for Clarinet, Shakuhachi, Duduk and English Horn

Atlas Quartet (2010)

for three female voices and Wind Ensemble

Silk Hole(2011)

Performed and premiered by Continuum Contemporary Music. Commissioned through the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

By Other Means
Sunday, May 4, 2014, 8 pm
The Music Gallery, Toronto

Anne Thompson, flutes
Max Christie, clarinets
Carol Lynn Fujino, violin
Paul Widner, cello
Gregory Oh, piano
Ryan Scott, percussion
Brian Current, conductor

Au fond du cloître humide (2014)

Valentin Villard, organ. Performed/recorded at Orgelpark on June 9th, 2011

Ochluf (2010-Orgelpark)

Ma terre je la prendrai dans ma main 
je la soignerai
avec un pan
ma jupe
essuiera ses larmes noires
mes cheveux ses joues creuses
je la bercerai en ses tremblements 
je ne dors plus
l'endormirai sur mes genoux
et saluerai mes ancêtres de la main 
avec le bégaiement
l'enfant à naître que je suis.

- Natasha Kanapé Fontaine, Manifeste Assi


Short excerpt of an hour-long work for speaker and three bass instruments on texts by Natasha Kanapé Fontaine and Josephine Bacon for the Akademie der Künste der Welt's Pluriversale Festival.
(Academyspace, Cologne, Germany- June 20th, 2015)

Speaker: Thierry Tidrow 
Cello: Niklas Seidl 
Bass clarinet: Heather Roche
Bass flute: Liz Hirst
Text: Natasha Kanapé Fontaine

Translation:
My Earth, I will take her in my hand 
I will nurse her
with a piece of cloth
my dress
will wipe her black tears
and my hair, her gaunt cheeks 
will rock her as she shudders
I sleep no longer
will put her to sleep on my knees 
and wave to my ancestors 
stuttering
the yet to be born child that I am.


Photo creds: Ali Saad

Manifeste Assi [excerpt: Ma terre] (2015)

Continuum Contemporary Music
Brian Current, cond. 

In its use of quotation, the composition moves between clear, subtle, and disguised representations of melodic and harmonic materials from the piano music of 19th-century composer Frédéric Chopin. While on one hand presenting a playful and inviting point of reference, especially for music lovers and music students alike who may already be familiar with the works of Chopin, the use of quotation in Tidrow’s composition is also unexpected, challenging the audience and inviting their curiosity and close attention. As the composer has noted himself, the work is “a playing field between two musical worlds: one led by the piano and referring to music of the past, the other starring the percussion and dominated by un-pitched sounds such as brushing, scrubbing, scratching, and bouncing.” The strings and wind instruments are meanwhile “torn between a world of romanticism and a world of utter noise, ultimate victims of this musical tug-of-war.”

Au fond du cloître humide (2014, excerpt)

As with every good western millennial, the first thing I ever learned to do was to consume and want more. Sugar here is, of course, exemplary of the nefarious yet completely socially accepted poison of consumerism, which also ties into the dual nature of the sweet tooth: sweets make us smile because of their sugar and their often oh-so-cute presentation and depiction, but they also rot our teeth, and in a most insidious fashion! What a beautiful metaphor for happy neoliberalism…

In this post-truth age, image is everything: candy is food and advertisements depict real life. A major chord means happy emoji, a minor chord means sad emoji. How does this affect our grasp of deeper connection through art? I wanted to play with these codes and clichés and to see how I could harvest their energy to highlight the violence hidden behind each major chord.

Ensemble contemporain de Montréal (ECM+)
Véronique Lacroix, cond.
Jeff Stonehouse, flutes 
Martin Gauvreau, clarinets
Antoine St-Onge , bassoon, 
Laurence Latreille-Gagné, French horn
Olivier Maranda, percussion, 
Hubert Brizard + Geneviève Liboiron , violins
Valérie Arsenault, viola 
Chloé Dominguez, cello

Sunday November 11, 2018
The Music Gallery, Toronto, Canada

SWEET TOOTH (2018) - excerpt

Performed and premiered by the Quatuor Bozzini on at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2012, as part of their annual Composer's Kitchen. 
(November 24th, 2012; St Paul's Hall, Huddersfield, UK)
Clemens Merkel, Mira Benjamin-vlns
Stéphanie Bozzini- vla
Isabelle Bozzini- vlc

Note: In most "silent" moments, Quartet is still somehow softly bowing somewhere on instruments. 

Chanson (2012)

Thierry Tidrow is a Canadian composer currently living and working in Germany. Born in Ottawa, Thierry’s musical education began with choral and vocal music, followed by studies composition, music theory and early music performance at McGill University (B.Mus. 2009) with Christoph Neidhöfer and Brian Cherney. As a Fondation Ricard and Canada Arts Council Fellow, he received his Masters degree in composition from the Conservatorium van Amsterdam in 2011 under Richard Ayres, an Advanced Studies diploma at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg in 2013, under Brice Pauset, followed by masterclasses with Chaya Czernowin, Rebecca Saunders, and Ming Tsao.

Thierry has collaborated with many performers across Europe and North America, including the Asko-Schönberg Ensemble, the Bozzini String Quartet, Continuum Contemporary Music, Ensemble Garage, hand werk, LUX:NM, Ensemble Proton, the Talea Ensemble, Sarah Maria Sun, Johannes Fischer, Erik Bosgraaf, Brian Archinal, Heather Roche, and many others. He has been featured at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Heidelberger Frühling, Cluster New Music and Integrated Arts Festival, the Festival Radio-France de Montpellier, Gaudeamus Muziekweek, Pluriversale (Akademie der Künste der Welt), New Talents Biennale Cologne, and the Zagreb Music Biennale.

Thierry has written four operas: Less Truth More Telling (2012, libretto by Matthew Ricketts), an investigation of the origin of evil, for the Dutch National Opera Academie; My Corporate Identity (2017, libretto by Uta Bierbaum), a tragicomic tale of modern-day existential meltdowns, for the Deutsche Oper Berlin; Prosthetics of Autonomy (2018, libretto by Franziska vom Heede), a sci-fi post-utopia about an android discovering her femininity and artificial intelligence by tapping into years of canonical male-gaze-y opera; and Nils Karlsson Däumling(2019, libretto by Manfred Weiß), a children's opera based on the Astrid Lindgren classic for soprano and violin written for the Deutsche Oper am Rhein. Other big-scale projects include Manifeste Assi (2015), a 60-minute chamber piece based on the poetry of Innu poets and political activists Natasha Kanapé-Fontaine and Joséphine Bacon.

tidrow

Popular tracks