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.

Since the age of two, I have wanted to play the drums. A big part of my music career has been as a per­cus­sion­ist, and it was through per­cus­sion that I started with con­tem­po­rary clas­si­cal music. It was also the cat­a­lyst for my explo­ration of many other kinds of music, and I was quite active as a per­former until recently.

As a child, I moved between clas­si­cal per­cus­sion and jazz drum­ming, thanks to the influ­ence of my teacher, Trevor Bran­den­burg. Because the clas­si­cal per­cus­sion reper­toire is largely mod­ern, I had an early expo­sure to twentieth-​century music, and I always liked it. I had had rel­a­tively lit­tle expe­ri­ence with the clas­si­cal West­ern canon, so I never learned the mis­con­cep­tion that mod­ern clas­si­cal music is dif­fer­ent, weird, or “dif­fi­cult”. Also being a per­cus­sion­ist, I didn’t focus very much on pitch aspects of music until my later teens.

After high school, I decided I would study jazz drum­ming, so I enrolled in the jazz pro­gram at Grant MacE­wan Col­lege (GMC) in Edmon­ton. Brian Thur­good, my teacher at GMC, encour­aged me to pol­ish my tech­nique and work towards a pro­fes­sional level of per­for­mance. I enjoyed this chal­lenge, and my play­ing improved tremen­dously. How­ever, the more I refined the skills I had in jazz and pop, the more I was curi­ous to learn about other kinds of music. I was espe­cially inter­ested in Cuban music, and stud­ied pri­vately with Cuban per­cus­sion­ist Mario Allende for sev­eral years. I also took some courses at the Uni­ver­sity of Alberta on Ghana­ian Ewe music.

The Cuban stud­ies in par­tic­u­lar had an influ­ence on me, and I even­tu­ally ended up study­ing in Havana (see Cur­ricu­lum Vitæ). My curios­ity for explor­ing new kinds of music also led me to start com­pos­ing. I started out doing arrange­ments for bands I played with, then even­tu­ally began com­pos­ing my own songs. Grad­u­ally I became more inter­ested in learn­ing how to write for instru­ments I didn’t play and that weren’t nor­mally part of the jazz/pop ensemble.

After mov­ing to Toronto in 2002, the demands of my com­po­si­tional career pre­vented me from doing much per­form­ing. Since that time, most of my per­for­mance projects have been based around free improvisation.

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.