sur(rounding)

Jun 8, 2024   7:00 pm

Saturday, June 8 at 7pm

St. George by the Grange

30 Stephanie Street, Toronto

Workshop on Miller’s Rounding at 6pm

Drawing on their shared interest in improvisation and collective creation, Artistic Producers Émilie Fortin and Hillary Jean Young curate a programme that highlights the creation process as much as the performance. This immersive and collaborative listening experience features works by Cassandra Miller and Alex Jang. This program is developed as part of Continuum’s Mentorship in Artistic Production (MAP) in its first realization.

Cassandra Miller (CA)
Rounding

Alex Jang (CA)
distributed tourism

Excerpt from curatorial statement

“In many ways, (sur)rounding speaks to our shared interests. Both pieces on the programme grant the performers a new kind of freedom from the notated score, embracing improvisation and indeterminacy. Both pieces celebrate community and atmosphere while questioning mastery and perfection.

Alex Jang’s highly immersive piece, distributed tourism, allows the performers to have an organic interplay with each other by offering musical material to the performers instead of demanding or prescribing it. In a similar spirit, the performers and audience are not separated by a stage, but on the same level and side by side, with audience members encouraged to move through the space.”

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Tonight’s Musicians

Hillary Jean Young, voice

Hillary Jean Young is a musician, vocalist, and improviser working in experimental music, new opera, and contemporary chamber music. Hillary has performed with numerous ensembles and collectives, such as kallisti chamber opera, OperaQ, red fish blue fish, Quintagious!, FAWN Chamber Creative, Din of Shadows, and The Happenstancers. In 2019, Hillary earned their Doctor of Musical Arts in Contemporary Music Performance from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where they studied with Grammy Award-winning soprano Susan Narucki.

Émilie Fortin, trumpet

Émilie Fortin’s artistic practice revolves around three axes: the creation of new repertoire through close collaboration between performer and composer, the exploration of new sounds through improvisation, and teaching.

Constantly seeking to enrich the trumpet repertoire, she has participated in the creation of over forty works. Her future and present collaborations explore physicality connection with training in body mime, dance and theater. In 2018, she created the soloist collective Bakarlari and serves as its artistic director. Dedicated to solo contemporary and creative music by offering concert experiences outside the traditional framework, Bakarlari is supported by Le Vivier Group.

As an improviser, Émilie “possesses a tonal clarity and a knack for inventive, asymmetrical phrasing” (Scott Thomson, FIMAVs Artistic Director). Her collaborations include recordings and performances with, among others, Éric Normand, the Ratchet Orchestra and GGRIL.

She is a member of the Toronto-based ensemble Freesound, a collective of artist-creators dedicated to commissioning and presenting contemporary music in all its forms, and of ék, a mime and sound duo with trombonist Kalun Leung.

Émilie has participated, among others, in the soundSCAPE Festival (Italy), Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance and Practice (Boston), Oh My Ears Festival (Arizona), Re:Sound (Cleveland) and Northwestern New Music Conference (Chicago). She has worked with members of the International Contemporary Ensemble (Banff Centre for the Arts), Ensemble Musikfabrik (Bauwerke Brass Academy), Ensemble Modern (Klangspuren Schwaz) and Vinko Globokar (Laboratorium), and has studied with Marco Blaauw and Peter Evans. In Montreal, she has performed with Productions SuperMusique (PSM) and the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne (NEM).

Sara Constant, flute and voice

Sara Constant is a musician and artist working in various forms of contemporary/experimental music and sound.

Trained as a flute player and active as a soloist, improviser, and ensemble musician, Sara has performed at festivals/series in Canada (Music Gallery, Innovations en concert, Codes d’accès, CMC Presents, Women From Space), Europe (Fylkingen, Lyon Museum of Contemporary Art, Fondation Royaumont, Klangspuren Schwaz), and the United States (Oh My Ears, SPLICE, Cornell University, EMPAC),

Among others, Sara has performed with Paris-based contemporary music ensemble Semblance, medieval/improvised band Jelly Ear, Montreal-based duo alokori, FAWN chamber creative, the Canadian Composers Orchestra, and in solo projects working with flute, objects, and electronics. As an artist, Sara’s current projects include collaborations with composers on new works, improvisations with instruments and electronics, and sound installation, to explore ideas around listening, resonance, and place.

Sara is currently based in Tkarón:to/Toronto, and works as a flutist, artist, writer (Musicworks), and curator (Music Gallery).

Maxime Despax, viola

Canadian violist Maxime Despax is currently pursuing a Doctor of Musical Arts degree at the University of Toronto where he also completed a Master’s degree in Viola Performance under the tutelage of Teng Li. Originally from Gatineau, Quebec he has performed alongside manydistinguished musicians such as the New Orford String Quartet, the Gryphon Trio, Rob Kapilow, Krisztina Szabó, Philip Chiu, Alex Kerr, and Yehonatan Berick. An avid chamber musician, Maxime is an active member of the Quatuor Despax, a family string quartet that tours extensively throughout Canada, as well as internationally in France, Italy, and Colombia. Furthermore,Maxime is a founding member of the Interro String Quartet, which is based in Toronto and performs in the Greater Toronto Area. Also an active orchestral musician, Maxime is a member of the Orchestre Symphonique de Gatineau and has performed with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.

Kevin Harris, bassoon

Always striving to expand his role as a performer, Kevin has built a career around deeper audience connection, wider collaboration, and delving deeper into unfamiliar musical territory. As a freelance bassoonist, he performs regularly across Southern Ontario and the GTA in nearly every established orchestra, including the Toronto Symphony, the National Ballet, the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, and the Niagara Symphony.

Based in Toronto, Kevin is a member of two ambitious woodwind quintets: Quintagious and Blythwood Winds, each of whom are known for their innovative projects and engaging concert experiences. He contributes a variety of musical arrangements and transcriptions, and many hours of research to help these ensembles achieve their goals of building a broad and inclusive repertoire. In addition to his woodwind quintet transcriptions, Kevin has undertaken the work of producing editions of previously unpublished bassoon concerti by Canadian composers Jean Coulthard and Imant Raminsh.

As a studio musician Kevin has had the opportunity to lend his skills to a number of exciting projects in film, television, and video game soundtracks. Recently, he contributed to “The Ugly Chickens,” a short film produced by famed novelist and screenwriter George R.R. Martin, and scored by Canadian composer Agatha Kaspar. Other soundtrack credits include the hit video game “Cuphead,” composed by Toronto musician Kris Maddigan. Kevin can also be heard on the 2023 album “Lignum et Spiritus” by composer Robert Lemay, featuring works for solo woodwinds and piano.

Kevin is an Edmonton, Alberta native, and he moved to Toronto to attend the Glenn Gould School of The Royal Conservatory, where he studied with Fraser Jackson and Nadina Mackie Jackson, receiving his Performance Diploma in 2013 and Artist Diploma in 2015.

Elizabeth Lima, voice

Elizabeth Lima (She/they) is an experimental vocalist, clarinetist, improviser, performer and composer working with an interdisciplinary approach—mixing new music, experimental rock, noise and metal elements with film, theatre and literature. An avid sci-fi and bird enthusiast, she explores the outer limits of her vocal/instrumental techniques. Through her research into the emotional affect of sound, audiences are invited to experience different modes of listening.

In 2016, she perfected vocal improvisation with Maggie Nicols and Phil Minton (UK). In 2017 she was selected for the improvisation Montreal-Vancouver exchange, Trading Places organized by Suoni Per Il Popolo, Western Front, Coastal Jazz, Music on Main, NOW Society Present. She performs regularly as a soloist and with ensembles such as Sam Shalabi’s Land of Kush, Joane Hétu’s Chorale Joker and is a co-founder of experimental vocal ensemble Phth.

Productions include Opus Award-winning opera “À chaque ventre son monstre,” by Gabriel Dharmoo, live arts production “Mythe” by Mykalle Bielinski, interdisciplinary art performance “The Garden of a Former House Turned Museum” by Yannick Desranleau and Chloé Lum and opera “Désert Mauve” by Nour Symon. Recently she has presented her interdisciplinary solo project “Lyrebird Hotel” RMS (Rimouski) and Suoni per il Popolo (Montreal).

Louis Pino, percussion

Louis Pino is a percussionist, electronicist, and software engineer who works in a wide range of musical genres and other media. His performative and compositional practices are mostly influenced by cyclical time, neural entrainment, and the sound of his cat’s purr. Pino prefers music incorporating theatrical elements and the use of technology, and has curated and performed recitals of entirely theatrical music and entirely electroacoustic music. Recently, Pino has been applying these ideas to his ensemble, Duo Cichorium, along with percussionist and interdisciplinary artist Jasmine Tsui. Pino is an active chamber musician, acting as both percussionist and Technical Director of Toronto based chamber ensemble, The Happenstancers. Pino is also a founding member of The Black Fish Ensemble, and is featured on their Juno nominated album, The Black Fish. As an orchestral player, Pino was awarded the National Youth Orchestra of Canada’s Award of Excellence and maintains an active performance schedule with The National Arts Centre Orchestra, Orchestre Symphonique de Québec, and Hamilton Philharmonic.

Pino is also an avid educator and researcher. He has given masterclasses on snare drum performance at the University of Toronto, with additional workshops on coding language Max/MSP. Pino was Research Associate and Lab Manager at the Technology and Performance Integration Research Lab, focusing on musical biofeedback, collaborative multimedia composition, and pedagogical live electronics. His contributions to the lab included five international academic conference presentations, creation of seven new multimedia works, and a peer-reviewed paper publication.

Matti Pulkki, accordion and voice

Finnish accordionist Matti Pulkki performs frequently with different ensembles and as a soloist around the world. Although his artistic practice often involves classical contemporary repertoire and creative collaborations with composers, Pulkki arranges, transcribes, and performs music from a wide range of styles and genres. He also frequently engages in diverse projects, ranging from interdisciplinary productions to music theatre and opera. His currently active chamber music projects include an eclectic voice and accordion duo Sawtooth with Montreal-based vocalist Sarah Albu, classical-contemporary Freesound Performance Collective in Toronto, and internationally acclaimed Canadian classical crossover ensemble Quartetto Gelato. Pulkki holds a Master’s degree from the Sibelius Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki and a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Toronto, where he studied with the renowned Canadian accordionist Joseph Macerollo.