Thank you!

To everyone who has presented, performed, taught, studied, or composed Canadian music and sound over the past year; to everyone who has donated what they can to help support the Canadian Music Centre BC; to all those organizations and ensembles and practitioners we have collaborated with over the past season. Thank You!

“Ars longa, vita brevis — Life is short but Art is long” (Hippocrates)

And to all those who have volunteered their time to help the CMC. People like Bill Orr and Greg Soone, who have devoted thousands of hours to creating and expanding our Online Digital Archive, capturing the history of new music in BC since 1900. And the members of our BC Advisory Board, who have helped provide cogent advice and insight over the past year, and devoted weekends to helping us reimagine our future. We are grateful to Joanne Harada and Rosemary Thomson for their meaningful contributions to our organization during their six years on our Board.

 

 

Thank you to the BC Arts Council, the Canada Council, the Province of BC, and the City of Vancouver and City of Surrey, for their ongoing crucial operating support.  The City of Vancouver has also provided an infrastructure grant to help us make security upgrades to our centre to help keep patrons and team members safe.

“When words leave off, music begins.” (Heinrich Heine)

We are particularly grateful this year to the Carter Family for their generous support to rename the welcoming space of our centre in honour of Marnie Carter later this year, and wish to express our deepest possible appreciation to Marnie, James and Leslie, Martha, Beth and Bob Baker, for this transformational contribution to the future of CMC BC.

 

 

And to the Osbertus Fund held at the Vancouver Foundation for their extraordinary ongoing support, as well as the Deux Mille Foundation, that supports our composition workshop,  the Martha Lou Henley Foundation which supports the Ann Southam Prize Scholarship, Dr. Pentland Prize, Downtown Van, the McGrane-Pearson Endowment Fund, and the Hugh Davidson Fund, held at the Victoria Foundation.

“Music is a more potent instrument for education than any other because rhythm and harmony find their way into the most inward places of the Soul. (Plato)

Each of these unique contributions, representing such extraordinary generosity of heart, have made it possible for us to be more generous ourselves, empowering CMC BC to share everything we have in support of the new music ecosystem of this province.

 

We are also grateful to Chor Leoni for a new deep collaboration as part of our Indigenous Artist in Residence program, which this year welcomed Melinda Currie to our centre in May, with mentorship provided by Erick Lichte, Chor Leoni’s Artistic Director, resulting in three new commissions for the 2025 – 2o26 season.

“I adore art… when I am alone with my notes, my heart pounds and the tears stream from my eyes, and my emotion and my joys are too much to bear. (Giuseppe Verdi)

We have sponsored 14 performances so far this year in Vancouver, Surrey, Powell River, and Kelowna, including the JUNO’s Classical Showcase we produced with CMC Canada, the Casse-Tete Festival of Experimental Music in Surrey, a performance at the Indian Summer Festival, as well as the final concert of the International Choral Kathaumixw in Powell River.

There are now 275 score videos on our YouTube channel and 100 music videos and documentaries on our website video channel.

 

 

CMC BC presented 3 scholarships totalling $5,000 to UBC composition students from SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts Music & Sound program. Scholarhips include the $2500 Murray and Dorothea Adaskin Prize for graduate students of composition, funded by a dedicated endowment established through a generous donation from Dorothea Adaskin. The Pentland Prize is funded by Dr. Geoffrey Newman, Professor at the UBC Sauder School of Business and founder of VanClassicalMusic. And the Ann Southam Prize of $1000, for female-identifying composers, is funded by the Martha Lou Henley Foundation.

“There are not more than five musical notes, yet the combinations of these five give rise to more melodies than can ever be heard.” (Sun Tzu)

And we sponsored a record four composition workshops so far this year, including Vancouver Inter-Cultural Orchestra’s Sounds Global Composers’ Workshop 2025 and Standing Wave’s Compocon. We also partnered for the first time with the B.C. Registered Music Teacher’s Association Student Composer’s Club, led by Composer-Mentor Elizabeth Knudson and BCRMTA’s Kathleen Feenstra, who is joining our BC Advisory Board. And we collaborated with the Okanagan Symphony again this year in a workshop for members of the Okanagan Youth Orchestra led by Composer-Mentor Rodney Sharman.

 

On another front, one of the reasons we are able to provide such a high-quality print and bind service for composers and ensembles is because C-Pac paper distributor generously donates the extremely high-quality paper we use.

 

We also receive dozens of individual donations each year ranging from $10 to $10,000, coming from composers and friends of the CMC. All together, those individual donations make up 7% of our budget and are essential to our ability to continue our work.

“Beauty appears when one feels deeply. Art is an act of total attention.” (Dorothea Lange)

Thank you to each and every one of you! You make it possible for us to lift up the extraordinary group of creators making new music and sound in BC  —asking the most pressing questions of our day, interrogating and limning the intricate, labyrinthine complexity of the evermore-rapidly evolving reality in which we live at this epochal inflection point in history.

 

We exist to support the community of creators, practitioners, audiences, donors, funders, teachers, students, ensembles, presenters, venues, and organizations that create new music, foster those who do, bring their music to life, appreciate its performance, and nurture the next generations of composers, musicians, and patrons. Thank you for everything you do to help make this wonderfully weird work possible!