From our forthcoming album MONDEGREEN
Out March 24th 2014
Available from http://peelerrecords.bandcamp.com/

Quinta - Violin, Piano
Rebecca Waterworth - Cello
Caroline Weeks - Flute
Alice Eldridge - Cello

Spell

Written for the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival 2014 
at MASS MoCA, conducted by Brad Lubman and played by Bang on a Can Fellows

Ascension

Ken Thomson, clarinet
Emileigh Vandiver, cello
Stuart Fisher, electric guitar
Jeff Kolega, percussion
Jani Parsons, piano/synthesizer
Tristan Kasten-Krause, double bass

Cirrus (live, Bang On A Can Summer Festival @ Mass MoCA, 2014)

Knotted Silk

A demo in one take. 

voice - Charlotte Mundy
guitar - Jordan Dodson

composed by Charlotte Mundy.

These Fragile Snowflakes is a piece for SATB choir and piano. It is based on the poem "Poetry on Lake Simcoe" by Desi Di Nardo, and was commissioned and premiered by Jubilate Singers of Toronto ON in May 2014. It was the winner of the 2015 U of T Choral Composition Competition.

This recording is sung by the MacMillan Singers on December 6, 2015 in MacMillan Theatre, Toronto ON.

Lara Dodds-Eden, piano. Hilary Apfelstadt, conductor.

These Fragile Snowflakes (MacMillan Singers)

Jennifer Goode Cooper, soprano
Kelly Horsted, piano

This piece imagines a scene in which a woman puts herself and her words between a mob and its victim. She too is cornered by the crowd and, surrounded, she turns on them. Her anger is not a hot, hysterical rage or melodramatic chest-beating; instead, it's vicious, ruthless, ice-cold. Whatever has transpired, she's going to give as good as she got before they close in on her. And then (one imagines) brute strength will overcome whatever words echo in the air.

Almost all the singer's phrases sink chromatically from a starting peak, and the accompaniment’s interjections are sharp staccato barks or a low, roiling counterpoint which breaks out into strange chords. There's some sort of slow dance in this piece, some sort of tango of tension between the woman and her attackers.

Your mercy’s nothing: worthless; save it. 
With every second’s twitch you change your minds; 
how soon and easy you forget your fears, 
the desperate hungers in the hollows 
of your bodies, the press of bones inside 
your sliding skin: sliding as easily as lies, 
that slip between your lips like breath and bile. 
You jig and you spin and you lisp, and you 
pseudonym your sins, and your desires 
are a sick man’s thirst, craving most the thing 
that poisons. 
  
There is another justice, 
yet you want this vicious chase:
the slit throats,
the bracelets smeared with blood, 
the touch of steel, the sudden eyes… 
And still this planet dances on 
around its seething, heedless fire, 
your justice shining and drying 
and spinning in the sun: turning 
your ignorance to cruelties, 
so what should make you shiver makes you smile. 

				– Duncan McFarlane

Mercy (for soprano and piano)

Euphrosine's aria from Star-Shaped Biscuit, a semi-improvised opera conceived by David Toop.

Euphrosine's Aria from Star-Shaped Biscuit, a semi-improvised opera conceived by David Toop.

Composed for and performed by Quartet New Generation - recorder collective 
Susanne Fröhlich, Andrea Guttmann, Heide Schwarz und Petra Wurz (recorders)

Airlines for recorders/four perfromers

Composer-in-residence @ the Canadian Opera Company (2022-)
Composer-in-residence @ Glyndebourne (2019-22)

Photo: Daniel Alexander Denino

Mercy (for soprano and piano)

Cecilia Livingston

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