programme notes

Thinking about vulnerability, permanence and absence, I created ‘Figure – ground’ from my own phenomenological drawings of walking around the mighty elevation of Uluru in the centre of Australia.
Georgina Bowden

Invoking oceanic elements of depth, density, movement, and separation, this work calls on the sea as a prevalent theme of dream, and spiritual evocation. The unfolding of the piece elicits temporal elements of a stretch of changeable sea, along with its incumbent potential of fragmenting of narrative.
Dylan Lardelli

A blur of lichens is dedicated to my late grandfather Frank, a conservationist who fell in love with the world of lichens at the age of 96. Almost blind, Frank would pore over images in library books with the help of bright lights, magnifying glasses, and giant spectacles. As the pages blurred, shifting in and out of focus, the humble lichens’ world of texture, colour, and pattern captivated my grandfather’s imagination.
Teasing apart this memory of my grandfather, I wonder about the blurring of other boundaries. How much of who I am is inherited from my grandfather? How does light transform into colour? What is it like to live as a lichen at the juncture of decomposition and composition? Where does rock end and sky begin? Where does my breath become the air that you breathe?
Inspired by lichens as symbiotic relationships between fungi, algae and bacteria, a blur of lichens offers structures and vocabulary to support musical reciprocity. Each iteration emerges fresh from the moment of its creation.
A blur of lichens was commissioned by Gordon Williamson with the support of the Ontario Arts Council.
Juliet Palmer

This instrumentation for this piece is inspired by my recent composition Odd Couples, a set of 24 miniatures for unusual and unexpected musical pairings. I found the challenge of composing for a rarely (if ever?) heard combinations of instruments very quickly becomes a fruitful and focused exploration of the few common timbral areas that the instruments do share. It remains an exciting idea for me, as I wouldn’t have otherwise come across these particular timbre combinations: The inspiration of the piece is the instrumentation itself.
In expanding the idea to a trio, Odd Throuple explores a few points of intersection in the trio from multiple perspectives and musical characters, allowing us to rediscover these instruments in a fresh context.
Gordon Williamson