BWW Special Feature: Toronto Symphony Explores New and Unheard Creations

The Toronto Symphony Orchestra has made it a mission to connect with young musicians and audiences. The symphony supports an Affiliate Composer and the Toronto Symphony Youth Orchestra, and they offer a variety of programmes designed to support music education. These include a Young People's Concert series, a New Creations Festival which celebrates new work and a TSO Soundcheck program which allows young people the opportunity to attend the symphony at a reduced cost.

This year, the TSO expanded its efforts to connect with the contemporary musical community by holding two reading sessions for Canadian composers. They dedicated an entire rehearsal to each session and the orchestra played never-before heard music from emerging composers across the country.

Kevin Lau, the TSO's RBC Affiliate Composer and reading session organizer, was the perfect person to discuss the significance of such an opportunity. An active composer of contemporary music, Kevin has had music commissioned by multiple orchestras across the GTA and recorded for over a dozen films. He co-founded the Sneak Peek Orchestra, an ensemble composed of Toronto-based musicians making their way into the professional world.

Kevin explained that reading sessions are opportunities for both orchestras and composers. They allow conductors and artistic programming directors to get a sense of what's new - to hear something never heard before and meet new faces - while also allowing emerging composers the chance to work with musicians at a high level and receive individualized advice and feedback.

Most graduate music programs don't have strongly integrated composition and performance programs so it's not unusual for composition students to create new works without ever hearing their pieces rehearsed or performed. This poses a significant challenge for composers - getting a sense of what their pieces are about without ever hearing them played by a live orchestra. This is one of the biggest advantages of being chosen for the TSO reading sessions. After putting out a call for scores across Canada, Kevin Lau and the TSO's Composer Advisor Gary Kulesha reviewed the applications to select the pieces that would be played at the reading. They were looking for pieces showing musical promise but without previous commissions or professional recordings, narrowing the scope and finding the composers who could most benefit from having their pieces workshopped by a professional orchestra.

February 2013 marked the first time the Toronto Symphony hosted such a session and rehearsed works by four young composers: Elisha Denburg, Sofia Kraevska, Jordan Pal, and Roydon Tse. The second reading session on November 1 not only rehearsed pieces by three newly chosen composers, but began by showcasing Gary Kulesha's Third Symphony. At this reading, the orchestra read works by three new composers: The Ether of Feeling, by Eugene Astapov, Lullaby, by Sophie Dupuis, and High Strung, by Marco Burak.

This event allowed the composers to hear their pieces played by the TSO and received feedback and direction on musical interpretation while seeing how the musicians responded to their work. Perhaps most importantly, they received feedback from both the TSO`s Music Director Peter Oundjian and Composer Adviser, Gary Kulesha as well as from Principal Librarian, Gary Corrin, who shared his insights on making scores accessible and playable for musicians.

It may be difficult to see the immediate effects of such reading sessions, but the long-term benefits are many. Along with aiding these new composers' education and writing processes and providing the orchestra an opportunity to play new works, they help artistic programmers discover new talent and assist the orchestra in continuing to build its relationship with the contemporary musical community. Perhaps eventually we will all hear one of these emerging composers' works performed at a future TSO New Creations Festival!

For more information, please follow the Toronto Symphony on twitter at @TorontoSymphony or visit their website at http://www.tso.ca/