As founding faculty of the Vancouver International Song Institute, this couple is the embodiment of dedication to art song. Alison d'Amato is a phenomenal pianist and one of the program's three co-directors, and this will be her fourth year making music as part of Art Song Lab. Joining for her third year, Lynne McMurtry is a mezzo to be reckoned with!
Here they are performing together, three songs from ASL 2012:
ASL 2014: Tenor, Will George and pianist, Corey Hamm
Avid commissioners of new music, Corey Hamm and Will George were a natural fit for ASL 2013.
Listen below to the three songs they worked together on last summer.
Listen below to the three songs they worked together on last summer.
ASL 2014: Soprano, Phoebe MacRae and pianist, Marguerite Witvoet
ASL veteran, Phoebe MacRae is joining for her fourth year with the program. Joining for her first year, Marguerite Witvoet is no stranger to the kind of collaboration that makes Art Song Lab what it is!
After reading more about each of them on their websites, listen to some audio samples.
Here are two songs Phoebe performed at previous Art Song Labs:
And here is a video of Marguerite:
After reading more about each of them on their websites, listen to some audio samples.
Here are two songs Phoebe performed at previous Art Song Labs:
And here is a video of Marguerite:
ASL 2014: Guest Poet, Evelyn Lau
Apply for this opportunity to work one-on-one with Evelyn.
ASL 2014: Guest Poet, Elizabeth Bachinsky
ASL Program Co-Director: Composer, Michael Park
He is currently working on his Doctorate of Musical Arts at The University of British Columbia under the supervision of Dorothy Chang. While pursuing undergraduate studies in piano, Michael's involvement with improvisation and multi-disciplinary collaboration led him to studies in composition. He continues to collaborate with a wide variety of artists, including dancers, poets, visual artists, and musicians.
Michael has written for choirs, vocalists, pianists, chamber ensembles and, as a pianist, regularly performs his own works, as well as those of his colleagues. Michael’s compositions have been performed in Vancouver at the Sonic Boom Music Festival and the Songfire Festival of Song, as well as concerts presented by Music on Main and the Composers’ Collective. His music has been presented in Winnipeg by Flipside Opera and the Contemporary Opera Lab, and in New York by Opera On Tap.
ASL Program Co-Director: Pianist, Alison d'Amato
Alison enjoys a variety of interdisciplinary projects with musicologists, composers, writers, and dancers. Alison is co-creator of the 2011 Art Song Lab, a new partnership between VISI and the Canadian Music Centre (Vancouver) that presents new works in collaboration with composers, poets, and performers. Alison has been a guest artist at numerous schools including The American University in Bulgaria, University of Toronto, Tufts University, Royal Conservatory of Music, Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, SUNY Fredonia, Boston University, and Boston Conservatory. In addition to traditional masterclasses in collaborative repertoire, Alison has shared classes with colleagues such as musicologist Barbara Heyman, English professor David Ball, singers Lynne McMurtry and Aaron Engebreth, and flutist Barry Crawford. From 2006-2011, she was Visiting Assistant Professor at University at Buffalo, working directly with colleagues to create and enhance collaborations and chamber activities in the music department.
Alison has performed at venues across North America, including Boston’s Jordan and Symphony Halls and New York’s Weill Recital Hall. The 2012-13 season features a wide variety of activities in new and established repertoire including reappearances with the Buffalo Chamber Players, several recitals with saxophonist Wildy Zumwalt, and original interdisciplinary projects at Eastman and VISI.
Alison received the Grace B. Jackson Prize from Tanglewood Music Center acknowledging her 'extraordinary commitment of talent and energy.'
ASL Program Co-Director: Writer, Ray Hsu
Dr. Ray Hsu is co-founder of Art Song Lab and the Medici Group.
Dr. Hsu has published over 150 written works in over 50 publications internationally.
He is the author of two award-winning books of poetry: Anthropy (winner of the Gerald Lampert Award and shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award in Poetry) and Cold Sleep Permanent Afternoon (winner of an Alcuin Award).
He has been a faculty member at the Banff Centre, the SFU Writers Studio, and UBC Creative Writing. He also taught writing for over two years in a US prison.
ASL 2013: Guest Composer, Jocelyn Morlock
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| Photo credit: Alex Waterhouse-Hayward |
Juno-nominated composer Jocelyn Morlock is one of Canada’s most distinctive voices. “A lyrical wonder, exquisite writing” with “an acute feeling for sonority” and an approach that is “deftly idiomatic” (Vancouver Sun), Morlock’s music has received numerous accolades, including: Top 10 at the 2002 International Rostrum of Composers; Winner of the 2003 CMC Prairie Region Emerging Composers competition; winner of the Mayor’s Arts Awards in Vancouver (2008); two nominations for Best Classical Composition at the Western Canadian Music Awards (2006, 2010) and most recently a Juno Nomination for Classical Composition of the Year (2011, Exaudi.) She is currently serving as inaugural Composer-in-Residence for Vancouver’s innovative concert series, Music on Main.
Morlock’s international career was launched at the 1999 International Society for Contemporary Music’s World Music Days with Romanian performances of her quartet Bird in the Tangled Sky. Since then, she has become the composer of record for significant music competitions, including the 2008 Eckhardt-Gramatté National Music Competition and the 2005 Montreal International Music Competition, for which she wrote Amore, a tour de force vocal work that has gone on to receive more than 70 performances and numerous radio broadcasts.
Highlights of the past year’s premieres include Three Meditations on Light, written for the debut concert of the Couloir duo at Music on Main’s Modulus Festival; Luft, a 35-minute music and dance production with choreography by Simone Orlando, featuring Josh Beamish and the dancers of MOVE: The Company, written for Turning Point Ensemble’s Rio Tinto Alcan prize-winning production Firebird 2011; In Situ, a large-scale collaboration with the Aeriosa Dance Ensemble premiered during the 2010 Cultural Olympiad and attended by over 7000 people; Theft for Standing Wave’s Too Strange…an exploration of magical realism in music, and two CBC commissions: Asylum, a piano trio written for the 10th anniversary of the Tuckamore Chamber Music Festival and the 200th anniversary of Robert Schumann’s birth; and The Jack Pine, written for The Gallery Project, a partnership between Music and Beyond, CBC Radio Two and the National Gallery of Canada.
New CD releases featuring Morlock’s work include musica intima’s Into Light, (nominated for two 2010 Western Canadian Music Awards and two 2011 Juno Awards: Classical Album of the Year, and Classical Composition of the Year for Morlock’s Exaudi), Fringe Percussion’s eponymous debut album (nominated for a 2010 Western Canadian Music Award), pianist Rachel Iwaasa’s Cosmphony, and the Canadian Chamber Choir’s In Good Company. Other notable, recent releases include Tiresias Duo’s Delicate Fires (nominated for a 2008 Western Canadian Music Award), Trio Verlaine’s Fin de Siècle and the Canadian Music Centre’s So You Want To Write A Fugue (“the most exciting disc of new Canadian music in years” – The Toronto Star).
Jocelyn Morlock completed a Bachelor of Music in piano performance at Brandon University, studying with pianist Robert Richardson. She received both a Master’s degree and a Doctorate of Musical Arts from the University of British Columbia. Among her teachers were Gerhard Ginader, Pat Carrabré, Stephen Chatman, Keith Hamel, and the late Russian-Canadian composer Nikolai Korndorf.
ASL 2013: Guest Poet, Betsy Warland
Creative nonfiction writer, poet, essayist, teacher, manuscript consultant, and editor Betsy Warland was born in the United States in 1946. Betsy immigrated to Canada in 1973, becoming a citizen in 1980. Warland has published eleven books of creative nonfiction and poetry.
Dedicated to emerging writers, Betsy is the former director of The Writer’s Studio, part of Simon Fraser University’s Writing and Communications Program (2000 -2011). She currently directs and is
a mentor in her own five-month manuscript development program, Vancouver Manuscript Intensive. Betsy is on faculty in both programs.
An active member of The Writers’ Union of Canada, Betsy serves on the National Council and is the co-founder, along with Myrna Kostash, of the Creative Nonfiction Collective. Her archives are in the
National Library of Canada.
Perhaps most known for her language-focused writing and ways of working with silence, Betsy finds as much meaning in scoring blank space on the page as she does in inscribing written language. The
unsayable, the secreted, the unknowable: these are her obsessions –how we encounter them in lover relationships, family, a homophobic society, a mono-truth society and the inner work of spiritual practice.
Currently, Betsy is working on a lyric prose manuscript “Oscar of Between”.
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