Canadian Composers
Martin Bartlett(1939-1993) was born in Great Britain and immigrated to Canada in 1952. Bartlett created his first electronic pieces on tape at University of British Columbia in his mid-twenties and began working in live electronic music at Mills College in Oakland during the late sixties. While living in the Bay area he worked closely with composer-performers Pauline Oliveros and David Tudor, as well as Indian vocalist Pandit Pran Nath and Indonesian composer-performer KRT Wasitodipuro (Pak Cokro).
Bartlett's first mature works for solo electronics were created using hand-made electronic devices, including the legendary Black Box and Apogee Motor. He later worked extensively with the Buchla 400 computer-controlled synthesizer and went on to create many interactive pieces with alternate tuning systems using Midi FM synthesizers.
In addition to composing, Martin Bartlett was a founding member of the Western Front where he curated numerous concerts and interdisciplinary presentations. As a professor of electronic music at the University of Victoria and then later at Simon Fraser University, he passed on the practice of interactive electronics to a number of composers on the west coast, including Matt Rogalsky, Ken Newby, and Daniel Scheidt. At SFU, he was instrumental in establishing the Vancouver Community Gamelan that is still active today playing traditional Javanese and contemporary Canadian repertoire.
Christian Bouchardest né à Québèc en 1968. Guitariste de formation, il touche à presque tous les styles musicaux. En 1996, il boucle dix années de pratique en co posant et interprétant huit pièces pour guitare électrique préparée, inspirées de photographies de Stéphane Beaulieu. En 1991, il remporte la finale locale de CEGEP en spectacle avec le groupe multimédia Synopsis. De 1993 à 1995, il travaille à la réalisation d'émissions radiophoniques pour l'organisme: La bande magnétique. C'est dans leur très petit studio, qu'il effectue ses premiers essais électroacoustiques. On lui décerne le premier prix pour Trois miniatures en suite au concours jeunes compositeurs de La Fondation SOCAN, édition 1998. Depuis 1996, Christian Bouchard étudie au Conservtoire de Musique de Montréal, où il complète une maîtrise sous la supervision de Yves Daoust.
Ned Bouhalassa is a studio composer, specializing in acousmatic music, as well as writing for a variety of media (cinema, television, internet), and in a variety of techno-derived styles. Attracted by cinema, contemporary visual art and science fiction, he balances form and content in his work, while leaving room for emotion and poetry. Presented in concert and on radio in many countries, his works have won him several national and international prizes (1990, '93, '95). Active in the promotion of electroacoustic music in Montréal since 1987, he has participated as a composer, teacher, curator, radio host, and administrator. His teachers have included Kevin Austin and Francis Dhomont. His first CD, Aérosol, has been released on Montréal's empreintes DIGITALes label.
Alex Bulmeris a multi-talented blind artist in Toronto who has produced work for theatre, radio, and video. She has also performed in numerous productions with Nightwood Theatre and Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. After working on Life Unseen, she has focused on the subject of vision loss in a variety of media. Her video Beauty was premiered last year at the Inside Out Festival and has gained international attention since then. She is currently developing a theatrical work called Smudge from which she created a short radio piece for CBC's Out Front.
Darren Copeland creates electroacoustic soundscape compositions for the concert hall, radio, and theatre. He has studied electroacoustic composition under Barry Truax (Simon Fraser University) and Dr. Jonty Harrison (University of Birmingham). His acousmatic works have received mentions in international competitions and have been published in several CD collections. His radio adaptation of August Strindberg's A Dream Play is being produced for broadcast in surround sound by CBC's Sunday Showcase. Also, his first CD Rendu Visible has just been released on the empreintes DIGITALes label. Darren Copeland is Producer for New Adventures in Sound, and is active with the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (WFAE) and the communauté électroacoustique Canadienne/Canadian electroacoustic community (CEC).
Yves Daoust (1946) - Formation traditionnelle de pianiste et compositeur au Conservatoire de Musique de Montréal. Stagiaire au Groupe de Musique Expérimentale de Bourges de 1973 et 1975, il a ensuite travaillé comme concepteur sonore durant quelques années à l'Office-national du Film du Canada. Directeur de l'ACREQ de 1983 à 1992. Actuellement professeur-responsable du programme électroacoustique au Conservatoire de Musique de Montréal.
Récipiendaire du prix Euphonie d'Or lors du Consours International de musique électroacoustique de Bourges 1992, pour Quatour (1979).
Yves Gigon is studying composition at Concordia University in Electroacoustics and Digital Image/Sound. He is a drummer, producer, webmaster, and is actively involved in the administration of the communauté électroacoustique Canadienne/Canadian electroacoustic community (CEC).
Ken Newbyis a multi-instrumentalist and composer who combines interests in world music with interactive electronics. These interests are reflected in his close association with Martin Bartlett, as well as performance and composition collaborations with Lights in a Fat City and the Vancouver Community Gamelan among others. He has studied extensively in Java and received his MFA from Simon Fraser University.
Matt Rogalsky is a composer and intermedia artist making live electronic performance and installation works with a focus on responsive and algorithmic computer-controlled sound. He studied electronic music with Martin Bartlett between 1985 and 1991 and afterwards worked as a technical assistant on several Bartlett compositions. Rogalsky has lived in the UK since 1995 and has been performing and showing work in Europe and North America. Upcoming activities include installations and performances at the Cambridge Darkroom Gallery (UK) and a performance in the Experimental Music Festival in Munich (Germany).
Chris Rolfecomposes music specifically for multi-channel diffusion. He received his BA in Politics from Princeton University in 1986 and his MFA in Electroacoustics from Simon Fraser University in 1996.
As the programmer behind Vancouver's Third Monk Software, he is also the developer of the ABControl software used to diffuse all of the works in the Sound Travels repertoire. ABControl grew out of research originally conducted for Barry Truax at Simon Fraser University with funding from the Canada Council in 1995 and in collaboration with researchers Tim Bartoo of Harmonic Functions and David Murphy (SFU).
This original 8 channel diffusion system, consisting of the DM8 mixer and a Max application called Matrix, was first used in Barry Truax's Powers of Two, premiered at the International Computer Music Conference (Banff, 1995). The DM8 and Matrix became prototypes for the DM1616 AudioBox and ABControl being used for Sound Travels in concerts across the country and around the world.
Randall Smith was born in 1960 in Windsor Ontario. He began his compositional career after discovering the music of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales. He studied the violin under Eugene Kash and has now begun a new direction that involves the writing for musical instruments with tape. Randall has received numerous prizes and mentions at Noroit competition (Arras France), Luigi Rusolo Competition (Varese Italy), and the Bourges Competition, along with the GMEM prize in Marseilles France. In addition to grants from the Canada Council, Ontario Arts Council, and Toronto Arts Council, he has received commissions from l'ACREQ, Canadian Electronic Ensemble, Continuum, Percussionist Beverly Johnston, and Reseaux to name a few. His music is available on the empreintes DIGITALes label. A new release is due out this year that will include The Unmoved Center.
Jacques Tremblay... then one day, I heard Hymnen by Karlheinz Stockhausen. As a young guitarist driven by the desire to become a composer, the experience of hearing electroacoustics for the first time was like a revelation. My first teacher was Yves Daoust (Conservatoire de musique de Montreal), who introduced me to repertoire and composition. With the help of a Canada Council grant, I continued my studies with Denis Dufour and Jean-Marc Duchenne in Lyon (France). I then returned to Montreal where I realized my initial ambition by completing my studies in composition under the direction of Gilles Tremblay.
Barry Truax is a Professor in both the School of Communication and the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University where he teaches acoustic communication and electroacoustic music.
He has worked with the World Soundscape Project, editing its Handbook for Acoustic Ecology, and has published a book Acoustic Communication dealing with all aspects of sound and technology.
As a composer, Truax is best known for his work with the PODX computer music system which he has used for tape solo works and those which combine tape with live performers or computer graphics. In 1991 his work, Riverrun, was awarded the Magisterium at the International Competition of Electroacoustic Music in Bourges, France, a category open only to electroacoustic composers of 20 or more years experience.
A selection of his pieces may be heard on the LP recording Sequence of Earlier Heaven, and the Compact Discs Digital Soundscapes, Pacific Rim, Song of Songs, and Inside, all on the Cambridge Street Records label.
Hildegard Westerkamp was born in Osnabrück, Germany in 1946. She emigrated to Canada in 1968 and gave birth to her daughter in 1977. After completing her music studies in the early seventies her ears were drawn to the acoustic environment as another cultural context or place for intense listening. Whether as a composer, educator, or radio artist most of her work has centered around environmental sound and acoustic ecology.
She has taught courses in Acoustic Communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and has conducted soundscape workshops internationally. She is a founding member of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology and edited The Soundscape Newsletter between 1991 and 1995.
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