I have always wanted to compose a work about the Niagara Falls. Countless times I have walked along the Niagara River, from the upstreams to the falls, and along the Lower Niagara Water Rapids. Water goes through a series of transformations during its journey downstream. Inspired by the falls and this idea of transformation, I…

Taking My Rocks To Nunavik My ‘way into’ the Inuit culture was connecting with the remarkable throat singer Evie Mark. In 2007/2008 Evie and I corresponded by phone and email. She provided me with recordings of throat singing and DVDs about artist elders as I peppered her with questions. I read Inuit stories, finding them…

Tuning My Rocks The small group of musicians and others involved in the northern tour (a couple of orchestral staff members, and a small documentary film crew) were to head out for the Montreal Symphony Orchestra’s first tour of Nunavik to Inukjuak, Kangiqsujuaq, and Kuujjuaq in a small twin engine plane. As the composer of…

Would I write a piece for two Inuit throat singers and ensemble for the Montreal Symphony’s first tour of Nunavik, Northern Arctic Quebec? When I got that call saying that Kent Nagano would be pleased if I accepted, my heart skipped a beat, but I was frozen – yes, frozen with fear. I thought through…

Several years ago, my friend and collaborator Konstantinos Vasilakos approached me with an idea to develop a collaboration between CERN and our laptop group, the Birmingham Ensemble for Electroacoustic Research. The idea was to develop ways of transforming data from experiments at the Large Hadron Collider – the world’s largest particle accelerator – into electronic music and visuals,…