Continuum Contemporary Music presents Chrysalis: A workshop for emerging composers

Sunday, January 24, 2010 (2-6 pm)

Gallery 345 – Free Admission

Toronto, December 14, 2009: Intrigued by the creative process of composing? Continuum invites audience members to step inside the creative process by presenting Chrysalis, Sunday, January 24 (2-6 pm) at Toronto’s Gallery 345. The concert / workshop led by the insightful Victoria composer Christopher Butterfield is a rare opportunity to gain insight into the specific challenges of writing music, through discussion and performance. Composers Anna Hostman, Lan-Chee Lam, William Peltier, Chris Thornborrow and Hiroki Tsurumoto (selected from a local call for scores) will have works performed by Continuum’s ensemble. Shedding a light on the craft of writing music, the lively composition master class - a discussion between Butterfield and participating composers – can be described as a “behind-the-scene” experience. The event also includes a performance of Butterfield’s four pearls for piccolo, violin, cello and piano. Admission is free.

The Continuum ensemble’s experienced musicians (Anne Thompson, flute; Max Christie, clarinet; Carol Lynn Fujino, violin; Paul Widner, cello; Laurent Philippe, piano; and Ryan Scott, percussion) and their unique ensemble chemistry promise a memorable event for participants and audience alike as they perform ghosts of swallows (Anna Hostman); La Defense (Lan-Chee Lam); Springtime for Gentle Risings within Gridlock (William Peltier); Music for Marionettes (Chris Thornborrow); and Code Thumbnail 1 (Hiroki Tsurumoto). Continuum has performed workshops at UBC, Banff, U of T, York University, University of Aberdeen (Scotland), and Trinity College of Music (England).

Christopher Butterfield has established himself as one of Canada’s leading composers and educators through

performance art, rock n’ roll, opera, installations, multi-disciplinary work, and chamber music (for which he has received the Jules-Léger Prize). His music has been played and broadcast across Canada, as well as in Finland, Slovakia, France and Russia. He studied composition with Rudolf Komorous at the University of Victoria (B.Mus. 1975) and with Bülent Arel at the State University of New York at Stony Brook (M.A. 1977). He lived in Toronto between 1977 and 1992, where he was active as a performance artist, rock guitar player, and composer. In 1979/1980 he taught in the graduate visual arts department at Concordia University in Montreal, and in 1986 and 1989 he taught in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. In 1992 he was appointed assistant professor of composition at the University of Victoria. His music has been performed across Canada and in Europe, and is recorded on the CBC and Artifact labels.

Featured composers:

• A doctoral student in composition at the University of Toronto, Anna Hostman has written works ranging from opera and orchestral to chamber and installation.
• Lan-chee Lam trained in her native Hong Kong and is now a doctoral student at the University of Toronto. She has received numerous international awards, including the Grand Prize of the Georges Enescu Competition (symphonic section).
• William Peltier is a composer re-emerging after a lengthy hiatus. He has some history at Wilfrid Laurier and McGill and early on was performed at Gaudeamus Music Week in Amsterdam; more recently he has had performances in New York, Cuba and various places in Europe.
• Chris Thornborrow studied at Wilfrid Laurier University and is now in the doctoral programme at the University of Toronto. He is a member of Toy Piano Composers Collective.
• Hiroki Tsurumoto has an undergraduate degree in economics, and degrees in composition from the CUNY and the University of Toronto. His works have been performed in Asia, North America and Europe.

Led by artistic director Jennifer Waring, Continuum presents concerts featuring the core ensemble of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, and percussion, as well as unusual instrumental combinations. The organization has commissioned and premiered more than 100 new works from emerging Canadian and international composers, and also established composers charting new territory. Increasingly the group engages in collaboration and interdisciplinary work. Continuum has toured to Banff, Brandon, Kitchener, Montreal, Ottawa, Vancouver and Winnipeg; touring twice to Europe, it has appeared in Aberdeen, Amsterdam, Ghent, Huddersfield, Leeuwarden, London, and ‘s-Hertogenbosch. The group has recorded two CDs on its own label, formed the recording ensemble for a Centrediscs release of works by Chris Paul Harman and is soon to record a CD of works by James Rolfe, also for Centrediscs.

Continuum’s 25^th anniversary season continues on February 28^th with a performance of chamber works by James Rolfe at The Royal Conservatory’s Mazzoleni Hall, in preparation for a Centrediscs recording of Rolfe’s works. The season concludes with performances May 20^th, as part of the free concert series at the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre, and May 21^st at the Music Gallery, both featuring soprano Carla Huhtanen, the latter headlined by actor RH Thomson as narrator in works by Tom Johnson and a commission by Juliet Palmer on a text by Thomas King.

Continuum is generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the City of Toronto through the Toronto Arts Council, SOCAN Foundation, the George Cedric Metcalf Charitable Foundation through its Strategic Initiatives programme and many private donors.

Continuum Contemporary Music presents

Chrysalis

A workshop for emerging composers

Sunday, January 24, 2010, 2-6 pm at Gallery 345

345 Sorauren Avenue, south of Dundas

Free admission, open to the public

For more information on this concert please visit www.continuummusic.org,

email josh@continuummusic.org or call (416) 924-4945.

Continuum Contemporary Music presents start : stop Launching Continuum’s 25th season

Sunday, October 25, 2009, 8 pm at The Music Gallery
Part of the Music Gallery’s Xavant Festival

Toronto, October 1, 2009: Continuum Contemporary Music celebrates its 25th anniversary this season, beginning with start : stop on Sunday October 25th at the Music Gallery. The evening’s program examines beginnings and endings, and things between and beyond: a definition of Continuum.

Chris Paul Harman’s Incipits distills Domenico Scarlatti’s keyboard sonatas into a sense of perpetual inception; Samuel Andreyev dissolves and truncates in Stopping. Between the beginning and the end is the fluttering state of energy of Encore/Da Capo by Italian composer Luca Francesconi and the propulsive rhythms of Juan Trigos’s Pulsación y Resonancias. Beyond are the subtly shifting colours of Fuhong Shi’s Emanations. These last two pieces were discovered in Continuum’s 2007 biennial Call for Scores. Continuum’s ensemble is joined by Colleen Cook (bass clarinet), Diane Leung (viola), Paul Rogers (double bass), and Mark Duggan (percussion), with David Fallis conducting.

The composers and works
• Canadian composer Chris Paul Harman writes, “An incipit is the series of words that appears at the beginning of a poem or other literary piece. The term is also applied to music where one may view the opening measure or measures of a piece of music in the context of an index. In this work Incipits, I postulated what it might be like if a musician seated at the piano never cared to leave the index page of musical examples -- that is to say what if this reference page was a complete musical statement in and of itself?” The resulting work by Chris Paul Harman follows his interest in recent years in working in sections – creating full and complete statements sometimes in under one minute.
• “The tension between continuation and cessation forms the crux of Stopping,” writes oboist, composer and poet Samuel Andreyev. Written for two vibraphones because of the potential for treating attack, resonance and the cessation of sound, the work is made up of gestures that are strongly inclined to their own dissolution. Stopping contains sudden proliferations of seemingly alien material, which are just as likely to disappear as to dominate.
• Born in 1956, Luca Francesconi has studied composition with Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio. His compositions have won numerous international awards. He has taught as visiting or guest professor at Rotterdam Conservatory and at l’Université de Montréal, and has served as composer-in-residence with numerous international organizations. Encore/Dacapo is a work that builds up of the fibrillating relationship between layered instruments, over time coalescing into rhythm and broader gestures.
• Mexican composer and conductor Juan Trigos received his musical training in Mexico and in Italy. His music is in general characterized by a primal "pulsation", articulated by obsessive rhythmic gears and a "Concertante" relationship between instrumental forces, in Pulsascione y Resonancias between piano and percussion. His recent work has centered on the creation of a new genre, which he calls “Hemofiction Opera”. “Hemofiction”, is a literary aesthetic invented by his father, the Mexican play writer and novelist Juan Trigos S. Mr. Trigos maintains a busy schedule of composing and conducting from his home base of Toronto.
• Emanation, by Toronto-based Chinese composer Fuhong Shi, is inspired by the ancient Chinese text Yijing (the Book of Changes) and Mongolian folk music. Yang and yin archetypal forces are represented in the contrasting timbres of the string instruments and percussion. Ms. Shi writes, “according to the eight basic tri-grams in Yijing … music expresses the character of life everlasting.” This is a piece that goes beyond start : stop to the eternal universe. The recipient of numerous awards in China, Taiwan and Canada for young composers, Fuhong Shi studied composition in Beijing, Victoria and Toronto.

Continuum’s 25th anniversary season

Continuum’s 2009-2010 season continues on January 24th with an open workshop at Gallery 345 for local emerging composers, with guest conductor/commentator Christopher Butterfield. On February 28th Continuum performs chamber works by James Rolfe at The Royal Conservatory’s Mazzoleni Hall, in preparation for a Centredisc recording of Rolfe’s works; and the season concludes with performances May 20th, as part of the free concert series at the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre, and May 21st at the Music Gallery, both featuring soprano Carla Huhtanen, the latter headlining actor RH Thomson as narrator in works by Tom Johnson and a commission by Juliet Palmer on a text by Thomas King.

Continuum

Led by artistic director Jennifer Waring, Continuum presents concerts featuring the core ensemble of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, and percussion, as well as unusual instrumental combinations. The organization has commissioned and premiered more than 100 new works from emerging Canadian and international composers, and also established composers charting new territory. Increasingly the group engages in collaboration and interdisciplinary work. Continuum has toured to Banff, Brandon, Kitchener, Montreal, Ottawa, Vancouver and Winnipeg; touring twice to Europe, it has appeared in Aberdeen, Amsterdam, Ghent, Huddersfield, Leeuwarden, London, and ‘s-Hertogenbosch. The group has recorded two CDs on its own label, formed the recording ensemble for a Centrediscs release of works by Chris Paul Harman and is soon to record a CD of works by James Rolfe, also for Centrediscs. Interdisciplinary projects have paired music with dance, installation, film, architecture and philosophy. In 2005 Continuum presented l’Oreille Fine, three days of concerts and a symposium featuring philosophers, poets, critics and a psychologist dealing with the subject of contemporary expression in a classical art form. Last season Continuum mounted SHIFT, a festival of Canadian and Dutch music, film and literature, in Amsterdam and Toronto.

Continuum is generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the City of Toronto through the Toronto Arts Council, SOCAN Foundation, the George Cedric Metcalf Charitable Foundation through its Strategic Initiatives programme and many private donors.

Continuum Contemporary Music presents
start : stop
Sunday, October 25, 2009 at 8 pm at The Music Gallery
197 John Street, north of Queen
Tickets ($20 regular/$15 senior & arts workers/$10 student)
are available at the door on the night of the concert.

For more information on this concert please visit www.continuummusic.org,
email josh@continuummusic.org or call (416) 924-4945.