Composers Working in or from the Canadian Prairies Region Curator: David Ogborn

The possibility of establishing a connection between electronic sound and traditional instrumental and vocal performance has been a perennial concern in the international development of electronic sound art (a.k.a. electroacoustics or EA) — from the romantic classics that Clara Rockmore would play on her Theremin to the musica mista of the Milan studio in the 1950s and 1960s, and beyond. My experience has been that EA composers from Canada’s Prairies — the western provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta — tend to gravitate towards this possibility, answering it in a variety of different and interesting ways (why they might do so is a musicological question on which I must, at least for the moment, plead ignorance). In this playlist, part of a special eContact issue on the Prairies (9.2), I am hoping to draw attention to works that show diverse ways of imagining the relationship between electronic sound art and its unplugged elder sibling.