Newfound Music Festival!
Today is the day classes are cancelled, replaced by a day-long slate of seminars, colloquia, performances, etc., all relating to new and recent music. Please check schedules posted around the building to see what's going on, and post any
comments / thoughts / reactions you have about the festival on this blog entry.
Our special guest, John Beckwith, will start things with a keynote address at 9AM in PC Hall. If you are interested in composition (and hopefully you are, if you are reading this blog!), you will not want to miss this. He has had a long and brilliant career as a composer, musicologist, professor, administrator (former Dean of the Faculty of Music, University of Toronto), and CBC scriptwriter/programmer. And, for five years, he was also my composition teacher at the University of Toronto.
I will be talking about my composition, Dream Dance, at 12:30 in PC Hall, in a talk called "Playing With Expectations." I have spent approximately 20 hours on the PowerPoint for this, and hopefully you will find it an interesting and fun presentation.
And I'll be doing another talk on The Beatles at 3:30. Time spent preparing PowerPoint presentation for this: Approximately 50 hours. Yes, I am insane. But you probably knew that…
There will be 8 PM concerts tonight (music by two very talented former students, Kim Codner and Aiden Hartery, an ensemble improv led by Paul Bendzsa, and some pieces of mine that span a 20-year period), tomorrow (an entire programme of John Beckwith's music), and Saturday (works by a variety of composers). Saturday's concert will be followed by a trip to Bitter's pub for the premieres of seven newly commissioned 2-minute pieces, called "Pint-Sized Encores."
Please take in as much as you can, and post
comments on the festival here!
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