Artist Statement
I am a composer of concert art music, dance, and other media music. My work is centred around creating music for performers of Western classical and multicultural musical instruments. As a form of art music, my work embodies research into musical and social ideas from the range of cultural, historical, and scientific influences that permeate contemporary society at a global scale. This music is written for a broad range of audiences including classical music listeners and others who are interested in our world and in the reflective, expressive, and imaginative modes of listening found in diverse genres of both traditional and newer music.
My work as an artist explores the power of music to animate our consciousness. It connects us to the spiritual experiences of awe, wonder, joy, loss, sensuality, and compassion. This exploration embeds in our imagination through works created as concert art music, music for dance, research-based music & multimedia projects, and music for gallery installation and video. The broad varieties of musical forms created unites the worlds of the spiritual and imaginative with the emotional and sensual. It opens an exploration of the mysterious threads of our origins, the flavour and substance of our consciousness, the conflicts embedded in our contemporary experience, as well as the existential question of where we are going in the 21st century as a species. This music integrates with poetry, dance, and visual imagery to recreate the imaginative voyage of the child through the universe while illuminating the dark and veiled inner journey out of which we create our future. This music combines rhythmic embodied mathematics with the awe and wonder of freely evolving timbral arcs set within a world of natural sound. Every work is based on an idea, a sound, a word, an experience, a relationship; never standing alone, but integrating into a complex fabric of connection to our humanity and the world.
The following are the core ideas out of which I create this music:
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Melody is avant-garde… because every possibility of purely technical innovation has already been examined by composers and theorists in the past 100 years, melody is now the way forward. As our musical and artistic paradigms continue to evolve within 21st century society, diverse types of melody and expressive ornamentation have re-emerge to be explored and reanimated as a intimately human reconstruction of the avant-garde experience in music.
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Rhythm is the passion…because of the powerful musical energies emanating from the cultures of the South, rhythm passion permeates the unconscious mind/body musical connections of our 21st century world. When rhythm is the passion, we liberate expressions of the life force in music. Barriers between between North and South, between high and low art, and racialized cultural differences are overcome, opening a wider appreciation of our journey.
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The audience matters, and so does the “story”…because the stories we create about ourselves matter at this critical period in our history, the moment of humanity’s entry into the Anthropocene Epoch. This is a period in the history of the planet defined by human industrial and land-use activities becoming the primary drivers of geophysical and biological change; a period of high social/political conflict and existential risk. For the art music of our time to be relevant to the audience/actors of our time, music and the arts are combined with elements of documentary to create new concert experiences that address the narrative threads of awareness out of which we create our future.