Where Waters Meet is an Indigenous/settler partnership built on friendship, deep respect and admiration, and the desire to communicate through our shared sung medium. It is a culmination of several joint projects in different regions of Canada over the course of many years. We are thankful to many for contributing their talents and engaging with the CCC on numerous levels in the creative phases: composer Carmen Braden, poet Yolanda Bonnell, incubation collaborator Sarain Fox, tour partners Wesley Hardisty (violinist) and Aaron Prosper (singer/drummer), and non-Indigenous collaborator Hussein Janmohamed, who has inspired us all in the CCC to consider what our music can be like if we honour and respectfully incorporate cultural traditions into our creative process. Hussein has modelled this in envisioning the expansion of his composition Sun on Water to include Sherryl Sewepagaham’s spoken word, drumming, and sung improvisations. We also thank the many Elders, Knowledge Keepers, and community members who have guided us along the way in our reciprocal creative collaborations. The music on this album has evolved organically as we have listened, asked questions, and responded honestly and in relationship with each other.
Where Waters Meet: Sherryl Sewepagaham + Canadian Chamber Choir was released worldwide on September 6, 2024. Solo pieces written and performed by Sewepagaham are nestled around each movement of Where Waters Meet, mirroring the way in which Braden’s contemporary choral suite has been performed live during the CCC’s past tours.
JUNO nominated Indo Jazz fusion band, Raagaverse, celebrates the journey and personal triumphs of Shruti Ramani, a young, queer, Indian immigrant in Canada. Raagaverse highlights Shruti’s cultural background, her forays into and admiration of multiple musical genres, and her ever-growing relationship with music and the music community.
Raagaverse’s music exposes you to vibrant tapestries of the Agra Gharana, a tradition in ancient North Indian Classical (Hindustani) music, and Black-American Jazz traditions. Through her dedicated training and practice, Shruti was accepted into the Agra Gharana’s musical lineage by her guru Dr. Ritu Johri, an esteemed and knowledgeable keeper of the musical tradition. Shruti gratefully acknowledges the huge influence of Black-American music on her work after she immigrated to Canada to study Jazz.
Featured UBC Faculty Artist: Alexander Weimann, organ
Redshift Records
Recorded at Holy Rosary Cathedral in Vancouver
Producer: Denise Ball Recording/mix engineer: Brian Chan Mastering: Will Howie
Recording details:
Organ – A Prayer for Peace
Gregorian Chants serve as the foundation for the piece, played on the wonderful organ at Holy Rosary Cathedral in downtown Vancouver. What’s captured here really happened “ex tempore”, in one complete take.
My improvisation re-imagines the so-called Organ Mass in which parts of the religious service alternate between singing the chant and playing/improvising on the organ. The sequence loosely reflects the Christian liturgy. For Plain Chant, I included parts of the “Missa Cunctipotens Genitor Deus” (Kyrie, Gloria, Sanctus, Agnus Dei), and added two free, unbound and fancier movements, one after the Gloria and one after the Sanctus. The first is a meditation on change or the conversion of thinking, perceiving and living (µετάνοια); the second was inspired by the “elevation toccata”, music that depicts the mystery of death and transfiguration.
The last line in the “Agnus Dei” serves as the cornerstone of the whole improvisation. Its words are “Give us peace”. For the conclusion of this musical prayer, I picked the Lutheran hymn “Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan” (What God ordains is always good). ~ AW
Abstract: The current study investigates the influence of pitch and register (ordered vs. randomized) on listeners’ ratings of five emotional dimensions (mood, energy, movement, dissonance, and tension) using excerpts from multi-part musical compositions that feature complex rhythmic and pitch structures. In addition to listeners’ ratings, computational measures derived from nine rhythm and pitch features were used to assess the influence of specific structural elements on listeners’ perceived emotions. The results show a large main effect of pitch presentation on all five emotional dimensions. Participants tended to rate ordered excerpts as more positive in mood, higher in energy, and with a greater impulse to move along the music, while randomized excerpts were perceived as more dissonant and more tense. Several rhythmic and pitch features were also reliable predictors of listener’s ratings, providing support for the use of naturalistic stimuli accompanied by more fine-grain measures of structural elements in experimental studies of listeners’ experience of music.
Authors: Poudrier, Ève, Bell, B. J., Lee, J. Y. H., Sapp, C.S.
Publication details: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computer Music and Multidisciplinary Research (CMMR 2023), 13–15 November 2023, Tokyo, Japan, pp. 599–610. CMMR 2023 & Laboratory PRISM, Marseille, France.
Abstract: Research on listeners’ perceived emotions in music draws on human and synthetic stimuli. Although research has shown that realistic synthetic audio can convey emotions, studies that compare listeners’ experience of synthetic audio and human performances are limited. Using short musical excerpts, we investigate the effect of performance (human vs. synthetic) and instrumentation (piano vs. string quartet) as well as the influence of twelve musical features on participants’ ratings of five emotional dimensions (mood, energy, movement, dissonance, and tension). Findings show a small main effect of performance and a large main effect of instrumentation. Synthetic audio was perceived as more positive in mood and less tense than human performances. Piano excerpts were also perceived as more positive and as conveying less tension and energy than synthetic excerpts. Several rhythmic and pitch measures were reliably predictive of participants’ perceived emotions, supporting the need for considering finer-grain structural features when using naturalistic stimuli.
CREDITS
Producer/Réalisateur: Jennifer Butler
Recording engineers, digital editing, mastering/Ingénieur de son, montage et transfert numériques: Will Howie and Paul Luchkow
Recorded at/Enregistré à: Pyatt Hall, Vancouver, March 22, 2021 and Philip T. Young, Victoria, November 27, 2021
VSO School of Music: Sydney Trotter; UVIC School of Music: Kristy Farkas
Graphic design/Conception graphique: André Cormier
Photos Programme notes/Notes d’explication: Jennifer Butler
This recording was made possible through the financial assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts. / Cet en- registrement a bénéficié de l’appui financier du Conseil des arts du Canada.
Artists: Tyler Duncan (BMus’98) and Erika Switzer (BMus’97, MMus’00)
Recording details:
A Left Coast is a heartfelt song collection for the place baritone Tyler Duncan and pianist Erika Switzer call home- British Columbia.
The distinguished artists write that: “Our particular connections to Vancouver’s communities, geography, and spirit, continue to nourish us as artists. Its lands and waters, the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory cared for since time immemorial by the Musqueam, Squamish, and Selilwitulh and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, provided us with an extraordinary upbringing. With these songs, (by composers Iman Habibi, Jean Coulthard, Jocelyn Morlock, Stephen Chatman, Leslie Uyeda, Melissa Hui, and Jeffrey Ryan) we wish to say thank you.”
Duncan and Switzer have been inspired by the vibrant Canadian new music scene, and offer an adventurous, deeply felt homage to Canada’s beautiful ‘left coast.’
