A Native of Hong Kong, Viola Yip is a New York-based experimental composer, performer and curator.  Her recent interests fall on exploring the sonic materiality of instruments and found objects, as well as incorporating our musical listening and performing bodies as a form of technology in creating new musical experience.

Her works and performances have appeared in places such as Women Composers Festival of Hartford, Ravinia Festival, University of Florida, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, UC San Diego, NASA saxophone conference, PAUSA Art House in Buffalo, Hong Kong Cultural Center, Hong Kong City Hall and Radio 4 at Radio and Television Hong Kong, Abrons Arts Center, DiMenna Center for Classical Music, Secret Theater and Flushing Town Hall in NYC, unternehmen mitte in Basel and University of Huddersfield. Her recent collaborations include working with ICE ensemble, JACK quartet, Yarn/Wire, Marco Fusi and Lauren DeBoer among others. 

She is currently pursuing her PhD in music composition at Graduate School of Arts and Science of New York University. 

Toronto-based composer Patrick McGraw was born in the United States but has made Canada his home since 2001.   A lifelong interest in the sciences led him at first to a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the California Institute of Technology, but the pull of his other great love, music, proved irresistible.  He returned to school to study composition, with David Mott at York University and then with Gary Kulesha at the University of Toronto.  His chamber, electroacoustic, large ensemble, vocal and operatic works have been performed in the U.S. and Canada by TorQ Percussion, Reverb Brass, the Cecilia String Quartet, and the Toy Piano Composers Ensemble among others.  He was awarded the Karen Kieser Prize in Canadian Music for his string quartet Glass in 2014, and his piece A Force of Nature for trumpet, electronics and 3D video was recently selected as one of two Canadian works in the 2018 Mise-En music festival.  Although music is now his primary focus, he remains active in the sciences as a teacher and is credited with almost as many publications in Physical Review as works performed. Much of his work is inspired by the quest for a mutually enriching synergy between the two fields, and by a deep appreciation for the abstract beauty of natural and mathematical phenomena.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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photo: Prince Requino 

Hailing from the Philippines, Juro Kim Feliz (b. 1987)is a pianist and composer currently based in Toronto, Canada. Along with composition studies at the University of the Philippines and McGill University, he got mentoring from various consultations with composers Jonas Baes, Melissa Hui, Liza Lim, Chong Kee Yong, Dieter Mack and Linda Catlin Smith. He won the Goethe South East Asian Young Composer Award (1st place) in 2009 and landed as a Finalist in the Five-Minute Piano Concerto Competition of the Music Biennale Zagreb in 2017. He contributed and premiered works for festivals and projects including the Yogyakarta Contemporary Music Festivals (Indonesia, 2009; 2010; 2014); the Asian Composers League festivals (South Korea, 2009; Taiwan, 2011; Israel, 2012; Philippines, 2015); The Montreal Contemporary Music Lab (2014, 2016); the Project Bakawan Arts Festival (Philippines, 2015); thePivot Mentorship Program of the Canadian League of Composers (Toronto, 2017); the New Music on the Bayou (Louisiana, 2017); the Toronto Creative Music Lab (2017); the Waterloo Region Contemporary Music Sessions (2017); the MATA Festival (New York, 2018); and the Nief-Norf SummerFestival 2018 (Tennessee, 2018). His percussion duo work Gandingan sa Kagiliran(2014) is commercially released in the Millennial Masters Volume 7 album under Ablaze Records.

Sonja Rainey is an inter-disciplinary artist, designer and facilitator. She designs for opera and theatre, projections and puppetry, film and spectacle events. Her approach is tactile and experiential, responding to the visceral qualities of ideas and themes at hand to create immersive environments that blend forms and materials to investigate the questions and stories that lie below the surface. Her work has been presented at the Prague Quadrennial, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Mississauga, and is currently being shown at PAMA. Recent collaborations in Toronto have included the Canadian Opera Company, urbanvessel, Ahuri Theatre, Thin Edge New Music Collective, the Bicycle Opera Project, The Gladstone Hotel and Jumblies Theatre. Her contributions with these companies has encompassed installation, set and costume design; puppets mask and shadow projections, exhibit design as well as the creation of a series of short films. She is thrilled to be working increasingly with musicians and composers in the creation of environments and visuals for listening.

Janet Sit is a composer and pianist currently based in Toronto, by way of Hong Kong and Victoria. Her compositions have been performed in Beijing, Berlin, Toronto, Vancouver, and Victoria. She holds a B.Sc. in Zoology and B.Mus. in Composition from the University of Toronto and a M.Mus. from University of Victoria. Her research interests include exploring acoustic properties of sound in various spaces and transmission media, seeking dialogue with marine scientists on underwater sound issues, collaborating in multi-disciplinary projects, and more recently, learning about digital music processing through the EQ: Women in Electronic Music workshop led by Rose Bolton. Janet has been commissioned by the Caution Tape Sound Collective, the Gray/Constant Duo, and Dave Riedstra for his cross-Canada tour Topography: new music for solo bass. She is a founding member of the Victoria Composers’ Collective and is currently in her second year as an organizing member of the Toronto Creative Music Lab (TCML). Some of her favourite TCML duties are cooking and baking for the participants, including co-leading a communal dumpling-making session for TCML 2017. In her spare moments, Janet loves to test new recipes on unsuspecting TCML organizers. She is excited to start her composition doctoral studies in the fall at UC San Diego, where she hopes to continue multi-disciplinary research and potentially take a few surfing lessons. She is very thankful to Thin Edge New Music Collective for this opportunity to collaborate with Sonja Rainey for this concert.

Amy Hull is an Indigenous dance artist of Mi'kmaq and Inuit heritage currently studying and training at York University. She began her dance training in ballet and has since been trained in the Graham, Horton, and Limon modern dance techniques. She also incorporates traditional Indigenous dance forms into her choreographies which most often express different hardships and tragedies experienced by contemporary Indigenous peoples. Amy combines her passion for dance and her love for her communities to advocate for change and political action, and to share a healing experience with others.

Dan Tapper explores the sonic and visual properties of the unheard and invisible. From revealing electromagnetic sounds produced by the earth’s ionosphere, to exploring hidden micro worlds and creating imaginary nebulas made from code. His explorations use scientific methods alongside thought experiments resulting in rich sonic and visual worlds.