Please join the Canadian Music Centre in BC for a Celebration of the Joint 50th Birthday of JUNO Award-winning composers Jocelyn Morlock and Jordan Nobles at The Annex on Monday, December 9 at 7pm.
Featuring cabaret seating, this innovative Celebration co-presented with Redshift Music Society and musicians from Vetta Chamber Players features a 16—channel array alongside — or more accurately (and suspensefully) soaring above — an all-star cast of performers that includes Mark McGregor, Flute; Vern Griffiths and Michael Jarrett on Percussion; Jane Hayes, Piano; Joan Blackman, Violin; Olivia Blander, Cello; David Brown, Bass; Roger Cole, Oboe; AK Coope, Clarinet; and Ellen Marple on Trombone.
To kick off the concert, enjoy the unique experience of not just one but seventeen different versions of flutist-extraordinaire Mark McGregor as he accompanies sixteen recorded versions of himself on bass flute in Jordan Nobles’ multilayered Air.
Jocelyn Morlock’s divinely haunting Shade features a passionate, sometimes soaring and often reflective cello juxtaposed against an insistent but increasingly energetic vibraphone until their paired voices irreparably diverge; followed by Morlock’s Petrichor for Violin and Piano, which explores “an emotional landscape of anticipation, joy, and release.”
Nobles’ LaGrange Point calls on the full panoply of musicians present to spread out through the space and seek the kind of equilibrium satellites strike, suspended as they are in stationary orbit, perfectly balanced between the Earth and the Moon.
Torsion, Jocelyn Morlock’s gyrating work for Trombone and Piano alternates between pulsing rhythms and intertwining phrases chasing each other into a pulsating tangle.
Then flute, clarinet, piano, violin, cello, bass and a battery of percussion combine forces in Simulacrum by Jordan Nobles, its melody chasing instrument to instrument while the larger ensemble echoes fragments, sometimes reminiscing and occasionally anticipating in a musicological hall of mirrors refracting melodic light. Following Simulacrum, the full cast of musicians again occupies the entire space of The Annex in his stop-watch spatial soliloquy Chiaroscuro.
This unique concert concludes with Jocelyn Morlock’s Icarus, landing, which embraces nostalgia and the ways in which events beyond our control alter lives. The work begins in a dream-like state which is then transmogrified and transformed, devolving first into somber reflection, then disorder, and concluding with a compositional panic.
Jocelyn Morlock
JUNO Award-winning Jocelyn Morlock’s music is hailed as “airy but rhythmic, tuneful but complex” and with “uncanny yet toothsome beauty” (Georgia Straight.) She served as the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s first female Composer-in-Residence, from 2014-2019, after completing her term as Inaugural CiR for Vancouver’s innovative concert series Music on Main, co-host of ISCM World New Music Days 2017. She has been the composer of record for significant music competitions, including the 2008 Eckhardt-Gramatté National Music Competition and the 2005 Montreal International Music Competition, for which she wrote Amore, a tour de force vocal work that has gone on to receive more than 70 performances and numerous radio broadcasts.
Called “a lyrical wonder, exquisite writing” with “an acute feeling for sonority” and an approach that is “deftly idiomatic” (Vancouver Sun), her music has gathered accolades including a JUNO® for Classical Composition of the Year, Top 10 at the International Rostrum of Composers, the Jan V. Matejcek Award from SOCAN in recognition of overall success in New Classical Music, the Barbara Pentland Award of Excellence, the Mayor’s Arts Award for Music, several Western Canadian Music Awards wins and nominations, and the CMC Prairie Region Emerging Composers competition.
Her work is recorded on several dozen CDs, including the National Arts Centre Orchestra’s critically-acclaimed “Life Reflected,” musica intima’s “into light” and her own “Cobalt” and “Halcyon.”
Much of Jocelyn’s music is inspired by birds, insomnia, or a peculiar combination thereof. www.jocelynmorlock.com
Jordan Nobles
Jordan Nobles is known for creating music filled with an “unearthly beauty” (Mondomagazine) that makes listeners want to “close (their) eyes and transcend into a cloud of music” (Discorder Magazine). Jordan was nominated for ‘Classical Composer of the Year’ at the 2018 Western Canadian Music Awards, his third such nomination. He has received many honours in recent years including a JUNO Award, a Western Canadian Music Award, and numerous International prizes. He was also the recipient of Jan V. Matejcek Award from SOCAN in recognition of his “overall success in ‘New Classical Music’” and was honoured with the ‘Barbara Pentland Award of Excellence’ from the Canadian Music Centre for his “extraordinary contribution to Canadian Music”. His focus is spatial music and making musicians stand in weird places with stopwatches. He lives in Deep Cove, BC with his wife Kelly, and son Julian. www.jordannobles.com