2018 SALT New Music Festival and Symposium in Winnipeg, Victoria and Vancouver

May 6, 2018
Winnipeg, Manitoba
University of Manitoba in Coordination with GroundSwell
11:00 AM: Open Rehearsal: A Ghazel by Örjan Sandred
1:00 PM  Vocal Workshop: Love Songs by Claude Vivier
2:00 PM: Reading Session with Works by Young Composers
7:30 PM: Concert with works by Philippe Leroux, Giorgio Magnanensi, Claude Vivier, Luca Marenzio and the premiere of a string quartet by Örjan Sandred
Desautels Faculty of Music
Tache Hall, Room T2-145
136 Dafoe Road
Winnipeg, Manitoba

May 8-9 2018
Victoria, BC
SALT New Music Festival and Symposium / Open Space
11:00 – 1:00: Reading Session
2:00 – 4:00 PM: Reading session with works by young composers
Open Space
2nd floor, 510 Fort St, Victoria
Victoria, BC
8:15 PM: Open Rehearsal with works by Örjan Sandred, Claude Vivier and Philippe Leroux
Klangforum Heidelberg and Ensemble Aisthesis
Congregation Emanu-El
1461 Blanshard St,
Victoria, BC
Free and Open to the Public

May 9, 2018
7:30 PM: Lecture-Concert: Ethica by Dániel Péter Biró
Klangforum Heidelberg and Ensemble Aisthesis
Congregation Emanu-El
1461 Blanshard St,
Victoria, BC
Free and Open to the Public

May 10-11, 2018: Vancouver New Music / Vancouver Community College
May 10, 2018
3:00 PM: Reading Session with Works by Young Composers
4:00 PM: Workshop with Works by Giorgio Magnanensi and 
Örjan Sandred
Vancouver Community College
1155 East Broadway
Vancouver, BC
May 11, 2018
7:30 PM: Concert in Coordination with Vancouver New Music with works by Giorgio Magnanensi, Örjan Sandred, Claude Vivier and others.
Red Gate Arts Society
1601 Johnston St.
Vancouver, BC

From May 4-11 the Schola Heidelberg and Ensemble Aisthesis will be visiting Canada to present works by Canadian composers.

The KlangForum Heidelberg is where two very distinctive formations pool their interpretive élan and their astounding virtuosity: the voices of the School Heidelberg and the instrumentalists of the ensemble aesthesis. The two ensembles for contemporary and ancient music thrill their audiences all over Germany, at international festivals and as much-sought-after guests of major concert series. With its innovative concert formats, KlangForum Heidelberg has injected new life into the relationship between music and society. Conductor for the ensemble is Walter Nussbaum.

On May 6, 2018 the group presented a workshop around the music of Claude Vivier and perform readings of works by young composers. At 7:30 they performed music by Philippe Leroux, Giorgio Magnanensi, Claude Vivier, Luca Marenzio and the premiere of a string quartet by Örjan Sandred at the Desautels Faculty of Music, University of Manitoba. 

On May 8, 2018 at 11:00 AM and 2:00 PM the ensemble presented a reading session for young composers at Open Space in Victoria, BC including works by BC-based composers Maria Eduarda Martins, Timo Pekhonen and Sean Kiley. At 8:15 PM, an open rehearsal was presented with composer Örjan Sandred in attendance at Congregation Emanu-El in Victoria, BC.

On May 9, 2018 at 7:30 PM a concert was presented at Congregation Emanu-El featuring works of Dániel Péter Biró, Gideon Klein and Viktor Ullmann, presented by the Klangforum Heidelberg and Ensemble Aisthesis. This last year, Dániel Péter Biró has been composing a large-scale musical composition based on Baruch Spinoza’s philosophical work, Ethica. The works by Gideon Klein and Viktor Ullmann were  written in during his internment in the Theresienstadt Concentration Camp.

On May 10 and 11, 2018 the Klangforum Heidelberg presenedt a workshop and concert at the Vancouver Community College and the Red Gate Arts Society in coordination with Vancouver New Music. This featured new works by Giorgio Magnanensi, Örjan Sandred, Claude Vivier, Dániel Péter Biró and others.

These events are happening in collaboration with the SALT New Music Festival and Symposium, Open Space, the University of Manitoba and Vancouver New Music and made possible through support from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts, the BC Arts Council and the Goethe Institute.

About the Artists:
Dániel Péter Biró is associate professor of composition and music theory at the University of Victoria in Victoria, BC, Canada. He studied in Hungary, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and Israel before completing his PhD from Princeton University in 2004. His dissertation examines historical relationships between orality, memory, and notational development in Hungarian laments, Jewish Torah recitation, and early Christian plainchant. In 2011 he was visiting professor at Utrecht University, where he researched Jewish and Islamic chant as practiced in the Netherlands. Biró has been commissioned by festivals (Eclat Festival, Darmstadt International Summer Courses, Toronto New Music Concerts, Vancouver New Music), and his music has been performed internationally by such ensembles as Frankfurt Radio Symphony, Ensemble Surplus, ensemble aisthesis, Kai Wessel, the Meitar Ensemble, ensemble recherche, Neue Vocalsolisten, Talea Ensemble, and Schola Heidelberg. He has won international prizes for his work (Kodály Prize, Gigahertz Production Prize, Vocal Music Competition of the ISCM–Austria). In 2013 his composition Kivrot Hata’avah (Graves of Craving) represented Canada at the World Music Days in Vienna, Austria. In 2014–2015 he was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, where he worked on the completion of the composition cycle Mishpatim (Laws) for voices, ensemble and electronics in collaboration with Experimentalstudio. He co-edited The String Quartets of Béla Bartók: Tradition and Legacy in Analytical Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2014). In 2016–2017, he was artist-in-residence at the University of Victoria Centre for Studies in Religion and Society and was named a Guggenheim fellow in 2017.

Brandon Chow began his university music education at the University of Victoria, Canada, in 2012. His compositions won awards at the Greater Victoria Performing Arts Festival and the Langley Pulse Music Festival. His music has been performed by members of the Civic Orchestra of Victoria, Victoria Symphony, Turning Point Ensemble, Land’s End Chamber Ensemble, and the University of Victoria Sonic Lab contemporary music ensemble. He studied percussion with Willliam Linwood, conducting with Ajtony Csaba, electronic music with Dr. Andrew Schloss, and composition with Drs. Rodney Sharman and Dániel Péter Biró. He participated in the 2015 SALT festival, where his music was read by Ensemble Tsilumos and he was mentored by Samir Odeh-Tamimi. In 2016, his orchestral work, Tilikum, was premiered by the Greater Victoria Youth Orchestra in commemoration of their 30th Anniversary. In 2017 he participated in the CCRMA workshops in computer music and followed masterclasses led by Philippe Leroux, Marc Andre and Alex Mincek at Royaumont Académie Voix Nouvelles. His recent electroacoustic piece,Regnvejr I Skoven was premièred at the University of Victoria in April, 2018. Current projects include Grey Waters, an electroacoustic piece based on shortwave radio broadcasts.

Liam Ross Gibson is a composer, pianist, and electronic musician currently based on Vancouver Island. He recently completed his MMus at the University of Manitoba, studying with Gordon Fitzell and Örjan Sandred. Previously he received a BMus in composition and theory from the University of Victoria, studying composition with Christopher Butterfield, Dániel Péter Biró, and John Celona, as well as piano with Eva Solar-Kinderman. He also holds a diploma in jazz piano from Vancouver Island University. As a composer he has worked with various professional and student ensembles; recent highlights include the premiere of his piece Halogen Archangel by the University of Manitoba Wind Ensemble, as well as his quintet Sostenuto, for members of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. As a performer he has premiered numerous works by other young composers, particularly as a member of the Victoria Composers Collective. He is currently a member of the electronic group Top Men, and previously played in other Vancouver Island bands such as Bridal Party, and The Body Politic.

Gideon Klein (1919-1945) was a pianist, composer, writer and educator. In his short life he combined a dizzying array of skills, experiences, musical styles and activity. He arranged Hebrew folk melodies, wrote quarter-tone compositions, served as repetiteur for the infamous production of the Verdi Requiem in Terezín, and was a formidable presence in the musical life of that place. Klein was born in the Moravian town of Přerov in 1919, the youngest of four children. His parents were Czech-speaking Jews and he grew up in a traditional atmosphere. His gifts showed early, and at age 11 he began piano lessons with Růžena Kurzová in Prague; by the time he was twenty he had moved permanently to the city. He began composing in 1934, and continued studying piano with Vilém Kurz. He completed his Master Class in 1939 and continued studying musicology at Charles University and composition with Alois Hába. These studies took place in difficult and uncertain conditions — by November of 1939 the Czech universities were closed by the Nazis, and Klein was forced to leave the Conservatory by 1940. An attempt to study in London in response to an invitation to study at the Royal Academy of Music was aborted. For the next year Klein tried to continue his activities using the pseudonym Karel Vránek, playing concerts in private homes, and continuing to work as a composer. His own apartment became the site of something very much like a salon, a meeting place for musicians and writers. On December 4th 1941 he was sent to Terezín where he remained for almost three years. Klein’s time in Terezín is a record of remarkable activity under adverse circumstances. He became an avid educator, on musical and other subjects, and devoted himself to the teaching of the camp’s orphans. He remained active as a performer, serving as pianist for several opera productions and playing in solo recitals such works as Beethoven’s Op.110, Janáček’s Sonata, and Busoni’s transcription of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in C Major and performing such chamber compositions as the Schubert Trio in Bb, Op.99, and piano quartets by Brahms and Dvořák. He also displayed conspicuous artistic growth as a composer, completing several choral works, a formidable Piano Sonata, a Fantasy and Fugue for String Quartet, and his final work, a Trio for strings, completed a week or so before he was transported to Auschwitz. Like so many others, his final days, spent at the Fürstengrube concentration camp, are impossible to document. One of the last sightings of Klein is described in Milan Slavický’s excellent biography of the composer. According to a prisoner named Hans Schimmeling, all new arrivals at Fürstengrube were subject to a doctor’s examination. They were forced to wait naked in a room together, guarded by an SS officer. There happened to be a piano in the room, and the SS man asked if anyone played the piano. “The eyewitness was not a musician and did not recognize the piece, yet to this day he remembers Klein’s playing and is convinced that had Klein played something to the guard’s liking (a waltz, a ditty or something of that kind), he could have alleviated his fate and perhaps even saved his life.” Klein’s legacy was preserved by several musicians, and carried forward primarily by his sister, the remarkable Eliška Kleinová who took great pains to make his music available and encourage a range of performers to take an interest in it. In her goals, and hopefully in her successes she embodies many of the same intentions of the Orel Foundation. Although there was a flurry of interest in Klein’s music immediately after the war, his legacy and that of his fellow Terezín prisoners did not fare so well under the Communists. Complex conflicts and geo-political alliances created an atmosphere of de facto anti-Semitism in Czechoslovakia under normalization, ranging from the Slánský trials to the more benign but similarly toxic undermining of both religious and cultural forms.

The music of Philippe Leroux has been widely performed in international festivals and by orchestras such as Tonhalle Orchester Zürich, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio-France, and the BBC Symphony. Philippe Leroux’s compositional output includes symphonic, vocal, electronic, acousmatic and chamber music. Born in Boulogne Billancourt 1959, he entered the Paris Conservatory in 1978 studying with Ivo Malec, Claude Ballif and Pierre Schäeffer and obtained three first prizes. Other prizes and awards include: Best contemporary musical creation Award 1996 for (d’) ALLER, SACEM Prize, Fondation Simone et Cino del Duca, André Caplet, Nadia and Lili Boulanger Prizes from the Academy of Fine Arts (Institut de France), Arthur Honegger Prize (Fondation de France) for his overall production. He is fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. From 2001 to 2006 he was a teacher in composition at IRCAM in the frame of the “Cursus d’Informatique Musicale”. From 2007 to 2009 he was composer-in-residence at Metz Arsenal and at Orchestre National de Lorraine. From September 2011 he is Associate Professor in composition at McGill University.

Maria Eduarda Mendes Martins is a composer, music director, and concert organizer resident in Victoria (Canada).Maria’s music primarily aims for transmitting essentially similar messages and human ideas through distinct musical languages, utilizing electroacoustic, spectral, extended and medieval compositional techniques as some of her communicational tools. After initiating her piano studies in 2006, Maria completed a bachelor’s degree in Music Composition at Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), where she was supervised by Celso Loureiro Chaves and Eloy Fritsch (2008-2012). Subsequently, Maria moved to Canada in order to pursue a master’s degree in music composition from University of Victoria (2013-2015), studying composition with Dániel Biró and Christopher Butterfield, and instrumental conducting with Ajtony Csaba. Currently, Maria Eduarda divides her activities between working as a composer, conductor, singer, Music Theory teacher, and co-director of the Victoria Composers Collective. Maria’s music has been performed in North America, South America, and The Netherlands.

Kirk McNally is a sound engineer who specializes in popular and classical music recording, and new music performances. He has worked with national and international recording artists in studios in Toronto and Vancouver. As a balance/electronics engineer for new music compositions, he has performed across Canada, in Tel Aviv, Israel; Graz, Austria and at the Fromm Concerts at Harvard University. Kirk joined the School of Music at the University of Victoria in 2006 to support a new combined program in Music and Computer Science. In 2016, he was appointed as the assistant professor of Music Technology for the School and is the current program advisor for the undergraduate combined major program and the graduate program in Music Technology. His research and creative work has been funded by the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD), the Canada Council for the Arts, the Learning and Teaching Centre at the University of Victoria and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. In 2017 he received an Internal Research Creative Project Grant from the University of Victoria to support his research into creativity and sound recording pedagogy in the studio. Kirk has been published in the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, The Journal on the Art of Record Production as has an upcoming chapter in the Bloomsbury Press publication, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Education: Perspectives and Practices

Born and raised in Italy, Giorgio Magnanensi currently lives in Roberts Creek on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia, Canada.  His diverse artistic practice includes composition, conducting, improvisation, circuit bending and video art.He is artistic director of Vancouver New Music and Laboratorio, and lecturer at the School of Music of the Vancouver Community College. From the early 1980’s to date he has been working as a composer, conductor, educator, artistic director, and performer in Europe, Japan and Canada. His views have developed gradually to his current belief that in today’s world of music, cultural studies and research the most vital ideas and resources travel through many different channels. This has led him to work with a wide variety of musicians, artists, performers and researchers, local, national and international organizations and to test through technology, interactivity, free creative improvisation and conduction the possibilities of a varied approach to music composition, performance and pedagogy. Through his work he wants to emphasize the value of difference, communication and active participation in the creative process as a path towards a deeper availability to the dialogue and the encounter. The process is a generative one that leads towards the foundation of a meaningful social function of the musician composer in contemporary society while fostering a higher level of knowledge transference. This process shows that art is a potentiality in a continuous becoming and that it takes form through the individual identity of each person existing as a manifestation of our multiplicity, we, existing as personæ – from the Latin word per sonum: that through which sound can resonate according to our ability to regain the qualities of curiosity, interest and commitment, and experience them in communication, mutual exchange and caring.

Örjan Sandred is a composer of both instrumental and computer music. His instrumental works reach from music for Symphony Orchestra to solo instruments. Several of his later compositions show an increased interest in mixed music, where acoustic instruments are combined with live electronics. He has composed music for performers in many countries, for example the Harrington/Loewen Duo (Ice Fog for saxophone, piano and live electronics), Sarah Jo Kirsch (A Ghasal, soprano and live electronics) and Oleg Pokhanovski (Sundogs for violin and live electronics) in Kanada, Camilla Hoitenga and Heloïse Dautry (Whirl of Leaves, flute and harp) in Germany/France, The Pearls Before Swine Experience (Fragments of Light), Das Orchestra (Flames and Blazes, blfl, tbn, vlc) and Mårten Falk (Cracks and Corrosion I, guitar and live electronics) in Sweden. Among his electroacoustic compositions is Konzert für Konzerthaus for the Wave Field synthesis loudspeakersystem at the concerthall in Detmold, Germany. He has also composed larger scale works, for example Magmafor symphony orchestra (for the Swedish Radio Orchestra), Labyrinths in the Wind for Yamaha WX5 Wind Controller and symphony orchestra, and Lament for Humanity (both commissioned by the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra). Sandred is currently a Professor in Composition at the University of Manitoba in Canada, where he founded Studio FLAT – a studio for computer music research and production. Previous to his current position he was teaching composition and electro-acoustic music at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm 1998-2005. He is a frequent guest lecturer around the world. He has given seminars at Harvard University, at University of California at Berkeley and Davis, at Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique in Paris, at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, at the Bartok Seminar in Szombathely (Hungary), at Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien, at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, at McGill University in Montreal, at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research at the University of Plymouth and other places. During the spring 2016 he was a DAAD visiting professor at the Hochschule für Musik, Detmold in Germany. Many of Sandred’s pieces are results of his search for new methods of composition. During 1999 he worked as a Composer on Research in the Musical Representation Team at IRCAM. He has a particular interest in Rule-based Computer Assisted Composition techniques, and he has published several articles on the outcome of his ongoing research (for example in Computer Music Journal 2010 and Contemporary Music Review 2009).Sandred’s music is regularly performed in many countries around the world. During 2017 he will be featured in a portrait concert at the concerthall in Uppsala, Sweden. He is currently working on a commission for the French string quartet Quator Leonis.Sandred’s music is available on the CD “Cracks and Corrosion”, releaased on the Navona label in 2009.

The vocal soloists of the Schola Heidelberg are equally at home with widely differing styles and vocal techniques, including microtonal intonation and vocal and respiratory noise. Under the artistic directorship of their founder Walter Nußbaum, the ensemble frequently performs works from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries alongside contemporary ones, reflecting a deep concern with historically informed practice and contemporary music. The ensemble’s extensive repertoire is the fruit of close collaboration with leading present-day composers. The ensemble frequently performs in its home city, throughout Germany, and at international festivals such the Salzburg Festival, Milano Musica, the Lucerne Festival, the Biennale in Venedig, the Biennale Salzburg and the Festival d’automne (Paris). The Schola has collaborated with Ensemble Modern, the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne, the SWR Symphony Orchestra, the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, the Deutsche Radio Philharmonie, and the Gürzenich Orchestra.

The Ensemble aisthesis (Greek, meaning: perception, to understand with your senses) specializes in contemporary music from the twenthieth and twenty-first centuries. Under the artistic direction of founder Walter Nußbaum, the instrumentalists have built an extensive repertoire, from modern classics like Schoenberg, Webern, Boulez, Stockhausen, and Lachenmann, to forward-looking Romantic works by Wagner or Mahler. Commissions are developed in close collaboration with the composers. The ensemble performs regularly in Heidelberg and has been invited to festivals like musica viva in Munich, the Zurich Festival, the Romanische Nacht in Cologne, the Tongyeong International Music Festival in South Korea, the Kasseler Musiktage, and the Basel Music Forum.