Maple Sugar Moon at the ImagineNative Film + Media Festival

By Unsettled Scores / On / In Film, Music, Uncategorized

We are pleased to share that our short video collaboration with Jay Havens will be screening as part of the ImagineNative Film Festival!

Maple Sugar Moon is a future imagining of a Haudenosaunee village witnessing the season of the maple sugar moon. This lyrical, animated short takes us through a longhouse, over fields of three sisters, and the maple syrup tapping grove.

The festival is online this year, so you can enjoy it all from the comfort of your home!

Maple Sugar Moon screens from October 22 to October 24. For more information please visit: https://festival.imaginenative.org/external/events/maple-sugar-moon/

Maple Sugar Moon
a short film with:
Animation by Jay Havens
Music written and performed by Unsettled Scores (Spy Dénommé-Welch & Catherine Magowan)
Sound FX by Verne Good

Indigenous Book Club – Performing Turtle Island

By Unsettled Scores / On / In Blog post, News

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.

Artist Spotlight: Jean Becker

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 our Project Knowledge Carrier/Project Grandmother Jean Becker.


Jean Becker is Inuk and a member of the Nunatsiavut Territory of Labrador. Jean has lived in Ontario for forty years and has been involved in grassroots urban Indigenous community building throughout that time in Wellington and Waterloo regions. As the Senior Advisor Indigenous Initiatives at Wilfrid Laurier University, Jean is responsible for overseeing the strategic direction of the university related to Indigenous activities. She continues to be involved in Indigenous ceremonies and advocacy work for Indigenous people outside of the academy and is actively engaged with local Indigenous communities.


Jean has been invaluable to the artists and creative team of RADAR and Contraries: a chamber requiem, and will be 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: Benjamin Stein

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 guitarist and Assistant Music Director Benjamin Stein.


Benjamin Stein is a singer, lutenist, pianist, guitarist composer, music director and writer. He has played or sung for ensembles as such Tafelmusik Baroque Chamber Choir, Opera Atelier, Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, Elora Festival Singers, Toronto Masque Theatre and Soundstreams Canada. He has an MA in Musicology/Theory from the University of Toronto, a Bachelor of Music in voice and classical guitar from McGill University, and is currently pursuing a PhD at York University, focusing on the re-emerging art of Western classical music improvisation. He is the proud founder of Musicians on the Edge, an initiative devoted to creating opportunities for classical musicians to reintegrate improvisation practice into music education and concert performance.  He works an associate music director at Metropolitan United Church of Toronto, and has written articles on music and culture for the Toronto Star and Wholenote Magazine.   More information on his activities can be found at benjaminstein.ca.


Benjamin 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.