Composer: Dean Burry Featured UBC Faculty Artist: Krisztina Szabó,
Recording details:
Alfred Noyes’ narrative poem The Highwayman made an early impact on me when I discovered it in a faded book in my elementary school library. I remember committing it to memory for a school concert, delivering the sumptuous descriptive language with all the drama a 10-year-old imagination could muster. The poem stayed with me since that time.
Despite its slightly “old-fashioned” nature, it has endured as one of the most popular poems of the twentieth century. The story tells of a dashing robber riding through a stormy night to reach an English country inn for a tryst with his true love, Bess. The robber is betrayed to the British Army and Bess is forced to make a choice between her lover’s safety and her own brutal death.
The musical ensemble is inspired by Arnold Schoenberg’s seminal work Pierrot lunaire, op. 21 (1912). Both works are narrated, divided into a number of short sections, and employ the moon as their central image. While the music of The Highwayman is often influenced by the atonality of that earlier work, it also veers at times into other referential styles as the drama of the narrative dictates.
Publication details: 2nd International Conference Música Analítica, Interdisciplinary Approaches to Music Time, Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal, 12-14 October 2023, p. 48.
Abstract: This paper proposes a definition of polyrhythm that affords classification of a wider variety of polyphonic textures along a set of characteristics derived from”composite rhythms,” i.e., the sequential presentation of event onsets reduced to a single strand. Examples of notated rhythmic polyphony from the Suter 1980 Corpus (https://polyrhythm.humdrum.org/) that have been encoded in kern for computational analysis using the composite tool (https://doc.verovio.humdrum.org/filter/composite/) are provided as case study. One of the advantages of this approach is that it allows for comparison across different types of ensembles, regardless of the number of instrumental parts. By dividing the polyphonic texture into contrasting rhythmic strands, aspects of metric orientation, rhythmic patterning, event density, coincidence, and salience can be assessed. It is argued that measures derived from composite rhythms not only afford more fine-grain characterization of rhythmic structures, but also provide an opportunity to address issues of perceived complexity using realistic musical stimuli.
Featured UBC Alumni: Sherryl Sewepagaham (composer of Okâwîmâw Askiy (Mother Earth) & Picikîsksîs (Chickadee) Chant)
Label: Leaf Music
Recording/mix engineer: Paul Chirka and Zana Warner
Recording details:
Ispiciwin, meaning “Journey,” embarks on an unprecedented musical exploration, bridging cultures and perspectives. Winnipeg and Cree composer Andrew Balfour describes it as a dream collaboration, one that deepens the understanding of truth and storytelling from an Indigenous standpoint. With the powerful voices of Luminous Voices, alongside artists Jessica McMann and Walter MacDonald White Bear, Ispiciwin is an evocative testament to the transformative power of music and a small, but important step toward reconciliation.
Luminous Voices, Calgary’s professional chamber choir, was founded in 2012 by conductor and Artistic Director Timothy Shantz. Uniting local, national, and international artists and organizations to illuminate choral music of the past and present, spanning cultures and traditions, we engage audiences in Calgary and beyond through exceptional sonic experiences encompassing live and virtual performances, recordings, workshops, new commissions by contemporary composers, and community education and development. Luminous Voices comprises some of the best ensemble singers in the Calgary area, collaborating with singers and musicians from across North America.
Description: This essay explores the author’s process of trying to understand how to responsibly forge a relationship with traditional song heritage given conditions of ethnocultural rupture. Weaving together Slovácko folk songs transcribed by the author’s great-grandfather, an archival recording of the author’s grandfather, audio/video documents of her own embodied performance, dreams, folk tales, and analysis, the piece meditates on the many facets of “living song” (živá píseň). The author explores her process of learning how to approach the life of song, and how songs might be cared for. The performance of practice-based research is posited as a means to confront and dismantle patriarchal white supremacy within one’s body and spirit, thereby making possible the recovery of exiled strands of self and the forging of ancestral connections.
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Composer: T. Patrick Carrabré Artists: Rebecca Cuddy, mezzo-soprano; Amy Hills, violin;
M Gillian Carrabré, violin; Laurence Schaufele, viola;
Ariel Carrabré, cello
Recording details: WinterWind Records, released September 15, 2023
Métis Songs was commissioned by Harbourfront Centre for their Summer Music in the Garden concert series. Following the Red River Resistance (1869–1870) and the Battle of Batoche (1885), it was often dangerous to publicly identify as Métis. This album includes a cycle of three songs that explore manifestations of Métis identity from the 1800s to the present and our continued struggle to be recognized as a unique people and claim space wherever we might now live.
Description: Over the past 30 years, musicologists have produced a remarkable new body of research literature focusing on the lives and careers of women composers in their socio-historical contexts. But detailed analysis and discussion of the works created by these composers are still extremely rare. This is particularly true in the domain of music theory, where scholarly work continues to focus almost exclusively on male composers. Moreover, while the number of performances, broadcasts, and recordings of music by women has unquestionably grown, these works remain significantly underrepresented in comparison to music by male composers. Addressing these deficits is not simply a matter of rectifying a scholarly gender imbalance: the lack of knowledge surrounding the music of female composers means that scholars, performers, and the general public remain unfamiliar with a large body of exciting repertoire.
Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers: Concert Music, 1960-2000 is the first to appear in a groundbreaking four-volume series devoted to compositions by women across Western art music history. Each chapter opens with a brief biographical sketch of the composer before presenting an in-depth critical-analytic exploration of a single representative composition, linking analytical observations with questions of meaning and sociohistorical context. Chapters are grouped thematically by analytical approach into three sections, each of which places the analytical methods used in the essays that follow into the context of late twentieth-century ideas and trends. Featuring rich analyses and critical discussions, many by leading music theorists in the field, this collection brings to the fore repertoire from a range of important composers, thereby enabling further exploration by scholars, teachers, performers, and listeners.
Abstract:This article adapts Classical notions of formal function for the purpose of proposing a listener-centered theory of phrase formation in post-tonal repertoires. It contends that formal function is an emergent property of music through which a listener actively shapes musical organization in time. The result of this approach is a view of musical form in which the listener and composer mutually construct the significant formal units of a musical work through their interactions, a perspective particularly well adapted to the challenges presented by post-tonal music. In order to show how phrase structure in post-tonal music emerges through these formal affordances, the article analyzes in detail several passages from Edgard Varèse’s Density 21.5, Luigi Dallapiccola’s Dialoghi, and Anton Webern’s Three Little Pieces Op. 11, No. 1. The theory of phrase presented here encourages an understanding of phrase as fundamentally relational and constantly mutable.
Publication details: Martin Bresnicks Piano Compositions: An Analysis and Performance Guide, MTNA e – Journal, Cincinnati Vol. 14, Iss. 4, (Apr 2023): 37.
Excerpt of abstract: This document is intended to be a practical tool for those interested in performing, researching and developing a deeper understanding of Martin Bresnick’s keyboard music. As one of György Ligeti’s pupils, the practice of micropolyphony is prevalent in his music, and influences from Schumann, Bach, Beethoven, Webern and others are discussed. The document presents brief biographies of Bresnick and his wife, the pianist Lisa Moore, and contextualizes each piano composition.
