Taylor Brook (born 1985) is a composer of contemporary classical music who currently resides in New York City.
Taylor Brook (born 1985) is a composer of contemporary classical music who currently resides in New York City.
Brook was born in Edmonton but grew up in Toronto, where he attended Etobicoke School of the Arts, a specialized arts-academic public high school. His studies included guitar and violin. He then studied at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University, where he completed his Bachelor of Music degree in 2007 and earned his Master's Degree in Music Composition. For his thesis he composed Mitya, a piece for solo clarinet with 18 musicians and live electronics. It premiered on April 14, 2010, with Mark Bradley of the Portmantô Ensemble as soloist and Denys Bouliane conducting the McGill Contemporary Music Ensemble. His teachers included Brian Cherney, Denys Bouliane, Luc Brewaeys, Ana Sokolović, John Rea, and Sean Ferguson. [1] [2] [3] [4] He earned a Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) from Columbia University in 2018 and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020. [5] [6]
In 2008, he spent two months in Kolkata studying at Bhattacharya School of Universal Music with Hindustani musician Pandit Debashish Bhattacharya, studying raga on the chaturangui, a many-stringed slide guitar of Bhattacharya's invention. [2] This exposure influenced subsequent works including his 2009 composition Vocalise, for solo violin accompanied by a drone playing a continuous tone 14 cents flat of F♯. [7] The piece won the 2010 Lee Ettelson Composer's Award from Composers, Inc., whose artistic director is Robert Greenberg. [8] [9] [10]
Another 2009 composition, Murder Ballad, won the coup de cœur prize from le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne. [11] [12]
His composition It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there won the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada Young Composers Award for 2010. [13] [14]
For the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne's FORUM 2010, he composed music to accompany the 2010 version of the Les trains où vont les choses series of films by Nathalie Bujold. This piece was awarded the Prix Public and second prize from the jury. [15] [16] [17] (The phrase Les trains où vont les choses is a play on words — "le train de choses" is an idiom for "the way things go" or "that's how it goes." The title is pluralized to reflect the grid of images in the video. The double meaning is from the fact it is filmed from a train window.)
His 2011 composition Against the Morning was commissioned by the Banff Centre. It was inspired by the third movement (Summer Morning by a Lake) of Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra. [18] [19]
In 2011, Brook studied orchestral composition with Luc Brewaeys in Brussels [3] and Quatuor Bozzini recorded his piece Florescences for their album À chacun sa miniature. [20] [21] [22]
The ArtSpring Arts Center in Salt Spring Island announced in May 2012 that it would host a residency for Brook and Quatuor Bozzini to develop and perform a new evening-length work over the period August 1–7, 2012. The process was captured by Quebec videographer Nathalie Bujold and the audience received a preview of the result on August 4, and participated in its creation. [23] [24] [25] [26]
Brook was a finalist in the 2012 American Composers Forum Finale National Composition Contest September 14, 2012. [27] His entry Arrhythmia was described as "a strikingly modern re-imagining of Mahler’s ninth symphony, lush and ethereal" [28]
He is the technical director of TAK Ensemble, a quintet that performs contemporary classical music, including Brook's. [29]
James Tenney was an American composer and music theorist. He made significant early musical contributions to plunderphonics, sound synthesis, algorithmic composition, process music, spectral music, microtonal music, and tuning systems including extended just intonation. His theoretical writings variously concern musical form, texture, timbre, consonance and dissonance, and harmonic perception.
Linda Catlin Smith is a Canadian composer based out of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. In 2005 she became the second woman to win the Jules Léger Prize for New Chamber Music.
Jacques Desjardins is a Canadian composer whose music has been performed by important ensembles internationally like the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the Ijsbreker Ensemble.
John Rea is a Montreal-based composer who won the Jules Léger Prize for New Chamber Music in both 1981 and 1992. He obtained his bachelor's degree at Wayne State University (1967), his Master of Music degree at the University of Toronto (1969), and his PhD at Princeton University. His children's opera The Prisoners Play from 1972 uses serial techniques. His works have been played by the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, the Quebec Symphony Orchestra, the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, the Arditti Quartet, the Esprit Orchestra and others. He is the previous dean and head of the composition department at the Schulich School of Music of McGill University, from which he has taken his retirement. Among his notable students are composers Robin Minard and John Oliver.
Denys Bouliane is a Canadian composer and conductor. He is a Professor of Composition at McGill University.
Owen Underhill is a Canadian composer, flutist and conductor based in Vancouver. He is currently a professor of music at Simon Fraser University. He has been an active contributor to the new music scene on the West Coast, as a flutist, as co-music director of Western Front New Music (1982-3), as the artistic director (1987–2000) of the Vancouver New Music Society, and as a conductor in Magnetic Band and the Turning Point Ensemble, for which he is also currently the Artistic Co-Director.
Jimmie LeBlanc is a Canadian composer specializing in instrumental and mixed music. His music has been performed throughout his native country and internationally, including by the Ensemble Contrechamps, Hwaum Chamber Ensemble, Kore Ensemble, Les Enfants Terribles, Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, Pentaèdre, Quatuor Bozzini, and the Trio Fibonacci, and many soloists.
Denis Gougeon is a Canadian composer and music educator. His more than 80 compositions encompass a wide variety of genres, including orchestral works, chamber music, opera, ballet, and pieces for solo instruments and voice. Notable ensembles to have included his compositions in their performance repertoire include the Bavarian State Ballet, the Canadian Opera Company, the I Musici de Montréal Chamber Orchestra, Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, New Music America, the Norwegian National Opera and Ballet, the Quebec Contemporary Music Society, and the Vancouver New Music Society.
Éric Morin is a Canadian composer. He has been awarded several prizes for his compositions, including the 2003 Jules Léger Prize for New Chamber Music for his D'un Château l'autre and the CBC Radio National Competition for Young Composers which he won twice. His works have been performed by several notable musical ensembles, including the Esprit Orchestra, the National Arts Centre Orchestra, the Quebec Contemporary Music Society, and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra among others. He has been commissioned to write works by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.
Mary Finsterer is an Australian composer and academic.
The Quatuor Bozzini is a string quartet that specializes in new and experimental music based in Montreal, Canada.
Fabián Panisello is an Argentinian-Spanish composer, conductor, and professor.
Nina C. Young is an American electro-acoustic composer of contemporary classical music who resides in New York City. She won the 2015 Rome Prize in musical composition, a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2014 Charles Ives Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Dr James Weeks is a British composer, conductor and teacher of composition.
Anna Höstman is a Canadian composer. She currently lives in Victoria, British Columbia.
Mira Benjamin is a Canadian violinist and researcher. She currently lives in London.
Georgia Rodgers is a composer and acoustician from the United Kingdom, currently based in London.
Matthew Ricketts is a Canadian composer of contemporary classical music. He is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow as well as the recipient of the 2020 Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 2016 Jacob Druckman Prize from the Aspen Music Festival, the 2015 Salvatore Martirano Memorial Composition Award, a 2013 ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composer Award, and eight prizes in the SOCAN Foundation's Awards for Young Composers. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
TAK ensemble is a contemporary chamber ensemble based in New York City consisting of flute, clarinet, violin, percussion, and soprano voice.
Martin Arnold is a Canadian composer of experimental music. His music has been widely performed and commissioned by ensembles including the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Quatuor Bozzini, the pianist Eve Egoyan, the violinist Mira Benjamin and the cellist Anton Lukoszievieze.
This album, Ecstatic Music, will highlight one of our most esteemed colleagues, and newly appointed Technical Director, Taylor Brook.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
