A day of free music in Downtown Vancouver and online
This year’s Day of Music online programming will shine a spotlight on musical learning. Province-wide, the musically curious can come together on June 1, 2024 to learn from BC’s rich diversity of teaching artists.
1:00pm – 2:00pm
Inspiring Creativity in Composition – using digital tools to explore new possibilities
In this seminar, award-winning composer Marcus Goddard shares some of his ideas and processes for composing, using digital mediums such as Ableton Live. Marcus will play examples, work with sound samples in real time, and demonstrate how these processed samples can sound within the context of a large scale orchestral work. These examples will come from the raw sound samples that were used to create the score to Antarctica: Life Emerging, a multi-media work created in collaboration with world-renowned photographers Paul Nicklen and Cristina Mittermeier and SeaLegacy.
There will be time reserved in this session to ask Marcus interactive questions and to hear the resulting sounds.
2:00pm – 3:00pm
Persian Traditional Music – Introducing the music scales and the traditional repertoire
In this seminar, Amir Eslami the former senior music lecturer in Tehran Art University talks about Persian traditional music modes and repertoire. He will share a PowerPoint on the Zoom screen with the audience and he shares the information in a simple approach. There are some examples of music scores and audio samples that the audience can sing, perform, or listen to.
Join us if you are curious to know more about Persian traditional music.
3:00pm – 4:00pm
A World of Rhythm: Exploring Complex Time Cycles with Mohamed Assani
Calling all rhythm enthusiasts! Join us for an exhilarating journey into the intricate world of rhythm with renowned sitarist and composer, Mohamed Assani. In this workshop, Mohamed, twice nominated as ‘Instrumental Artist of the Year’ for the Western Canadian Music Awards, will guide participants through a dynamic exploration of rhythmic techniques drawn from Indian and Pakistani traditions, as well as his own genre-defying approach to music making. Whether you’re a percussionist, instrumentalist, or vocalist, this workshop will deepen your understanding and mastery of rhythm. This workshop will help you understand complex time signatures, expand your rhythmic vocabulary by mastering cross-rhythms, enable you to recite intricate tabla rhythms and integrate the new rhythmic ideas learned into melodic phrases and your own music making.
4:00pm – 5:00pm
A More-than-human collaboration
Ruby Singh’s kraKIN: is a more-than-human hip-hop collaboration bringing together the sonic stylings of Singh, the amphibious intellect of Dr. Michael Datura (aka professah exile), and a boom-bap menagerie of West Coast plants, amphibians, and mushrooms. In an age of ecological crisis, this multi-species assemblage aims to decompose human dominion and reintegrate our minds with the resonant ecology of a living world. In this workshop you’ll see how kraKIN creates their unique place based sound by cutting and crossfading samples of field recordings of biomes throughout western canada and you will learn about “biosonification”—a technology that translates the bioelectric signature of flora, fauna and fungi into musical information.
Singh named his latest project, kraKIN, based on the birth of the project in the Octopus Islands, the habitat of the giant pacific red octopus, in Desolation Sound. The tracks include everything from cedar tree basslines, wolf-howls and orca song synths, fungi-triggered 808s, to woodpecker hi-hats —resulting in an ecological portrait aiming to shapeshift perceptions and help us stay awake to the ways of the world.