Noteworthy

By Kyle MacMillan

One critic has described Amy Brandon’s music as “otherworldly and meditative...[a] clashing of bleakness with beauty.” The Atlantic Canada composer emphasizes a palpable aural essence over all else.

“I’m primarily a timbral composer,” she said. “Everything else branches out from that—the harmonic language, the melodic language, the instrumentation of things. It all has to do with creating the physical sensation of sound.”

Brandon is one of three 2024/25 participants in the Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s NextGen Composer program who will have newly commissioned works featured on the ensemble’s June 12, 14, and 15 set of concerts—a different one at each performance.

These World Premières will provide a quick jolt of the new alongside the familiar and beloved—Johannes Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1 (1858) with celebrated Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson and Symphony No. 4 (1884–1885).  

Top-level emerging composers have the talent, skill, and desire. They just need opportunities to put their creativity to work, get their voices heard, and build their reputations, and that is exactly what the TSO’s NextGen program provides.

Established in 2020, it supports the development of promising Canadian composers ready to expand their skills in orchestral composition. Three such creators are selected each year and given the opportunity to write five-minute pieces for the TSO.

In addition, Brandon and her two fellow composers have been mentored during this past musical season by Gustavo Gimeno, the TSO’s Music Director, as well as the orchestra’s Composer Advisor, Emilie LeBel, and RBC Affiliate Composer Liam Ritz.

Brandon teaches composition at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick—schools that are about two hours apart. She lives in a town of 16,000, about halfway in between, to minimize her driving as much as possible.

The Prince Edward Island native studied jazz guitar as an undergraduate and went on to perform for ten years as a freelancer in the field. But she became increasingly interested in classical music, drawn at first to the avant-garde side of the form, which enjoys a crossover with “free improv” in jazz.     

“I’m interested in sound as a composer,” said Brandon, who has been inspired by such noted timbral-focused composers as Unsuk Chin, Horațiu Rădulescu, and Kaija Saariaho. “That led to writing more for different kinds of acoustic instruments than were available to me if I had just focused on jazz.”

She sent a few early pieces for guitar and electronics to John Armstrong, a part-time professor of composition at the University of Ottawa, and, with his encouragement, pursued master’s studies there, earning a degree in 2016. 

Brandon is currently putting the finishing touches on an interdisciplinary doctorate at Dalhousie. She is delving into the fields of neuroscience and kinesiology to explore how the mind and body translate musical notation into movement, specifically when it comes to playing the guitar.

The up-and-coming composer has written works for such ensembles as the Chartreuse Trio and Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, and, in a more experimental vein, created an underwater sound installation in a swimming pool at the July 2022 Sound Symposium in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

Lysis, a recording of Brandon’s compositions released in August on the New Focus Recordings label, features a range of performers including the Alkali Collective, a Halifax-based new-music group, and Symphony Nova Scotia with cellist Jeffrey Zeigler as soloist.   

For her TSO Commission, she has created a work that evokes the expanses of outer space. She likes to make up words for the names of her compositions, and this one is titled qililliil, a word she envisions as a fictional deity of black holes. It came to her while she was sleeping.

Inspired in part by John Luther Adams’s 1994 work Drums of Winter, this new composition incorporates a range of percussion instruments, including two bass drums, vibraphone, singing bowls, tuned gongs, and resonant metals.

“When people go to listen to it,” Brandon said of the new work, “they’re going to hear quite a lot of sounds and textures, but it’s not entirely that. There is a cohesion through the piece that transitions from timbral into melodic toward the end. I tried to pack as much into five minutes as possible, let’s just say that.” 

The other two NextGen premières are:

• ROY by Andrew James Clark. The Toronto composer is founder of the concert series Classical Context and president of the Canadian Composers Orchestra. He describes this work as a celebration of radio technology, Roy Thomson Hall, and the TSO. “In this piece,” he writes in his accompanying notes, “unexpected jolts of energy carry the music into far-flung and unfamiliar places, and frequent ‘re-tunings’ of the radio lead to the emergence of new themes, sections, and attitudes.”
• Celestiaga, Daughter of the Cosmos by Sonny-Ray Day Rider. A Blackfoot composer and pianist from the Kainai Blood Tribe, he holds a seat on the Indigenous Advisory Circle to Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa. “Celestiaga is a piece,” he writes in his accompanying notes, “that was inspired by my awe and love for the stars and my ancestral Blackfoot stories about the cosmos and our origins as Niitsiitapii (the real people).”

In sentiments no doubt echoed by her fellow NextGen Composers, Brandon expressed gratitude for the chance to collaborate with an internationally respected symphony orchestra and to have her music heard in one of the biggest moments of her career so far. 

“It’s a huge honour to be selected,” she said, “and I’m just delighted to be working with Toronto Symphony Orchestra in any capacity, but especially to have a piece premièred by them.”

Be among the first to hear the bold new voices shaping Canada’s musical future. Experience three World Premières—one night at a time—at Gimeno Conducts the Best of Brahms. Secure your tickets today at TSO.CA.