“For a choral composer, a premiere sung by a Cambridge Choir is like a dream,” says Martin, who has just returned from three weeks at the University of Cambridge immersed in the daily life as a Visiting Bye-Fellow. The 24-voice strong Selwyn College Chapel choir is comprised of male and female choral scholars and students, who performed the world premiere under the direction of Sarah MacDonald, the choir’s director of music.

Right: Stephanie Martin conducting

Martin had the Selwyn College Chapel Choir members in mind when she composed the new settings, as they perform a traditional version of evensong several times a week. “They are students, but functioning at a professional level. They rehearse and perform at least four days every week,” she says.

Monastic communities throughout the world still sing these prayer services called “offices” several times a day, but it is the service of evensong that has survived in common practice at Cambridge, and is now a big draw for tourists. Choirs like the famous King's College, Cambridge have been making recordings for decades. She calls the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis canticles “beautiful and inspired poetry” with the Magnificat being quite dramatic in places, and the Nunc Dimittis gentle and comforting.

Already, Martin has been contacted by choirs in Edmonton, Ottawa and Toronto, who would like to perform her settings when they go on tour in England, and that, says Martin, “is pretty exciting.”They will be able to sing a Canadian composition. “It’s one thing to create a piece that is performed once, but quite another thing to compose a piece that has legs and will be sung for years.” She hopes this premiere in England will interest other choirs in her music.

Left: Selwyn College Chapel at the University of Cambridge

“The difficulty for modern composers with thousands of years of Western music behind them is to strike a balance between honouring tradition and saying things in a new way, while keeping the performers in mind,” she says. The desire always for composers is to express their own voice.

A recipient of the Lilian Forsythe Award for excellence in church music and the Leslie Bell Prize for choral conducting, Martin has had plenty of opportunities to express herself while on sabbatical this past year. She’s launched a new CD – , won the Association of Anglican Musicians competition for new choral music and has been accepted as an associate composer into the Canadian Music Centre, which keeps a library of some 600 composers of which Martin will now be one.

What has been really close to her heart, however, is the opportunity to make a difference in the lives of young people with cancer. She was recently asked about having her Alleluia CD available as an online resource for young people coping with cancer in Northern Ontario, and, of course, she said yes. “I do this pretty self-indulgent thing. I just write music and perform. Sometimes I step back and wonder how I’m helping anyone,” she says. “So I think that this is just such an amazing thing. This is kind of special because it will actually help someone.”

As the director of music at the , she is also involved in fundraising for Christchurch Cathedral in New Zealand, which lost its tower in the recent earthquake. A doctor from the Christchurch area, sang with the Gallery Choir at the Church of Saint Mary Magdalene during the recording of Martin’s Alleluia CD. The choir won in their category of the CBC amateur choir competition in 2008.

In addition, she is getting ready to launch another CD, this one with in Toronto, a 90-voice oratorio choir, which Martin has conducted since 1996. After putting out a call for submissions to their Great Canadian Hymn Contest, the Pax Christi Chorale picked one winner out of 75 submissions. The judges felt there were at least 10 more hymns deserving of wider dissemination and decided to have the choir perform the hymns for a CD that will be part of a book containing all 11 new hymns.

As if that weren’t enough, Martin will conduct the opera La Serva Padrona in Calgary in May, head to England for the Three Choirs Festival and be back in time to starting teaching once again in September.

To listen to a preview of Martin's Alleluia CD, visit the website.

By Sandra McLean, YFile writer

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Composer and choral conductor Professor Stephanie Martin (left), who serves as music director of Toronto’s historic Church of St. Mary Magdalene, is celebrating the publication of five new choral compositions. Ave Verum Corpus, a song for unaccompanied choir, was recently published by Vancouver-based Cypress Choral Music. Martin directed the Gallery Choir of the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in a performance of the work at the choir’s home church in Toronto and Calvin Presbyterian Church in Kitchener on April 30 and May 1, respectively. Ave Verum Corpus will be heard again later this month, having been selected for inclusion in the performance repertoire of , Canada’s Choral Conference taking place in Saskatoon May 20 to 23.

Martin’s other recent composition publications include Kontakion, an unaccompanied choral piece on a text from the Greek Orthodox liturgy, also released by Cypress; God so Loved the World for choir, oboe and flute, and O sacrum convivium, a Latin communion motet for unaccompanied choir, released by Hamilton’s UtReMi Edition; and Drop, Slow Tears, a choral work set to a text by the 17th-century poet Phineas Fletcher, released by Victoria’s Fairbank Music Publishing.

91��ɫ’s Grammy Award-winning “rock ’n’ roll professor”, ethnomusicologist Professor Rob Bowman (right), has added another release to his long list of popular music reissues. His latest production, , is a 5-DVD boxed set documenting some of the legendary rock artists and greatest hits of the 1960s. Bowman associate-produced the series for , home of the world’s largest library of music footage. Joining a chorus of critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic, the Toronto Star’s Greg Quill hailed the DVD series as “a well-researched and expertly curated package.”

The set includes four titles: Dusty Springfield - Once Upon A Time 1964-1969, Small Faces - All Or Nothing 1965-1968, Gerry & The Pacemakers - It’s Gonna Be All Right 1963-1965, and Herman’s Hermits - Listen People 1964-1969, plus a bonus disc with additional content from the same artists. Rare concert and archival interview footage of the performers in their prime is accompanied by recent interviews that Bowman researched and conducted with Peter Noone (of Herman’s Hermits), Gerry Marsden (Gerry & The Pacemakers), Kenney Jones (The Who and Small Faces) and Ian McLagan (Small Faces), among others.

Bowman attended the launch party for the United States release hosted by the British Consulate General in Manhattan on April 8. While in New 91��ɫ, he got a head start on his next DVD project, conducting a three-hour interview with Graham Nash of The Hollies and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. Future plans include a trip to England to do more interviews with members of The Hollies and The Pretty Things.

Bowman’s writing also graces the liner notes of two timely CD releases: Canadian blues artist Colin Linden’s recently re-issued debut LP , and an upcoming recording by soul singer Bettye LaVette.

On the jazz front, music Professor Sundar Viswanathan (right) released his latest CD with Sundary Quartet, titled at a standing-room only event at Chalkers Pub in Toronto earlier this season. A collection of jazz standards, the disc features Viswanathan on vocals and saxophone, with 91��ɫ instructor Adrean Farrugia and Dave Restivo on piano, George Koller on bass and Larnell Lewis on drums. Toronto Star jazz columnist Ashante Infantry described Viswanathan’s vocals on the CD as “a cross between Kurt Elling and Chet Baker” and complimented his performance of the material as “as commanding live as recorded.”

Master percussionist Professor Trichy Sankaran is launching his new book, The Art of Konnakkol, on May 27 with a free concert at Toronto’s . The concert starts at 8pm and will feature Sankaran in performance with members of the Indo-jazz fusion band Autorickshaw and other special guests.

The Art of Konnakkol is an authoritative text on the rich tradition of rhythmic spoken syllables of south Indian drumming. The spoken syllables, called konnakko or solkattu, are onomatopoeic to the mrdangam, the two-headed drum of south Indian classical music, on which Sankaran is a virtuoso performer. The spoken syllables can be performed as a call and response to the drum, or simultaneously with the drum beats.

Sankaran’s book, which is accompanied by a CD, outlines in detail the principal rhythmic concepts of this dynamic spoken art form. It can be used as a study guide and will be of benefit to a wide variety of artists, from percussionists and vocalists to composers and dancers, and anyone seeking a greater understanding of rhythm and musical time.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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