Canadian new music composers biography

The VSO’s New Music Festival gave us a wonderful taste of some of the more recent compositions of composers close to home, featuring exciting premieres of works by Jocelyn Morlock, Kelly-Marie Murphy, and Marcus Goddard.  But the festival also served to remind us that they follow others who have left a strong imprint on the Canadian musical landscape.  Attention was certainly brought to Claude Vivier, who lived a tragically short life and died in , but left compositions that even now intrigue and sometimes bewilder us.  Part of their spell lies in their striking fusion of European compositional techniques with Balinese traditional music (gamelan), a fusion that also interests younger composers today.

But how unique was Vivier’s exploration?   Not that many decades ago, if asked to think of someone who also pioneered a gamelan fusion it would have been Colin McPhee, who did ethnomusicological st