt Congregation of Mary Victorious) even enjoyed bespoke songbooks printed for their use. Collections of litanies were published with the devotions and processions of confreres in mind, most notably the great Thesaurus litaniarum (1594) by the music director of the Munich Jesuits, Georg Victorinus. Some confraternities enjoyed rather sophisticated musical cultures and formed ready audiences for the burgeoning amount of distinctly Catholic polyphony issued by German presses after 1600. Specific collections issued by composers like Bernhard Klingenstein, Gregor Aichinger, and Rudolph di Lasso – some of them confreres themselves – offered music suited to a range of abilities, thus situating confraternities as a nexus where varied Catholic acoustic cultures might blend and interact.
First monograph-length analytical study of sign language music
Introduces and explicates the concepts of a singing signing voice, sign language melody, sign language rhythm and meter, and meaning in sign language music
Includes interviews with Deaf musicians that have never been published before, and some of whom have never been interviewed before
