Studio recording of an excerpt of my new opera Sweat (libretto Anna Chatterton). Cantonese translation by Germaine Liu, Tamil translation by Subhiksha Rangarajan. Performed by: Christine Duncan, Juliet Palmer, Felicity Williams, Germaine Liu & Subhiksha Rangarajan. Recorded by Jean Martin at The Farm, Toronto, July 2013.

Sweat: "Repeat Sleep"

Studio version of My Heart Starves, from Sweat, Urbanvessel's new opera with music by Juliet Palmer and libretto by Anna Chatterton. Singers: Subhiksha Rangarajan, Felicity Williams and Bó Bardós.

Sweat: "My Heart Starves"

Aquamarine (excerpt)

Blood Shower (excerpt)

Flotsam & Jetsam (Hazy)

Flotsam & Jetsam (Couldn't Play)

A sneak peek at Road Map, a sound and song map of the Mabelle neighbourhood in Toronto. Created in collaboration with community members, MABELLEarts and Urbanvessel.

Lyrics by Lorraine DeGasperis and Juliet Palmer
Music by Juliet Palmer
Performed by Christine Duncan and Alex Samaras
Recorded and mixed by Jean Martin

Photo: Katherine Fleitas

When I First Came Here

The lyrics for Solid Gold are the distillation of thirty years of number one hit song titles. Love is, not surprisingly, a big theme. From song titles absurd and poignant, from names of people I never knew or have since forgotten, I have winnowed down hundreds of song titles into a lean new lyric. I cast aside “Me and you and a dog named Boo”, put “Puppy Love” behind me and discarded “Mouldy Old Dough”. Sifting through the remaining hoard, I hoped to unearth the heart of the love song. Collaging selected titles into new and original lyrics, my quest echoes Foreigner's 1984 hit “I want to to know what love is”. In this maelstrom of romantic yearning, what does love mean? And who exactly is the singer? Is (s)he “Venus, Jezebel, Lady Madonna — Lola, Nikita, Sylvia's Mother”? Or is gender itself in question? “Fernando? Pinnochio? Mozart?” While the lyrics of Solid Gold are borrowed, the music is my own. This is not James Last's orchestra or Purple Haze arranged for symphony. In composing for chamber orchestra, I've tried to conjure the distinct sound world of pop production — from reverb, chorus, flange and distortion, to looping, static and cassette warp. I'm not looking for the tunes, but more for the dirt on the needle.

Solid Gold was commissioned by Orchestra Wellington and funded by Creative New Zealand. Many thanks to Marc Taddei, Adán Tijerina, Madeleine Pierard and the orchestra for bringing the music to life. 

© Juliet Kiri Palmer 2013

Solid Gold (excerpt)

Drawing on Japanese folksong and Die Winterreise, composer Juliet Palmer and writer Anna Chatterton have crafted a set of songs exploring the tension between inner reflection and outer journeying. Aki Takahashi, Juliet Palmer and Christine Duncan bridge multiple worlds, singing and playing shamisen, theremin, clarinet and percussion, weaving together shouts, chants and cries with throat singing, opera and gospel. Although worlds apart, this new song cycle finds fresh ground in two powerful yet disparate traditions.

The Province of Impossible was premiered at Open Space Arts’ VOICE++ Festival in Victoria, B.C., May 12, 2007.



Performers: Christine Duncan (voice and theremin), Aki Takahashi (voice and shamisen), Juliet Palmer (voice and clarinet). Original compositions and arrangements by Juliet Palmer in collaboration with the performers. English text by Anna Chatterton with additional lyrics in German (Wilhelm Müller) and Japanese (traditional).

Otemoyan

Like an Old Tale — Lullaby (excerpt)

The Moon

The melody in Starving Poetry comes from a Russian folksong taught to two Chinese poets as children during the Cultural Revolution.
‘In the middle of a snow storm. Going far. In the middle of nowhere. Lovers must separate. The snow is covering their footsteps...’
Starving Poetry is written in memory of Gu Cheng and Xie Ye.

Starving Poetry

Solo mezzo with mixed chorus [15’] 2015

Premiere: Laura Swankey & The Burble Choir with conductor Christine Duncan, Singing River, Pan Am Path, Lower Don Trail, Toronto, July 4-5, 2015.
Text: Anna Chatterton



Burble gives voice to the Wonscotonach/Don River, one of Canada's most polluted rivers. 



My curves are straight

My mouth is a drain

Spewing grease and trash

Cars roar and ignore me

I am deaf from the din...

Burble

The Wonscotonach River song by Marie Gaudet was featured in the audio installation Undercurrent during Singing River, a Pan Am Path event produced by Urbanvessel, July 4-5, 2015 in Toronto. 

Transducers applied to the pedestrian bridge transform it into a vibrating loudspeaker, singing the river’s Anishinaabemowin name to the most constricted and polluted section of the waterway. 

Original song for the Wonscotonach River composed by Marie Gaudet and performed by the First Nations School of Toronto girls singing group. The words in Ojibway mean "Wonscontonach river, we love you".

Wonscotonach has been translated by linguist Basil Johnson as “burning bright point or peninsula” or a point bright with fire, perhaps referring to the peninsula near the mouth of the Don (later the Toronto islands). 

“When you think about it, a lot of these songs came from the women who did the laundry along the riverside. This song came to me when I was in the laundromat. I was in there alone, listening to the swishes of the water and the humming of the machines. And I was thinking of another song that I really liked and thinking that, geez, I'd like to make a really nice pretty song like that one. And so that is how the song came to me.” — Marie Gaudet, on composing the Wonscotonach River Song 

Creative team: artistic director Juliet Palmer & sound artist Christopher Willes
Additional voices: Regent Park School of Music

Wonscotonach River Song by Marie Gaudet

A Guided Viewing hijacks the gallery audio-guide and reworks it into a face-to-face encounter between viewer and ‘artwork’. Questioning the idea of an authoritative voice, A Guided Viewing presents instead a polyphony of voices, each equally insistent.

Featured voice: Mary C. Wright

A Guided Viewing (Mary)

Inside Us (excerpt)

Inside Us (Ayelet)

Juliet Palmer

drift, drop

Bout

Commissioner: Arraymusic
Funders: The Laidlaw Foundation and Ontario Arts Council
Premiere: FontanaMIX Ensemble with conductor Giorgio Magnanensi, Angelica Festival, Teatro San Leonardo, Bologna, Italy, May 23, 2004.
Program note:

The march is connected with both military and alternative political gatherings. Trying to understand the form, I’ve been listening to Purcell’s Queen’s Funeral March, the conga playing of Québec Summit protestors and the strangely military snap of Old Mother Hubbard (performed by the US Air Force Band). Revisiting this nursery rhyme, I was struck by the revolutionary aspirations of the last verse:

The dame made a curtsey, 

The dog made a bow;

The dame said, “Your servant,” 

The dog said, “Bow, wow.”

In bringing together disparate sources of inspiration, I wanted to retain a sense of their independent directions. With the intensification of policing at protests, a march may become a labyrinth with groups encountering barricades and teargas, circling back and morphing into a many-headed creature whose aspirations are diverse and sometimes divergent. The reporting of such events is frequently rife with omissions and silences.

Mother Hubbard f-mix

guitar quartet [15'37"] 
Premiered by Minneapolis Guitar Quartet. Taplin Auditorium, Princeton, USA. 3/5/95.

a  porous or
vesicular
carbonate of
lime...
deposited near the sources
and along the courses
of calcareous
springs.

Tufa

Excerpt from a "Surrender?", a multimedia tribute to Doris Day. Premiered at Composing Women's Festival, Wellington, New Zealand, 8/8/93.

Surrender_ (excerpt)

Commissioner: Toca Loca
Premiere: Glenn Gould Studio, Toronto, March 25, 2008.
Program note:

Five leaps into the vexing world of Alanis Morrissette and the never-ending list of opposites found in her song Hand in My Pocket. Why choose this song? I heard it when I first came to Canada in 1996 which gives it a sentimental gloss, but I’m also intrigued by songs that we remember in spite of ourselves. How does that work exactly? I also couldn’t but help think of the invincible pianist and cyclist Gregory Oh when Alanis sings “I’m short but I’m healthy, I’m high but I’m grounded”. Finally, I guess I really do hope that “everything’s going be fine, fine, fine”.

Five (excerpt)

Mindmeat (excerpt)

New Zealand-Canadian composer Juliet Palmer is known as a “post-modernist with a conscience” (The Listener) whose work “crosses so many genres as to be in a category of its own” (Toronto Star). Juliet is the artistic director of Urbanvessel, a platform for interdisciplinary collaboration. Recent works: Stitch (Dora nominations Outstanding New Opera and Outstanding Production), Slip (Best Experimental Short, Toronto International Short Film Festival), and Voice-Box (Harbourfront World Stage premiere and Fresh Ground commission). Voice-Box was acclaimed as “a performance piece that smashes the boundaries between disciplines and leaves them sprawled out on the mat, down for the count” (Musicworks Magazine). Upcoming: Sweat, a cappella opera, with writer Anna Chatterton and director Tim Albery (Soundstreams); and the Toronto premiere of the chamber opera Shelter with writer Julie Salverson and director Keith Turnbull (Tapestry Opera) in June 2014.

Based in Toronto since 1998, Juliet's work has been featured around the world with performances at: New York’s Lincoln Center, London's Southbank Centre, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Bath International Festival, Voix Nouvelles France, Italy’s Angelica Festival, Evenings of New Music Bratislava, Musica Ficta Festival Lithuania, NYYD Festival Estonia, The Istanbul Festival, Soundculture Japan, the Adelaide Festival, the New Zealand International Arts Festival and Canada's Sound Symposium. Juliet was the 2011/12 Creative New Zealand/Jack C. Richards composer-in-residence at the New Zealand School of Music and the 2012 composer-in-residence of Orchestra Wellington. Juliet holds a PhD in composition from Princeton University and an M.Mus in performance, composition and time-based art from Auckland University.

Juliet Palmer

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