Title - Transpositions
Artist - Spy Dénommé-Welch & Catherine Magowan
For those unaware, Transpositions is the first recorded outing to emerge from Unsettled Scores, a unique collective endeavor that, since 2006, has been generating and mobilizing solo, chamber, orchestral and opera compositions, as well as productions that straddle music, theater and other art forms.
Co-founded by Spy Dénommé-Welch, an Algonquin-Anishinaabe composer, storyteller and researcher and Catherine Magowan, a Jewish-Hungarian wind musician, composer, and conductor, the duo’s co-creations (a welcome detour from the more prevalent model in the contemporary composition world) have delved into difficult histories, and contemporary issues from both a Canadian and global perspective.
The pair’s unique work has helped them forge partnerships with numerous important artistic institutions across Canada including the Nota Bene Baroque Players, Native Earth Performing Arts, Teatre Passe-Muraille, Tarragon Theater, and The Toronto Consort.
While Transpositions presents an entirely instrumental work bearing the same name, it also arises from a conceptual source, like the pair’s
other output. In this case, it’s the intersection between chronic illness and environmental health and in the words of Dénommé-Welch, who
led the creative charge on this particular project, the music traces the delicate and symbiotic rapport between the land, human life and all
other living beings.
Given the events of recent years, such subject matter has assumed great relevance, however as Dénommé-Welch reveals in the disc’s liner notes, his inspiration actually forecast the COVID-19 pandemic rather than arising from it. I could never have
anticipated the timeliness of this work by suddenly having to navigate a way to record and produce an album about a health crisis during what
became a sudden global pandemic, he remarks. As a result, the uncanny seems to heighten the immediacy and purpose of the piece itself.
1. Scan/Machine
2. Boiling Frog
3. Clear Cut/Lesions
4. Dead Zones: After the Fact
5. False Fugue: When All is Felled
6. Fault Lines: Waves of Panic
7. Aftershocks
8. Acclimation
This sonic exploration of the relationship between health and the environment dutifully opens on the studiously playful, yet stridently profound Scan/Machine and then we are brought forth the playfully impassioned Boiling Frog, the low slung, lonesome ode Clear Cut/Lesions and then we get my own personal favorite, the intricately melodious Dead Zones: After the Fact.
Conceived in a self-directed residency with Toronto’s Native Earth Performing Arts, along next is the sheer elegance of the preciseness found within False Fugue: When All is Felled, which is itself backed by the flourishingly fervent Fault Lines: Waves of Panic, the set rounding out on the yearningly cognizant Aftershocks, coming to a close on the heartfelt rhythmic nuances found driving the gently buoyant Acclimation.
Spy Dénommé-Welch, PhD., is a composer, sound designer, librettist/playwright, producer, and scholar. He wrote and co-composed the
Dora-nominated opera Giiwedin (2010), and premiered his second opera, Canoe, in September 2023.
Catherine Magowan is a composer, sound designer, conductor, and wind musician. She is first-generation Canadian of Jewish-Hungarian
ancestry. Catherine was nominated for a Dora Mavor Moore award for her first opera, Giiwedin (Native Earth Performing Arts/Unsettled
Scores, 2010) which she and Dénommé-Welch co-composed, their second opera together premiered in the fall of 2023.
Musicians:
Alyssa Delbaere-Sawchuk, Viola
Justin McLean, Bass Trombone & Tuba
Christine Cheongyeong Bae, Piano
Susan Durnin, Coordinator
Catherine Magowan, Music Director
Official Purchase Link
www.unsettledscores.com