Individual files

Called “a brilliant musical scientist” (CBC), “breathtakingly inventive” (Sydney Times Herald, Australia), “utterly inspiring” (I Care If You Listen, NYC) and lauded for “creating a stir with listeners for her breathless imagination and ability to capture Gen-X and beyond generation” (Winnipeg Free Press), award winning composer and video artist Nicole Lizée creates new music inspired by eclectic mix of influences including the earliest MTV videos, turntablism, rave culture, Hitchcock, Kubrick, Alexander McQueen, thrash metal, early video game culture, 1960s psychedelia and 1960s modernism. She is fascinated by the glitches made by outmoded and well-worn technology and captures these glitches, notates them and integrates them into live performance.

Nicole’s compositions range from works for orchestra and solo turntablist featuring DJ techniques fully notated and integrated into a concert music setting, to other unorthodox instrument combinations that include the Atari 2600 video game console, omnichords, stylophones, Simon™, vintage board games, and karaoke tapes. In the broad scope of her evolving oeuvre she explores such themes as malfunction, reviving the obsolete, and the harnessing of imperfection and glitch to create a new kind of precision.

Awards include the 2024 JUNO Award for Classical Composition of the Year, the 2023 Music Critics Association of North America Award for Best New Opera, the 2022 Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Opera (her opera received six Dora Awards), the 2019 Prix Opus for Composer of the Year, the 2017 SOCAN Jan V. Matejcek Award, the 2013 Canada Council Jules Léger Prize for Chamber Music and the Canada Council Robert Fleming Prize for achievements in composition.