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Dirty legato and musical parenting
I’ve been in beautiful Ottawa since Friday afternoon. After three intense days with the NAC Composers Program, I am enjoying a semi-day off. I have an interview with the CBC Radio 1 this afternoon (tune in around 4:45 EST). I also did an interview for the NAC blog earlier. You can check it out here…
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Off to Ottawa!
I am at this very moment on the last leg of my 24 hour train journey from Halifax to Ottawa, where I will be participating in the National Arts Centre’s Composers Program with Gary Kulesha and Chen Yi. I will be workshoping a brand new piece, The Unanswered, for an 11-part chamber ensemble. I am…
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Crowdfunding as a leveraging tool
Crowdfunding is a platform that allows many people to contribute varying amounts of money towards a project. It is the idea of patronage broken up into small pieces allowing a multitude of dedicated and curious people to participate in the creation process. The idea has been very successfully implemented digitally through websites like Kickstarter and…
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Idea blackboard
Last week I discussed the life-changing organizational virtues of the Musical Laundry Line. While the laundry line is great for keeping track of small items, at some point you might wish for a larger surface to work with. When you feel that no sheet of paper is large enough for your grand ideas, you turn…
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Musical laundry line
Our living room window looks out onto the backyards of some typical Halifax heritage houses, the kind with rickety wooden fire escapes and various mismatched protrusions added on throughout the last century. The life in these houses – with their odd assortment of cats, dogs and humans – provides endless entertainment and fodder for artistic…
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Village crawl in Ukraine
Now that I’ve exhausted myself jumping around my condo, I am calm enough announce that I was awarded my very first Canada Council grant! I’ll be traveling to the motherland (Ukraine) this fall to research Ukrainian folksong and experience it first hand. I’ll be living in Kyiv and going on short trips to villages to…
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Trained to look for a job
“Culture changes to match the economy, not the other way around. The economy needed an institution that would churn out compliant workers, so we built it. Factories didn’t happen because there were schools; schools happened because there were factories. The reason so many people grow up to look for a job is that the economy…
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Economies of Paper Sizes
Recently, I had to produce a set of parts for my new ensemble piece, The Unanswered. The whole experience got me thinking about paper size and its effect on cost. I had to format said parts according to the MOLA Guidelines for Music Preparation, which suggests parts with a staff size of no less than…
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Composing through the tears
On Friday I finally shipped off the score and parts of the newly completed The Unanswered. I birthed this baby for the National Arts Centre’s Composers Program, which will take place in late June. The piece ended up being quite a struggle with a lot of hair pulling and cursing and moaning involved. It was…
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The Child rises again
Paul Dwyer will perform The child, bringer of light at the Oberlin Conservatory Alumni Celebration Concert on April 28. The concert will take place at the DiMenna Centre, Mary Flagler Cary Hall in New York.
