This is a love letter. To thank all of you who create new music in BC, those who perform and present it, and to all those large enough of spirit and generous enough of nature to support those creators and practitioners and presenters that do.
“When words leave off, music begins.” (Heinrich Heine)
The only reason CMC BC exists is to support you. All of you — 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 — all those who have helped bring this vibrant ecosystem back to life, post-COVID, with such dedication, passion, innovation, and vision.
“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)
Chor Leoni performing works by Robyn Jacob, Chris Sivak, and Laura Hawley as part of their C/4 Composition Competition that CMC BC sponsors each year.
This concept of reimagining ourselves as a resource centre has been central to our revisioning, post-pandemic. As one point of comparison to previous years, the concert season we used to produce ourselves consisted of 6 – 8 concerts for a total audience of approximately 300 people in Vancouver. I believe that series made an important contribution, being unique in conception, dedicating an entire concert to the life’s work of one composer, and helped elevate a generation of composers in a genre continually obsessed with the search for the latest and the new.
Composer, performers, poet, producers and BC Director at CMC BC’s CD launch for Jeffrey Ryan’s Afghanistan: Requiem for a Generation
By contrast, last year, under our new incarnation, we sponsored 27 performances in 13 cities across the Province of BC, engaging a total audience of 10,000 people, much better fulfilling our mandate to be a provincial organization, and expanding our engagement exponentially.
“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)
BC Director Sean Bickerton with composer Imant Raminsh in Kamloops for performance of his new Clarinet Quintet performed by the Sycamore String Quartet for Imant’s 80th Birthday
But we could not do this without the help of the many donors and funders kind enough to support us. Our work is entirely dependent on them, particularly at a time of decreasing funding and greatly increased expenses. It is with their help that we have now produced 200 score videos and 100 music videos and documentaries all available on our new YouTube channel.
And it is also thanks to countless individual donors, large and small, that our Digital Archive capturing the history of new music in BC now contains 30,000 artefacts and links to thousands of recordings, videos, photographs, programs, reviews, letters, essays, and more.
We are extremely grateful to the Deux Mille Foundation, which has provided multi-year funding for our Composition Workshops for emerging composers, co-presented last year with musica intima, curated by Leslie Uyeda, and this year with the Okanagan Symphony for members of the Okanagan Youth Symphony, curated by Jennifer Butler.
Young composer conferring with Conductor Zeena Zaiyouna during readings with Okanagan Symphony.
Last year, thanks to funds from the Vancouver Foundation, we were able to launch a new Indigenous Artist In Residence program, first suggested to us by Marion Newman, supporting a new composition by Lil’wat composer Russell Wallace, commissioned by the Victoria Symphony. And we commissioned a new mural for our lobby by Coast Salish muralist Carrielynn Victor.
And, as all arts organizations of this province know, the support of the Government of BC throughout the pandemic in particular, which provides operating funding through the BC Arts Council and through the Community Gaming Fund, has been indispensable. We are deeply grateful to them.
As we are to the City of Vancouver, which provides operating funding that helps cover more than half of the ever-increasing costs of our beautiful space on Davie Street, which now costs $57,000 / year to operate, double what it did seven years ago.
It is because of that exponential increase in costs over the past three years that we are particularly indebted to The Osbertus Fund, held at The Vancouver Foundation, which has donated $50,000 to us each year since the pandemic. The truth is that much of the vibrancy in our programs and services is made possible by their anonymous and deeply appreciated generosity. It is a gift that appeared unasked in 2020 during a dark time. I cried when I first saw the email confirming that gift. The extraordinary thoughtfulness and generosity of the individual making those decisions transformed our work and allowed us to support so many performers and ensembles.
Exploring connection between members of our BC Advisory Board during two days of internal reflection and reinvention
We also received transformative project funding directly from the Vancouver Foundation itself, the City of Vancouver, and the BC Arts Council, allowing us to explore in depth what it could mean to centre our work, our programs, and values in belonging, equity, diversity and Indigenization.
“Ars longa, vita brevis — Life is short but Art is long” (Hippocrates)
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.
The three scholarships we offer every year to composition students are each funded by an individual donor — the $2500 Murray and Dorothea Adaskin Prize for graduate students of composition is 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.
BC Director Sean Bickerton presenting this year’s scholarships worth $5000 to composers Hope Salmonson (L), Joanne Na, (C), and Mark Marinic (R) at UBC School of Music final composition concert
“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)
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 10% 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 this extraordinary group of creators 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.
BC Director Sean Bickerton presenting Vancouver Inter-Cultural Orchestra and Mark Armanini and Farshid Samandari with a Barbara Pentland Award at VICO’s Dec 20, 2023 concert in The Annex.
In closing, please allow me to welcome a new cohort of CMC Associate Composers affiliated with BC confirmed in 2023 and early in 2024: Mariah Mennie, Victoria Gibson, Edward Han Jiang, Eileen Padgett, Grant Harville, John Reid, Kathleen Feenstra, Paul Plimley, Ray Sikora, and Mohamed Assani.
Thank you, all!