Day: 6 September 2019

Artist Spotlight: Dr. Spy Dénommé-Welch

By Unsettled Scores / On / In Artist Spotlight, Blog post, Chamber, Indigenous artist, Music

Leading up to our show at Celebration of Nations on September 7 we will be featuring each of our artists! Today’s second Artist Spotlight is Unsettled Scores’ Artistic Director, Composer and Librettist Dr. Spy Dénommé-Welch.

Photo by Lady Luck Photography

Dr. Spy Dénommé-Welch (Anishnaabe) is a multi-disciplinary scholar, composer, producer, and librettist/playwright. He wrote and co-composed the Dora Mavor Moore-nominated opera Giiwedin. Other credits (as writer and co-composer) include: Contraries: a chamber requiem (2018, premiered at the Royal Conservatory of Music), Sojourn (2017; commissioned by Signal Theatre for the dance opera Bearing, premiered at Luminato Festival); HATE MAIL & Irreconcilable Trolls (2017; premiered at Native Earth’s Aki Studio); Bottlenecked (2017); Victorian Secrets (2014, presented at Native Earth’s Aki Studio); Spin Doctors (2014); Bike Rage (2013). 

Spy’s academic research focuses on Indigenous topics in education, arts, and decolonizing through music and performance. He is Principal Investigator of two SSHRC-funded projects. His project, Beyond the Rainbow: Investigating representations of gender and sexuality in Indianist music and production, received SSHRC-Insight Development Grant funding (2016-2019), and examines the implications of gender and sexuality representation in historical Indianist music and cultural production. His second project, Sonic Coordinates: Decolonizing through land-based music composition, received the inaugural New Frontiers in Research Fund Award (2019-2021), and explores land-based approaches to Indigenous music, visual culture, and decolonization.  

Spy is Artistic Director of Unsettled Scores, an Associate Composer with the Canadian Music Centre, a member of the Canadian League of Composers and the Playwrights Guild of Canada, and an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at Brock University.

Spy will be appearing in RADAR and Contraries: a chamber requiem as part of a presentation of Unsettled Scores at Celebration of Nations on September 7 starting at 7:30PM at FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre.

Tickets are $5 for high school students, $20 for adults, and can be booked by visiting the FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre website.

Artist Spotlight: Catherine Magowan

By Unsettled Scores / On / In Artist Spotlight, Blog post, Chamber, Music

Leading up to our show at Celebration of Nations on September 7 we will be featuring each of our artists! Today’s first Artist Spotlight is Unsettled Scores’ Managing Director, Composer and Conductor Catherine Magowan.

Composer and bassoonist Catherine Magowan is principal bassoonist of the Sudbury Symphony Orchestra, the Southern Ontario Lyric Opera orchestra (SOLO), and regularly freelances throughout Ontario.  Catherine is co-founder of the world’s first electric bassoon band, DFM, and has appeared at festivals including Pride Toronto, World Pride, Buskerfest, and the Northern Lights Festival Boreal.

She was nominated for a Dora Mavor Moore award for the opera Giiwedin (Native Earth Performing Arts/Unsettled Scores, 2010) which she co-composed with her collaborator, Dr. Spy Dénommé-Welch. Together they premiered Contraries: a chamber requiem at the Royal Conservatory of Music in 2018, and their work for voice and orchestra Sojourn premiered at the Luminato Festival as the finale of the dance opera Bearing (Signal Theatre, 2017). Their chamber work Bike Rage took first prize by audience vote in Baroque Idol (Aradia Ensemble, 2013), and their comedy duo Professor Quack & Grunt has lectured at cabarets, poetry festivals, book launches, and universities. Magowan and Dénommé-Welch are currently completing their second full-length opera.

Together she and Dénommé-Welch have presented at conferences on topics such as decolonization and intercultural collaboration in music, and run workshops for youth and young adults on music creation and the politics of music.

Catherine is a member of the Canadian League of Composers, and an Associate Composer with the Canadian Music Centre.

She’s a doggy mama to hound dogs Maeve and Samson, and in her spare time she likes fidgeting with databases and spreadsheets, and her vegetable garden.

Catherine will be appearing in RADAR and Contraries: a chamber requiem as part of a presentation of Unsettled Scores at Celebration of Nations on September 7 starting at 7:30PM at FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre.

Tickets are $5 for high school students, $20 for adults, and can be booked by visiting the FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre website.