Name: Liebeslied by Anna Pidgorna in June 2025
Duration: 7 min
Description: Setting of Rainer Maria Rilke's poem "Liebes-Lied" for mezzo soprano and viola. Performed by Rochelle Ellis, soprano, and Michael Davis, viola.

June 2025

'Sister' by Edmund Finnis (2013) Lucy Railton - Cello, Aisha Orazbayeva - Violin

Piano 1, Aya Yamamoto
Piano 2, Donia Jarrar

This piece was inspired by what began as a night -time drive with friends beneath the desert sky on the outskirts of Cairo, Egypt. We would drive out into the desert, with nothing but the moon and stars, the bedus lights, to guide our way. Leaving the heavily polluted city sky behind us, the stars would appear one by one as the curtain of pollution was slowly lifted. The constant whir of the car engine was like a steady pulse that put us to sleep.
In the morning when we returned to the city, the traffic and disorderly, overcrowded streets welcomed us. Driving in that city is a constant brush with death, with cars driving the wrong way down one-way streets as policemen yawn and turn their heads, horse and donkey-drawn carriages blocking the sides of the highways, children hopping rides on the backs of buses, women driving with their babies on their laps, three or four men on one motorcycle, and pedestrians getting injured on a daily basis. Drivers will not even stop or move out of the way for an ambulance.
Eventually we made it to Khan El-Khalili, Cairos famous bazaar and souk in the Islamic District. The souk is filled with coffee shops and hookah bars, where we spent the day. Its narrow alleys and cobblestoned streets are filled with beautiful Egyptian silver jewelry stands, gold, spices, perfumes, accessories, oils and dessert shops where lokmit aadi, deep fried doughnut holes, are made.
My friends and I ended the day with a visit to Cairo Jazz Club, one of the best venues for live music in the city. There was dancing, there were drinks, and then there was dawn. We walked along the Nile. There were no stars, only a reflection of the citys lights on the river water.

-Donia Jarrar 

Cairo, I Love You (for two pianos)

Program Notes

Iridium is a hard, brittle, elemental metal and is the second-densest metal (after Osmium) with a density of 22.5. It is often alloyed with platinum. This creates a connection to Varèse’s Density 21.5 for flute alone, which has played a large part in my musical life. Iridium is one of the rarest metals found in the earth’s crust (found in Alaska, amongst other places); it exists mostly in the core of the earth. If Iridium were formed into the shape of a gold bar, it would shatter under its own weight. 

Iridium is in three short continuous movements, 6 minutes in total. We begin in the core of the earth: pulsating, molten, and hot. Metallic whooshes, pulses, and drones play against the live flute flutters, bends, and other special effects. After about two minutes, we emerge onto the earth’s surface into the mountains of Alaska in an ethereal, evocative mix of ocean waves, gulls, wind, whale songs, and celestial voices,  and the live and recorded flutes dance through the harmonic series on C. In about the fourth minute, the pulsating, ominous pressure returns, and gradually the Iridium shatters into many pieces. 

Iridium is composed for two flutes and fixed electronics. The electronics consist of 74 imported found sounds, 72 recorded flute clips, and 25 Ableton sounds Some of these shared the same track, so there is a total of 20 tracks against which the two live flutes play. The density of the sounds you hear is intended to reflect the density of the metal. The recorded flutes, which I recorded in my home studio,  serve as a bridge between the live flutes and the electronics.  The coordination is fluid and organic, with time marked in the score in seconds, and an approximation of the electronics notated in the score, and the performers are given flexibility.

Iridium for two flutes and electronics perf. by Sarah Bassingthwaighte

"Morning, Taipei 101" features the first 14 seconds of a theme from my orchestral piece "Urban Suite". Recently, I’ve been experimenting with Suno AI, feeding it melodies from my own works to see who make music better. So far, AI still has a way to go in modern music, but it might surpass human creativity in a year or two!
Visit my YouTube and watch the video I created:
https://youtu.be/pDohUCN5SDg?si=HjY7ah33YWhN3gl5

《Morning, Taipei 101》，前14秒的音樂動機來自我十年前創作的管弦樂作品《Urban Suite》第一樂章，由法國號獨奏開展，全曲描寫了我初次到溫哥華從機窗俯瞰的感受。近期開始使用Suno，將自己過去的作品主旋律作為seed餵養AI，與AI進行PK

Morning, Taipei 101

New Music Ensemble: Chicago Introduction
Fulton Hall, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
Nov 5th, 2017

Daniel Pesca (Artist-in-Residence at University of Chicago), piano

Program Notes:
"Isles" resulted from my reading of "the Lost Salt Gift of Blood", a collection of short stories by the Canadian novelist Alistair MacLeod. Drawing inspirations from the writer’s hauntingly beautiful depiction of the Canadian maritime landscapes, this piece displays three musical “isles” in three movements set in contrasting landscapes and moods: shimmering and light, resoundingly violent, and silently turbulent.

I. As Birds Bring Forth the Sun

White Lace

Svadba by Ana Sokolovic

An a cappella opera that takes place the night before a fiancée, Milica, leaves for her wedding. Her girlfriends keep her company all night long and engage in raucous ‘girltalk’, invoking pagan rituals as they prepare her for the impending wedding. What elevates this ‘girltalk’ to a supernaturally exhilarating experience is Ana Sokolovic's style of composition. Using existing Slavic/Balkan peasant folk tales, myths and traditions as her text source, she draws on her native Balkan folk music as a source of inspiration for all her music. She transforms the music and text into her own unique onomatopoeic language and transports listeners to a world of magic realism. The singers have to use every single possible vocal technique - combining opera singing with Balkan folk singing, overtones, extreme chest voice, heightened nasal voice, whispering, creating a wildly inventive intense palette of colours.

Svadba by Ana Sokolovic

Setting of Rainer Maria Rilke's poem "Liebes-Lied" for mezzo soprano and viola. Performed by Rochelle Ellis, soprano, and Michael Davis, viola.

Liebeslied

TEXTUREN 
for soprano, flute, saxophone, percussion, piano, violin and electronics
performed and written for the WET INK ENSEMBLE

Libretto based on botanist Michael Sundue's "A monograph of Ascogrammitis, a new genus of grammitid ferns (Polypodiaceae)". Brittonia 62(4): 357-399. © 2010 The New York Botanical Garden Press, Bronx

on hat [now] ART 186

WET INK ENSEMBLE & guests
Ariana Lamon-Anderson (clarinets), Eliot Gattegno (saxophones), Ian Carroll (trombone), Andrew McIntosh (viola), Eric Moore (cello), Scott Worthington (contrabass)

Carl Christian Bettendorf - conductor

Rozalie Hirs - poetry
Michael Sundue - taxonomy 


TEXTUREN

For amplified harpsichord and piano.  rocKeys duo.  Katelyn Clark, harpsichord and Luciane Cardassi, piano.  Live recording.  Friday Evening at the Rolston.  Rolston Recital Hall, The Banff Centre.  Feb 4, 2011.

Dubbelspoor by Louis Andriessen

SAKURA SONGS – VOLUME II
four haiku songs/cycle for soprano or mezzo-soprano, flute, cello and piano
duration: 5:30
haiku: various
also included: arr. of Sakura, Sakura for flute/cello/percussion (played by singer) and piano
AvP 132

View on the CMC Shop: https://cmccanada.org/shop/61056/

Sakura (from Sakura Songs, Vol. 2)

This is the live recording of an improvised piece performed on organetto.  It was performed live at the church in Skagastrond, Iceland, in March 2013.  

Organetto improv on e iceland 2013

Anna Pidgorna (b. 1985) is a composer and media artist who combines her interests in sonic objects, visual art and writing to create works that are dramatic and picturesque. She works in both the acoustic and electronic realms, and is quickly rising on the contemporary music scene. Her mini-opera for voice and electronics, "Mirror, mirror," was premiered by Janice Jackson at Halifax's Oscillations Festival in February 2012. "Light-play through curtain holes" for solo accordion was recently included in ISCM Canadian Section's official submission to World New Music Days 2013. Pidgorna was born in Ukraine and is heavily influenced by her heritage. Ukrainian folk themes appear as bird song in her first orchestral work, "Tintamarre," and form the backbone of her second chamber opera, "On the Eve of Ivan Kupalo." Ms. Pidgorna completed her undergraduate studies at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick in 2007 and is pursuing a master’s degree at the University of Calgary. This year she will be participating in a prestigious workshop with Kaija Saariaho and Anssi Karttunen at Carnegie Hall, and the National Art Centre's Composers Program in Ottawa. Days.

Association of Canadian Women Composers

The ACWC is a professional organization for Canadian women composers, their supporters, and the performers of their music.

Liebeslied

Anna Pidgorna

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