What a pleasure to have my music and research featured on CBC’s In Concert: Revelation Hour with Paolo Pietropaolo. All the more so because it is even possible to listen to the episode outside Canada! Thank you to the CBC, and to all the musicians featured playing my music, including Jennifer King, the Elizabeth Bishop Chamber Players, and more.
This project was an absolute dream come true! I was asked to write music for a new Audible audiobook of one of my childhood favourites, Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, directed by Megan Follows (who to my mind is Anne of Green Gables herself!) I had to write 70 minutes of music in 2 months (this is more than I usually write in 2 years), but somehow I did it, and had a great time! Thank you to Ken Woods, Seb Lovell-Huckle, Tim Burton, and the amazing musicians of the English Symphony Orchestra (Laura Jellicoe, Alison Lambert, Suzanne Woods, Sarah Ewins, Carl Hill, Corinne Frost and Daniel King Smith for their beautiful recording on such short notice: it was a real pleasure working with them. You can hear the Audiobook here (Audible has many versions of Anne of Green Gables: the one I wrote music for is the one released Nov 30, 2023.) If you listen carefully, you may hear some transcriptions of PEI birdsongs embedded in the music!
I had a great time participating in the Modern Chants concert, organized by composer and violinist Ruta Vitkauskaite. I wrote two pieces, in collaboration with poet Dawn Wood, Gannetry, for Jo Nicholson (clarinet) and Ellie Cherry (live electronics), and Machair Flowers, for violist Katherine Wren. These are my most graphically notated score to date, and I really enjoyed the process. Gannetry uses graphic notation to convey specific gestural, timbral, textural & structural information about the piece — that is, there is a particular way I wanted the piece to sound, and the graphics were the best way to notate this — while Machair Flowers uses graphic notation to suggest kinds of sounds & networks, but the overall realization is very open. If you are interested in exploring either of these pieces, feel free to get in touch. I’d be happy to make a version for instrument/voice/ensemble. You can hear both these pieces, as well as great pieces by Ruta Vitkauskaite and Gemma McGregor and more poetry by Dawn Wood right here. (Machair Flowers starts at 51’21”, and Gannetry starts at 1h17’20”).
I’m so exited to announce that Dr Rachel Drury (RCS), Dr Bede Williams (St Andrews), Dr Mhairi Stewart (St Andrews), and Rebecca Duncan (Dundee Science Centre) and I have received SGSAH CDA funding to co-supervise a PhD student to design music and/or sound installations for Dundee Science Centre. There is more info here and here. (The application deadline is June 7, 2021. Feel free to send me a note if you have any questions about it!)
Thank you so much to Kirsty MacLeod for inviting me to be a guest on the W.E.E. podcast, for a great discussion about interdisciplinary science-art research and creation with Beth Reinke and Amy Cheu. You can hear this episode (as well as lots of other interesting discussions) here.
Last year Sarah Hopfinger, Stuart MacRae and I received RSE Research Workshop funding to organize a series of talks, discussion, and a concert entitled “Art-Making in the Anthropocene”. Our initial plans for three days of in-person events were scuppered by covid, but we eventually figured out an online format that is just as exciting. For more information about the talks and concert (to be performed by Katherine Wren and Nordic Viola) and for free tickets, please check out our website.
I’m pleased to share my most recent zoomusicology article, “‘Hearken to the Hermit Thrush: A Case Study in Interdisciplinary Listening,” which was published as part of the special research topic “Songs and Signs: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Cultural Transmission and Inheritance in Human and Nonhuman Animals” in Frontiers in Psychology. In this article I discuss my own approach to zoomusicological inquiry, and use the example of how the hermit thrush (Catharus guttatus) has been understood and discussed over the past 200 years to illustrate why interdisciplinary perspectives are essential for better understanding of animal songs. The full text is available for free here.
Madrigirls is a fantastic women’s choir in Glasgow, founded and directed by Katy Lavinia Cooper, and really enjoyed having the opportunity to write a new piece for their 2020 Advent Concert, to help celebrate their 20th anniversary. Due to covid the concert couldn’t take place in person, but I am so pleased that they were able to find a beautiful way to present it online! (You should really watch the whole thing, but if you are looking for my piece specifically, it’s at 1:02:40ish.)
Programme note:
My Wren-King uses lyrics from the St Stephen’s Day tradition of hunting the wren, which is celebrated in various different ways in Ireland, the UK and other Celtic-influenced parts of Europe, and even in some parts of Canada, including Nova Scotia where I am from (though I have never seen it). Traditionally people would kill a wren and bring it from door to door asking for change, though people now use toy wrens, fortunately! There are a variety of theories about the origin of the custom, but it is thought to date from pre-Christian times, or to be a Christianization of Celtic and/or Norse
customs, perhaps replacing a solstice sacrifice. I myself come from a mixed religious background, and although I’m an enthusiastic celebrator of Christmas, I’m not Christian: I thus find myself particularly interested in these customs of somewhat mysterious, mixed origins, associated with the
celebration of Christmas, but not actually connected to the Christmas story itself. I feel a further connection with wren mythology because many folk stories that are told about the wren in Europe have been transposed onto one of my favourite birds, the hermit thrush, when told in North America.
I’m so deeply disappointed in this article series by the Guardian that I don’t even know where to begin. How could they possibly think that, right in the midst of Black Lives Matter, and at a time when many living musicians are having to sell their instruments to survive because there is so little support for artists during covid, that a series featuring the music of 14 dead white male composers, and 0 composers who are non-white, non-male, and/or non-dead, is exactly what people need? When I wrote to express my disappointment with the content of the series, I was told that it had to be all dead white men because it was a series aimed at beginners, and not at a musicologist such as myself. I am not actually a musicologist, but I do write for academic and non-academic contexts, and I know that it’s no harder to write an introductory article about Clara Schumann than it is about Robert (and indeed, no harder to write a specialist article about Robert than it is about Clara). I love many – most, even – of the composers included in the canon, but I can’t believe that there are still people out there who think there’s anything immutable, timeless, or objective about which composers are included. Lists of the “most influential” or “best known” XYZ are never simply neutral accounts of historical fact. They reflect which information has been preserved and which has been forgotten, as well as whatever lens the list-maker sees history through (and this lens is very likely to be affected by both historical and contemporary biases and prejudices). Even more dangerously, they help determine who is going to continue to be “most influential” or “best known” XYZ in the future (whether or not this is the list-maker’s intent). I’m not against making lists: they can be helpful for developing shared bodies of knowledge for enjoyment or discussion, and they can be fun! But from now on I’m going to refer to the Classical Music™ canon as the Classical Music Listicle, as a reminder that any list of the most important, best, and/or best-known composers is inherently subjective, context-dependent, and a bit silly.
Here’s a post I wrote for the RCS Green Room blog about being an artist and academic during covid-19 lockdown. (And while you’re there, please read the blog posts by my wonderful colleagues as well!)
