Concert

• Hans Martin : Résonances éternelles (2021) - 8’ (creation)

"My piece Résonances éternelles adopts the form of the figurative prelude of the Baroque era, where only the pitch dimension contributes to the evolution of the form, such as the famous prelude in C major from the first book of Johann Sebastian Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. It does, however, make use of a semi-improvised - rather than strictly measured - motif with a variable tempo, this time evoking the unmeasured prelude form characteristic of French music, where rhythms are left to the musician's free interpretation. The sound is prolonged indefinitely to produce a harmonic mass that gradually evolves, complexifying or simplifying the acoustic space. As this instrumental capability is mainly specific to instruments of the organ family, its use is intended to highlight the characteristics of this instrument."

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Hans Martin holds a master's degree in composition from the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal. During his training, he studied with Jimmie LeBlanc, Klaus Lang, Serge Provost and Michel Tétreault. Composing instrumental, electroacoustic and mixed works, he is interested in the experience of sound as an acoustic phenomenon. His research is influenced by musical forms stemming from the algorithmic tradition from the Middle Ages to the present day. Martin's works have been performed by l'Ensemble contemporain de Montréal (ecm+), l'Orchestre de la Francophonie, l'ensemble Hanatsu Miroir, l'Ensemble aka, the students of Ensemble Klangforum Wien (ppcm), as well as several other student ensembles such as the symphony orchestra, string orchestra and contemporary music ensemble of the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal, and the ensemble eroc at the Université de Montréal. As a sound designer, he has worked with director Simon Boudreault and students at the Conservatoire d'art dramatique de Montréal, then with director Charles Voyer and Théâtre indépendant. Alongside his work as a composer, Martin has also contributed as an author to the magazine Circuit, musiques contemporaines, and sits on the artistic and administrative boards of cultural organizations such as Codes d'accès and Vivier InterUniversitaire.

• Klaus Lang : marias mantel (2005) - 10’

Klaus Lang studied composition, music theory and organ at the Kunstuniversität Graz under Hermann Markus Pressl, Beat Furrer and Younghi Pagh-Paan. He has taught composition at the Impuls Academy in Graz, the Nordic Musik Days in Reykjavik, the Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble Academy and the Darmstadt Summer School. Since 2006, he has been a professor at Graz's Kunstuniversität. His catalogue includes numerous solo pieces, notably for organ, pieces for ensemble and orchestra, vocal works and several operas.

Klaus Lang has received commissions from a number of festivals, including: Wien Modern, ECLAT (Stuttgart), Lucerne Festival, Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik, Ultraschall Berlin, Musiktriennale Köln, Darmstardt Ferienkurse, Musikmonat Basel, Osterfestival Innsbruck, Biennale München, New Music Festival (Stockholm), Monday Evening Concerts (Los Angeles), Takefu Festival (Japan).

His works have been performed by the Klangforum Wien, the Arditti Quartet, the Ensemble intercontemporain, Musikfabrik, the ŒMN (Österreichisches Ensemble für neue Musik), Die Reihe, the Nieuw Ensemble Amsterdam, the SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart, the Studio Percussion Graz, the Recreation Orchester, the Tehran Symphony Orchestra, the hr-Sinfonieorchester and the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin.

Klaus Lang also has a career as an organist, performing a repertoire of early and contemporary music and improvised music.

• William Kuo : Phono Forms (2024) - 15’ (creation)

"Phono Forms engages with sonic phenomena as an abstraction of distance. The organ perfectly embodies the dualistic nature of this work, as it exists in various forms simultaneously as a sonic apparatus, an edifice, and a corpus in the broadest sense of the word (a body of knowledge; a bodily structure containing many other bodies and component parts forming a greater whole). Throughout this work, sound masses of varying densities are expressed both horizontally as continuous tones and vertically as discrete impulses. Collectively, these sound masses amplify different types of sonic detritus: the filtering of frequencies as sound decays through the idiosyncratic geometries of the church; and the distortion of the organ through extraneous sounds and alternative modes of sound production."

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William Kuo is a Canadian composer based in Vancouver, British Columbia. Notable collaborators in recent years have included Juliet Fraser and Ensemble Multilatérale, Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, Ensemble InterContemporain, Ensemble Paramirabo, and Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France. In 2017, his composition flieht wie ein Schatten was recognized with the Serge Garant Award from the SOCAN Foundation and received a Gaudeamus Prize nomination. Upcoming projects include a new piece for Ensemble Nikel, to be premiered at the Gaudeamus Muziekweek 2018 and a ten-month residency in the Cursus program at IRCAM.

William received his Bachelor's in Composition from McGill University in 2013 under the guidance of Brian Cherney, Chris Paul Harman and John Rea. In 2015, he earned his Master's in Composition from the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal, where he received valuable insight from Michel Gonneville, Serge Provost, and Louis Dufort. Other influential and equally indispensable mentors include Philippe Leroux, Mark Andre, Alex Mincek, Ana Sokolović, Jean Lesage, Beat Furrer, Martin Schüttler and Jorge Sánchez-Chiong.

• Sébastien Goulet : Fragments d’une consolation (2022) - 8’ (creation)

"Fragments d'une consolation is a sonic immersion into the heart of a panic attack. Inspired by the writings of Marie-Ève Comtois, this piece for organ and soprano explores the abyss of anxiety. Dissonant sonorities and aggressive rhythms evoke the sensation of suffocation and disorientation characteristic of a panic attack. Moments of calm, marked by gentle melodies and harmonies, offer a fleeting respite before plunging back into disorder. Through this music, the audience is invited on an introspective journey, where the boundaries between the real and the imaginary become blurred."

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Sébastien Goulet began studying music at the Conservatoire de Musique de Val-d'Or in 2015, at the age of 17, in Donald Ferland's saxophone class. In the winter session of the same school year, he also began cello training with Marie-Thérèse Dugré, then, a year later, with Jacob Auclair-Fortier.

By the end of his college training in performance, Sébastien was a saxophonist involved in a multitude of wind ensembles, had completed the conservatory's preparatory level on cello, and was a self-taught improvising pianist, occasionally participating in the various galas held in Val-d'Or.

At the age of 20, Sébastien began a bachelor's degree in performance, again in Donald Ferland's class, and continued his cello studies with Jacob Auclair-Fortier on second instrument. Demonstrating an aptitude for composition, his teachers encouraged him to audition for the Conservatoire de Musique de Montréal's instrumental composition program.

In fall 2019, Sébastien Goulet began studying instrumental composition in Nicolas Gilbert's class. There, he premiered several works with ensembles such as the Molinari Quartet and Ensemble Paramirabo, and studied with a host of musical masters including Christos Hatzis, Julian Anderson, Véronique Lacroix, Martin Bédard and Jimmie Leblanc.

Sébastien is currently pursuing his master's degree in instrumental composition at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal with professor Maxime McKinley, and is composer-in-residence with the Orchestre Symphonique du Conservatoire de Musique de Montréal. Interested in narrativity in musical discourse, his music generally features strong contrasts, opposing softness and aggression, all blending together in the search for balance and harmony.

• Alyssa Aska : der Phönix (2020) - 10’ (Canadian creation)

Alyssa is fascinated with the architecture of music, both spatially and temporally. She composes works which explore extremes in time and space, using rigid proportions to generate forms in acoustic works and exploring the unpredictable duration and lack of control in gamified works. This is closely tied to her compositional style, which is concerned with a delicate balance between elements of functional form and elements of pure aesthetic purpose. As much structure as possible, as many ornaments as necessary (and vice versa). She believes in a careful balance between craft and emotion in her music.

She studied composition in the United States with Robert Kyr, David Crumb, and Jeffrey Stolet, in Canada with Robert Pritchard, Keith Hamel, and David Eagle, and in Graz, Austria with Marko Ciciliani and Klaus Lang. Alyssa’s work and research are performed worldwide at various concerts and festivals such as Wien Modern, Ars Electronica Linz, Forum Wallis, ICMC, EMS, Impuls, Darmstadt Summer Courses, Musikprotokoll, Tonraum21, ComposIt, Mirkofest Helsinki, Microtonal Festival Prague, and many others. She was selected for participation at many academies and workshops such as WasteLAnd Academy (2019), CrossROADS Festival (2019), Kalv Festival Academy (2020), and reMusik.org (2021). She was also selected for performance at the Gamified Audiovisual Performance and Performance Practice (Gappp) Symposium 2019. Alyssa is a founding member of the Graz facere collective, which presents every year concerts in various formats, and is a current member of the Graz collective Die Andere Saite.

• Olivier St-Pierre : Jubal et Tubal (2024) - 6’ (creation)

"In Genesis, Jubal is “the father of all who play the zither and the flute”, while his half-brother, Tubal, is “the ancestor of all copper and iron smiths”. In the Middle Ages, the two figures were often associated with the figure of Pythagoras, who, according to a well-known legend, discovered the relationships of proportion underlying musical intervals while walking near a forge, where he heard hammers of different sizes producing sounds of different pitches. This association of music and the forge plays a key symbolic role in the theory of the “harmony of the spheres”, which lies at the heart of ancient and medieval musical thought, with Plato going so far as to assert, in the Timaeus, that the universe was created by a demiurge who divided the primordial whole according to the proportions that produce the intervals considered just and harmonious, namely the octave, fifth and fourth. In my piece, I drew inspiration from the Pythagorean conception to produce harmonies whose proportional relationships are expressed both in terms of pitch and duration, so as to create a deep connection and intimate correlation between the pure timbre of the flute and the rhythmic motifs made up of repeated notes, in the image of the relationship between the “twins” Jubal and Tubal, archaic ancestors and early patrons of music and alchemy."

• Eduardo Caballero : caleidoscopio de la oscuridad (2024) - 15’ (creation)

"Caleidoscopio de la oscuridad (“Kaleidoscope of obscurities”) was commissioned by composer and organist Olivier St-Pierre, to whom it is also dedicated. It unfolds a sound continuum with no silence, based on the idea that dissonance and consonance are only extremes (depending on the limits of the work or the context it proposes as such). The evolution of the sound material suggests a transition or gradation between dissonance - more or less dissonant material - and consonance - more or less consonant material. The title is closely linked to the work, proposing an exploration of darkness, as if sound were reflected through three mirrors, producing various forms and shades of darkness. Caleidoscopio de la oscuridad is a work that seeks to blur the perception of time, or to dislocate time, by focusing on slight changes in the harmonic development and registration of the organ. In a way, the work represents a detachment from the past, good or bad (consonant or dissonant), from what has already happened and belongs to the past, influences the present and the future, but no longer matters in the eternal present."

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Mexican composer and sound artist, His musical studies have been in Mexico, the United States and Spain, his main teachers have been Ramiro L. Guerra, Victor Rasgado, Ignacio Baca Lobera, John Mallia and Mauricio Sotelo. He has taken master classes with composers Beat Furrer, Yan Marez, José Luis Castillo, Carola Bauckhold, and Joao Pedro Oliveira. He has been a member since 2019 of the National System of Creators of FONCA, has received, among others, the following recognitions: UANL Award for Arts 2021 - Auditory Arts, Nuevo León 2021 System for Artistic Impulse and Creation CONARTE, Cluster Prize 2018 Associazione di Compositori Lucca Italia, Finalist in the ALEA III International Composition Competition 2015. Artist in residence at Millay Colony of the Arts (New York), Djerassi Resident Artists Program (California), LIPM Musical Research and Production Laboratory (Buenos Aires) and at the Mexican Center for Music and Sound Arts CMMAS.

He studied a Master in Sound Art at the University of Barcelona (2021), ​​a postgraduate degree in composition at the Vermont College of Fine Arts (2013-2015), a Bachelor of Guitar and Composition Workshop at the Escuela Superior de Música y Danza de Monterrey (1994-2003) and a two-time fellow at the Centro de Compositores de Nuevo León (2001,2005.)

• Klaus Lang : el sonido luminoso (2020) - 20’ (création canadienne)