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,…

My original choreographic design for Matthew Ricketts’ piece Lilt began with musings on the word itself.  ‘Lilt’ is defined as a gentle rise and fall, an intonation or cadence with a rhythmic quality.  It seems to suggest a place of weightlessness or carefree state of drifting. To me, a place where one either speaks or…