This is my new favourite thing… Two of his (Alaa Wardi!) videos are among the Most Shared in Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia today. Both songs, which are in Arabic, were posted in just the past week and call to mind a popular video trend we’ve seen in the United States.

Using only his mouth, body, and even his beard, Wardi creates a heavily layered, one-man a capella performance that, through elaborate editing, is both very complex and yet completely fluid.

The interweb is crazy…

I also had a baby last year which, well for all those parents out there – nouf said, right.

I’ll be updating this space regularly so you are all welcome (Hi Mom!) to tune in a follow along.

Le Cirque de Calder (Three Ring Circus) is a three movement work, based on Entrance of the Gladiators theme composed in 1897 by the Czech composer Julius Fucík. It is a mutation of sorts, which seeks to capture the spirit of the circus. The music is inspired as a soundtrack to a performance art piece by American Alexander Calder.

Alexander Calder’s fascination with the circus began in his mid-twenties, when he published illustrations in a New York journal of Barnum and Bailey’s Circus, for which he held a year’s pass. It was in Paris in 1927 that he created the miniature circus celebrated in this film – tiny wire performers, ingeniously articulated to walk tightropes, dance, lift weights, and engage in acrobatics in the ring. The Parisian avant-garde would gather in Calder’s studio to see the circus in operation. It was, as critic James Johnson Sweeney noted, `a laboratory in which some of the most original features of his later work were to be developed.’ This film exudes the great personal charm of Calder himself, moving and working the tiny players like a ringmaster, while his wife winds up the gramophone in the background. The Circus is now housed at the Whitney Museum in New York.

Premiere Performance by Quatuor Bozzini, April 18th, 2004, Oscar Peterson Concert Hall, Montreal, Quebec

February, 2011

Music / Language Interrelations: Towards an Evolutionary, Semiotic and Compositional Perspective is a research project that seeks to situate my academic interests cultivated during my tenure as a doctoral student at the University of Toronto. The central thesis of this research is three fold. The first section is concerned with a survey of recent hypotheses regarding evolutionary foundations involving language and music. The second section outlines the humanistic perspective of music meaning by revealing how music theorists and composers alike have been influenced by linguistic notions of referential meaning. In an applied trajectory, we will then examine the means by which composers have utilized speech in the composition of both acoustic and electroacoustic works. This project will conclude by synthesizing our research into a formal model, which represents the topographical “space” in which composers have traversed. It is my hope that this model can be used to help inform future scholarship in the study of language in musical composition.

Keywords: music and language, composition, speech-music composition, composition techniques, evolutionary musicology, semiotics, rhetoric, linguistics

Length: 129 pages

Click HERE to download (PDF)

This is music of longing and anticipation. The right hand and the left struggle to synchronise, now succeeding, now failing to coincide. The primary rhythmic figure – a restless polyrhythm of two beats in the right hand for every three in the left, should recall the onward rush of the titular river. The driving rhythm leads us towards a sense of catharsis, and perhaps resolve. ­

Haunting Lomax includes a field-recording of an American Prison Chain Gang by Alan Lomax, which is emitted from off-stage source. It is a haunting statement; an allegorical nod to our collective driving sense of spirit towards a sense of tomorrow.

Alan Lomax (January 31, 1915 – July 19, 2002) was an American folklorist and ethnomusicologist. He was one of the great field collectors of folk music of the 20th century, recording thousands of songs in the United States, Great Britain, Ireland, the Caribbean, Italy, and Spain. This piece is a ode to Lomax, and the powerful music he champion

(performance by Michael Vincent)

for Erhu (Chinese Violin), Zheng (Chinese Zither), Percussion, pre-recorded soundtracks, single-chanel projected digital video, and dance. 2007-09

Performed at the National Arts Centre (Ottawa), & Chan Centre for the Performing Arts (Vancouver)

Commissioned by the Orchid Ensemble, with dance choreography by Moving Dragon: Jessica Jone and Chengxin Wei and video images by multimedia artists Kenneth Newby and Aleksandra Dulic. Triaspora, also features music by Jin Zhang, Mark Armanini and Ta-wen Wang.

Triaspora is a cultural exploration of the Chinese Canadian experience through music, dance and interactive multimedia. The multi-media production incorporates Asian traditions with contemporary expression, which results in an elating mix of style, movement and sound. Triaspora draws on numerous interviews from different generations of Chinese Canadians, while examining the search for cultural identity and social acceptance.

Overture, the opening movement of this project, reflects the crossing of three disciplines – music, dance and multimedia. It also has a structure built upon three themes: fire, water and travel. Water, which at one time covered Vancouver’s Chinatown and carried the immigrants to this “new” country, symbolizes their emergence from a repressed world to a new frontier. Like water, which changes its form in natural cycles, the Chinese community continues to transform and renew with each generation. The fire that burned down Nanaimo’s Chinatown in 1960 is also a symbol of rebirth. Traveling is a familiar reality for the immigrant generation. Overture includes original interview material from a cross-section of Chinese Canadian individuals.

Creatively, this work utilizes a mixture of improvisatory and set instrumental material, which is overlapped with pre-recorded text and instrumentation. The balance between these three elements is achieved via the live performance, where each element is amalgamated into the overall texture of the movement. Though traditionally not a true “overture”, the work is titled as such, as it represents an introduction of materials, voice characters, and instrumentation, which is dealt with in detail later in the show: surrounding water, fire, and travel. This work is stylistically influenced by the use of traditional Chinese instrumentation and contemporary music. Instrumentation includes the zheng, (Chinese zither), the erhu (Chinese violin), and percussion (marimba, and various metallic gongs and cymbals).

Choreography/Dance – Jessica Jone and Chenxing Wei of
Moving Dragon Dance Company

Composers – Michael Vincent, Jin Zhang, Mark Armanini and Ya-wen Wang

Media Artists – Kenneth Newby and Aleksandra Dulic

(note this is a remix of the original version found exactly right at this spot here)

Dying Ain’t Bad Y’all was one of 2 commissions by the 2007 International Push Festival. It was inspired by the famed work GRAB IT by Dutch composer Jacob Ter Veldhuis. It features the voice of a pentecostal preacher synchronized with a lone tenor saxophone, resulting in a driving duet propelled by a spirited African American cadential speech melody. Funky? Damn, yesss!

Performed by Colin MacDonald February 2nd, 2007

Commissioned by the Off-Centre Dancers, with choreography by Jennifer Mascall and video by Jacqueline Levitin performed April 8th & 9th 2005 at SFU Theatre, Vancouver BC. This work was first premiered at Sonic Boom! New Music Festival, Vancouver, BC, March 12th, 2005. It was also co-presented with John Oswald as part of his Glenn Gould inspired concert featuring Robot Piano Performances at The New Forms Festival presented on September 15, 2005 at The Western Front. This piece was also featured in the Toronto New Music festival in November, 2009.