influenced by Morton Feldman, this composition for solo bass clarinet and digital accompaniment incorporates field recordings of birds, a forest walk as well as digital recording of bass clarinet, flute and piano.

Bird Song

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

CST088 Guitar & Voice 
Eric Chenaux

www.cstrecords.com/cst088

Eric Chenaux • "Simple Frontal"

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.

Wonscotonach River Song by Marie Gaudet

Juliet Palmer

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