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.

This is a reprint of the first edition of my e-mail newsletter.

For some time I’ve had a newsletter signup form on my website but this is the first time I’m actually sending a newsletter out!

I plan on doing this 2–3 times per year. For more frequent info, see my website or Twitter. Unsubscribe link at the bottom.

Contents

• Upcoming Concert: Halo Ballet Première – 24 Oct 2010 – Toronto
• Upcoming Concert: Hockey Story – 20 Jan 2011 – San Diego
• Oksana G. Opera Development Workshop
• Results of Experiment: Can I Avoid Choosing the Music I Listen to?
• Help Me Help You: Collaborative Audience Building

Première of Halo Ballet — Toca Loca, X AVANT Festival, Toronto

Gregory Oh and Toca Loca première my new piece, Halo Ballet (Bipolar Disorder NOS) on the X AVANT Festival’s all-dance pro­gramme. Choreography by Julia Aplin. Halo Ballet is a piece for live performers (piano, electric key­board, percussion, and harp) and electronic dancers, per­formed in real time within the Halo videogame environment.

It’s much more common to have live dancers with synthesized music, but we’re doing it backwards. The synthesized "dancers" will be performed by a team of videogamers, clicking away in sync to Toca Loca playing live. The programme also includes works by the legendary John Oswald of Plunderphonics fame and French composer Georges Aperghis.

Toca Loca always put on an awesome show, so don’t miss it!

If you can’t make it to Toronto, hopefully the performance will be on YouTube before too long, or be repeated live in your town. There’s a version of the piece that uses electric guitar too.

www.musicgallery.org www.ticketweb.ca

Hockey Story Performance — Luciane Cardassi, Sonic Diasporas Festival, UC San Diego

Thursday, January 20, 2011 Conrad Prebys Concert Hall, UC San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, San Diego, California Concert 10:30am (yes, that’s am) Free admission

Luciane Cardassi and I have the privilege of opening UCSD’s first Sonic Diasporas Festival, featuring the works of the music department’s alumni. On this concert, Luciane gives a repeat performance of Hockey Story, which she commissioned in 2009. The piece, for piano, electronics, and the voice of the pianist, takes a look at hockey in all of its dimensions, from the pro level to young children, players to fans, suspense to stats. All of this from Luciane’s perspective as an expat Brazilian transplanted to the Canadian Rockies.

Luciane has premièred several of my piano works now, and she is a sensitive, diverse, and moving performer. You can see video of her doing the piece in studio on YouTube, linked to in the Musical Works section of my website.

musicweb.ucsd.edu/concerts

Attention video artists: I have been looking for someone willing to collaborate with me to make a live video component for this piece. If you have time and are interested in hockey, let me know. We can include video on this concert if it’s ready. Otherwise, on a future performance.

Oksana G. Opera Development Workshop in Toronto

In collaboration with Colleen Murphy and Tapestry New Opera, I have been working on a large-scale opera over the past few years. We’ve had a number of exciting developments lately and I’m currently working toward the completion of the first 7 scenes, or about 45 minutes of music.

Highlights:

Aug 2009: Piano–vocal workshop of scenes from Act 1 at the Banff Centre.

Feb/Mar 2010: Orchestral workshop performance with the Canadian Opera Company Orchestra and Chorus in Toronto.

Feb/Mar 2011: Workshop of new scenes in Toronto, stay tuned for more details.

If all goes well funding-wise, we are looking at a full production in the next two or three years.

Synopsis: The Enslavement and Liberation of Oksana G. is set in 1997 and is the story of a young Ukrainian girl, Oksana, who is tricked into prostitution. She escapes in Italy and finds herself at a Catholic safehouse set up for Kosovo War refugees. Meanwhile, her pimp has fallen in love with her and risks everything to find her again. At the same time, she and the priest who runs the safehouse fall for each other. The three eventually come together in tragedy.

Results of Experiment: Can I Avoid Choosing the Music I Listen to?

For those of you who visit my website, you will have noticed that I maintain a blog on the philosophical, social, and pragmatic aspects of composing in the 21st century.

Inspired by, ahem, my new smartphone actually, I wrote a post titled, Can I Completely Stop Choosing What Music I Listen To? I was interested in seeing how my perception of music would change if I completely stopped using my collection of CDs and MP3s. Would I appreciate music more? Would I pay more or less attention? Would I stop listening to music or listen to more of it?

The results of my “experiment” are now available as a comment to the original post. In short, I think it’s a good palate cleanser and worth doing from time to time. I actually bought some new music as a result of not having access to my regular collection.

Other recent blog posts: The pros and cons of relying entirely on your art to pay the rent, reviews of concerts in San Francisco, why money and art have never been good friends.

Help Me Help You: Collaborative Audience Building

I’ve been trying to find ways of making composition more visible to the culturally inclined public at large, and I’d like your feedback. Arts organizations are getting better at finding strategies—the Globe and Mail had a great article about it a few months ago—but individual artists still largely work in isolation, waiting to be discovered or sucking up to the people they think will advance their careers.

Yet more and more, I believe artists have a responsibility to be organizers of culture and not just creators. We are drowning in music. Nobody cares if you write a fantastic piece, even if you’re the next Beethoven. But people do care about transcendence, about having meaningful experiences.

We need to find ways to bring what we do to the people who will be moved by it, and to present what we do in a format that is flattering to its strengths. After all, even the best piece can be unbearable on the wrong concert. We have to put on really good shows and invite the right audience.

Lots of people say social media will save the arts, but as was pointed out astutely on Chamber Musician Today, having a blog or a Twitter feed doesn’t do anything unless it has a purpose. I enjoy writing, so I’ve been trying to make my purpose the creation of interesting content; texts that will enrich the musical experiences I create.

So tell me what you think. We have ensembles. We have festivals. We have websites, blogs, and other Internet resources. What can we do to make these work better together, to support each other—and not just to promote our careers, but to genuinely touch the hearts of listeners? I’m not talking about putting on a concert, but about building a better music scene.

If you’ve got ideas, feel free to share, or post them on your blog and let me know so I can link to them. I will continue to post my ideas on by blog or on Twitter.

The programme also includes works by John Oswald and Georges Aperghis.

“P*P examines the fierce and fearsome taxonomy that historically has made some composers soulfully classical, and others popular. The cutting-edge of Canada’s composers write P*P-length, P*P-inspired works, the All-Stars of jazz throw their hats in the ring, and some of Canada’s most interesting indie-rockers flex their contemporary music chops.”

Cana­dian Trio Toca Loca recently launched their debut album, which includes a fan­tas­tic ver­sion of my piece, Cul­ture no.2 (or, Shoot Like a Film Star), which they com­mis­sioned in 2007. The album is avail­able through Cen­ter­Discs and can also be ordered through iTunes and Amazon. Also check out details about their CD launches in Berlin and Vancouver.