Thin Edge New Music Collective (TENMC) is a Toronto-based ensemble dedicated to ingenuity, collaboration, and artistic excellence in the programming and performance of contemporary music.  Founded in 2011 by co-artistic directors pianist Cheryl Duvall and violinist Ilana Waniuk, TENMC has performed across Canada, Italy and Argentina, and participated in residencies at the Banff Centre, Avaloch Farms New Music Initiative in New Hampshire and Le Pantographe in Switzerland. In addition to producing a regular concert series, TENMC has commissioned over 50 works from composers across Canada and beyond. Recent collaborations include “Raging Against the Machine” (RATM), a cultural exchange with Montreal-based Ensemble Paramirabo which toured across Canada in 2015 and 2017, coinciding with the release of a joint album on Vancouver-based Redshift Records and ”Balancing on the Edge”(BOTE), a large-scale production integrating theatre, dance, multi-media, new music and new circus, in partnership with ‘A Girl In The Sky Productions.’ Described as “provocative, thrilling and thought-provoking..” (Musicworks) and “a high-water mark for what multimedia storytelling can do “(The Wholenote), BOTE was presented at Toronto’s 2016 Nuit Blanche festival and in association with Harbourfront Centre’s NextSteps Dance Series (November 2016). Thin Edge has established a reputation as “one of Toronto’s hottest and bravest new music collectives” (Musical Toronto), and “one of the city's most forward-thinking DIY chamber ensembles“ (Mechanical Forest Sound). TENMC has been showcased as an Ensemble in Residence at Wilfrid Laurier University's 2016 40th Anniversary New Music festival, the Soundscape festival of new music in Maccagno, Italy and has performed on concert stages across Canada including the University of Calgary’s Happening Festival of New Music and Media, as well as been presented by Ottawa New Music Creators, Innovations en concert, New Works Edmonton, New Music Calgary, Music on Main, The Little Chamber Music Series That Could, Open Space in Victoria, The Music Gallery in Toronto and as part of the NUMUS Emerging Artist Series in Waterloo. In Nov 2015 with generous support from the Canada Council for the Arts, TENMC had the privilege to perform in Argentina as part of the Ciclo de Música Contemporánea at the Teatro Nacional Cervantes in Buenos Aires as part of a cross cultural exchange with performers and composers from Argentina and Canada. TENMC is proud to be an ensemble in residence with Arraymusic for their 2017/2018 season and is passionately dedicated to supporting their peers through commissioning and performance, bringing innovative and eclectic 20th and 21st century music to audiences both existing and as yet untapped.

Thin Edge New Music Collective, Tiff, and Riparian Acoustics present:

CONTRALTO

dir. Sarah Hennies | USA 2017 | 50 min. Video

Sarah Hennies’ Contralto has generated a wave of critical praise since its debut at the Brooklyn’s Issue Project Room last year. An experimental documentary designed to be performed with live musical accompaniment, Contralto — which takes its title from the term for the lowest female singing voice — is based on a common practice among transgender women, whereby they learn to change their voices in order to be perceived as “female.” Unlike transgender men, whose voices deepen due to the testosterone prescribed during hormonal therapy, the voices of transgender women remain unchanged by estrogen therapy, and require conscious practice to achieve a higher pitch.

In Contralto, onscreen interviews with and vocal exercises performed by seven transgender women are accompanied by a live score that emphasizes timbre, pitch and tone — qualities of sound that, when found in voices, often signify culturally determined gender cues. Conceived in part as a “protest piece” that challenges the audience to “change their definition of what they think a woman sounds like,” Contralto is a visceral and beautiful exploration of identity through sound.

Contralto is brought to Toronto in conjunction with Tiff and Riparian Acoustics. TENMC will be performing the piece along with a brand new composition commissioned especially for the collective. TENMC performers for the evening include Ilana Waniuk (violin), Nelson Moneo (viola), Amahl Arulanandam (cello), Adam Scime (double bass), Cheryl Duvall (keyboard/percussion), Nathan Petitpas (percussion) and Germaine Liu (percussion). 

 

General admission- $14

September 24th, 8pm

Tiff Bell Lightbox-350 King Street West

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Sarah Hennies (b. 1979, Louisville, KY) is a composer and percussionist based in Ithaca, NY. Her work utilizes an often grueling, endurance-based performance practice in a subversive examination of psychoacoustics, queer identity, and performance art. She has presented her work in a variety of contexts including Café Oto (London), cave12 (Geneva), Ende Tymes (NYC), Festival Cable (Nantes), the Johns Hopkins Digital Media Center, O’ Art Space (Milan), and Second Edition (Stockholm) and has received commissions for new work from Cristian Alvear, Bearthoven, Bent Frequency, R. Andrew Lee, LIMINAR, Qubit Music, and the Thin Edge New Music Collective. Her work has been supported by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New Music USA, New York State Council on the Arts, and in 2016 was awarded a fellowship in music/sound from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Hennies is currently a member of improvised music group Meridian with Greg Stuart and Tim Feeney, a duo with sound/performance artist Jason Zeh, and the Queer Percussion Research Group with Jerry Pergolesi, Bill Solomon, and Jennifer Torrence. In late 2017 she premiered the groundbreaking work, Contralto at Issue Project Room (NYC), a film featuring a cast of transgender women with a live score for string quartet and three percussionists.

In 2013, Hennies founded the record label Weighter Recordings, releasing works by artists working at the fringes of contemporary music including Prune Bécheau, Thomas Bonvalet, Morgan Evans-Weiler, Tim Feeney, Jean-Luc Guionnet, Enrico Malatesta, and Matt Sargent.

Presented with Generous Support from the Canada Council for the Arts, Tiff, Riparian Acoustics, and Arraymusic

Thin Edge New Music Collective Travels to Japan:

Atelier-Jaku Presents:

August 30th, 2018, 7-9pm- Koen-Dori Classics 公園通りクラシックス , Tokyo 

September 4th, 2018 7:30-9:30 Ftarri, Tokyo

September 6th, -7-9pm Super-Deluxe 公園通りクラシックス, Tokyo

Office-Deku

September 2nd, 2018 4-6pm Studio Take Who, Fukui, 

August 30th- TENMC’s co-artistic directors Cheryl Duvall (piano) and Ilana Waniuk (violin) present solo and duo works with electronics, highlights from their cutting-edge repertoire from 8 years on the Toronto scene. The concert will include Japanese premieres of works by grand dame of new music Kaija Saariaho, Canadian new music superstar Linda Catlin Smith, Tokyo-born Canadian Kotoka Suzuki, and Toronto-based rising star Brian Harman. They are also jumping head-first into exploring the music of young Tokyo composers, performing Yuka Shibuya’s View from the round window and Takahiro Kuroda’s Two Bows. 

September 2nd-TENMC performs works by Linda Catlin Smith, Takeo Hoshiya, Yuka Shibuya and Mozart. TENMC will be joined by Japanese clarinetist extraordinaire Hideo Kikuchi, for Aram Khachaturian's dynamic trio and also by students from Fukui University for a performance of John Cage's 'Five'. 

Sept 5th -Partnering with Tokyo improv veterans Ko Ishikawa on shō and Miyama McQueen-Tokita on 17-string koto for the first time, the TENMC duo will bring years of improv experience to a dynamic quartet of eastern and western sounds created in the moment.

Sept 6th-TENMC will give the Japanese premiere of Maria de Alvear’s 'Thinking', a monumental, powerful hour-long multimedia work for violin, piano, and live video. The live video is interwoven with images of the sea off Newfoundland, Canada’s easternmost province.  Just a few hundred kilometres over the frigid North Atlantic Ocean from Newfoundland is Iceland, the setting of Daryl Jamieson’s 'utamakura 2: Arnardalur'. It is based on around a saga and features video and audio recordings Jamieson made in northwest Iceland. The piece was written for TENMC for this Japan tour.  The concert will begin with Takeo Hoshiya's 'Ancestral Song' 2. 

TENMC's concerts in Tokyo are presented by Atelier Jaku and Office-Deku in Fukui.

TENMC's tour to Japan has been made possible with generous support by the Canada Council for the Arts.

Thin Edge New Music Collective Travels to Poland:

June 14th, 2018-Bielsko-Baila (Stanislaw Moniuszko State Music School in Bielsko-Biała )

June 15th, 2018-Katowice (Academy of Music in Katowice)

TENMC would like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts for their generous support.

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