Aaron Gervais is composer of new classical/avant-garde music, born in Edmonton, Canada, and represented by Art Music Promotion. He received a Bachelor of Music with Honours from the University of Toronto, and a Master’s degree from the University of California at San Diego. He has also pursued studies at the Koninklijk Conservatorium in the Hague, Netherlands. Aaron’s teachers have included Chan Ka Nin (CA), Chinary Ung (US), Philippe Manoury (FR), and Martijn Padding (NL), and he has also participated in masterclasses with renowned composers from around the world. Prior to studying composition, Aaron studied jazz drumming and Cuban folkloric percussion, including a summer of private study in Havana in 2002.

Aaron’s music has been performed by major ensembles in several countries, including the Nieuw Ensemble (NL), orkest de ereprijs (NL), the Ensemble contemporain de Montreal (CA), the Nouvel ensemble moderne (CA), Tapestry New Opera Works (CA), Toca Loca (CA), Continuum (CA), the Knights Orchestra (US), the London Sinfonietta (UK), and the Arditti Quartet (UK). His music has been broadcast on CBC Radio/Radio-Canada.

Prominent festivals have presented Aaron’s work, including Amsterdam’s prestigious Gaudeamus Music Week; Toronto’s New Wave, soundaXis, and SHIFT festivals; Aberdeen’s Sound Festival; and New York’s MATA Festival. He was additionally selected as a representative for Canada in the 2008 World Music Days in Lithuania. One of his solo pieces, Flüsse-Einflüsse, was chosen as a required exam piece for the graduating accordion students at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik – Trossingen in 2006.

Aaron was selected as the winner of the orkest de ereprijs’s International Young Composers Competition in the Netherlands in 2009. He has also received various other awards and grants, including an ASCAP Gould Award (2010), six prizes in Canada’s SOCAN Awards for Young Composers (2010, 2009, 2008, 2006, 2004, 2004), a Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award (2008), a SOCAN residency grant (2006), and numerous commissioning, travel, project, and study grants.

Long-term musical directions in Aaron’s composing include a focus on rhythm and time, a preoccupation with the social and cultural factors that influence listening and taste, an interest in found materials, an exploration of what in fact constitutes creativity, and a fascination with the ways that social technologies are changing listening habits, to name a few. His music incorporates a wide range of palettes, from rich microtonal textures and shimmering timbres to bright chipper counterpoint, upbeat rhythmic drive, blunt musical gestures, and light-hearted humour.

Over time, my music has grad­u­ally taken on more and more aspects of my par­tic­u­lar musi­cal back­ground. I grew up play­ing jazz and rock drums in addi­tion to clas­si­cal per­cus­sion, and this influ­ence has become increas­ingly clear in my pieces, although not always in terms of direct appro­pri­a­tion. What is more common is an inter­est in the cul­tural ele­ments of hear­ing: why we hear things in cer­tain ways, what it is we listen for in par­tic­u­lar genres, and so forth.

In addi­tion, my recent pieces have taken a par­tic­u­larly crit­i­cal slant on these ques­tions. I tend not to trust state­ments or ideas that people take as axiomatic, so I have focused on writng music that decon­structs these “givens” in order to find out exactly how axiomatic they really are—chal­lenge for the sake of chal­lenge, in other words. Almost always I do find some grain of truth in the axioms, though this process of intense scrutiny serves as a sort of inspira­tion to explore some­thing new, to push my music in dif­fer­ent direc­tions, and also to better inter­nal­ize the musi­cal or per­cep­tual or cul­tural truths that I do happen to stum­ble across. And what’s more, I often find myself saying, “Well, I was right, there really is a lot about that idea that is totally superfluous.”

So there are these two facets: one the one hand, my inter­est in cul­tural ele­ments of music, stem­ming from my back­ground in jazz, rock, clas­si­cal music, Cuban pop­u­lar and folk­loric musics, et cetera; and on the other, a kind of rebel­lious side that likes to ques­tion musi­cal author­i­ties for the fun of it.

On top of that, I also have some other more tran­sient inter­ests—flavours of the week that keep things fresh. For exam­ple, over the past few pieces, I have been inter­ested in writ­ing music that is fast-paced, rhyth­mic, and light in tex­ture. I’ve def­i­nitely writ­ten a lot of slow dark music, but it seems to me that there is a pre­pon­der­ance of that kind of thing in the new music com­mu­nity and I want to see how far I can push the other direc­tion. Com­posers like Jacob ter Veld­huis and Richard Ayres have been par­tic­u­lar inspi­ra­tions in that regard, though I am just as likely if not more to look at pop­u­lar music for this. I don’t think my music resembles those two com­posers very much, but they are people whose music I have thought about a lot as I write my own. And again, I also often sit and think about the Beastie Boys or the Black Eyed Peas; Aphex Twin, Björk, Stere­o­lab, or Metric; or what­ever. There’s some­thing to learn from any kind of music; the impor­tant thing is to actu­ally sit down with it and do the thinking.

Another thing that’s come up a lot lately is a rever­sal of formal pri­or­i­ties. Actu­ally, this might be start­ing to fall under the cat­e­gory of axioms I’ve chal­lenged repeat­edly instead of just a flavour of the week, but still… Many pieces by com­posers in the new music tra­di­tion have long, flow­ing forms with strong hier­ar­chi­cal inter­re­la­tions between sec­tions and seam­less tran­si­tions, often built upon a single motive or series of terse musi­cal ideas. That comes from the Beethoven tra­di­tion I sup­pose, which is as good a model as any to emu­late. But I wanted to know if there was another way to do it. So a lot of my recent music deals with very simple long-term formal struc­tures, based on a series of unre­lated musi­cal motives that change from sec­tion to sec­tion with very little tran­si­tional mate­r­ial. Coher­ence is cre­ated through the larger simple formal pat­terns instead of the long-term devel­op­ment of motives.

For exam­ple, Cul­ture no.1 is in four dis­creet sec­tions plus a coda. Each sec­tion is started by an audio sample that the musi­cians then imi­tate, and that’s all there is to the form. No interre­la­tion between the sec­tions, no mate­r­ial that comes back later to be devel­oped. But on the local level, I have very tight inter­ac­tions between mate­r­ial, clear devel­op­ment of motives, and this helps to carry the music through from one sec­tion to the next. The global char­ac­ter of the sec­tions, how­ever, and not the local devel­op­ment, is what strings together the piece as a whole.

As the saying goes, talk­ing about music is like danc­ing about archi­tec­ture, and prob­a­bly this little blurb will seem com­pletely inad­e­quate tomor­row. But that’s always the way it is and I hope at least this serves as a snap­shot of what’s going on in my music right now, which is always useful. Actu­ally, I don’t like that quo­ta­tion; talk­ing about music is noth­ing like dancing about archi­tec­ture. Metaphors like that over-simplify the issue and lead to the kinds of musi­cal axioms I don’t like. Maybe it’s better not to say any­thing. So I’ll just leave it here and you can decide for your­self what my motives are, if you’re so inclined.