Tobin Stokes composes for opera, orchestra, chamber ensembles, film, theatre, choirs, and more. His operas have been produced in the US and Canada, his music for children's and adult choirs is performed around the world.
Tobin has recorded with the Vancouver Symphony and with orchestras in Moscow and Bratislava. He composed music for th...
MARY KOUYOUMDJIAN is a GRAMMY®-nominated composer and documentarian with projects ranging from concert works to multimedia collaborations and film scores. As a first generation Armenian-American and having come from a family directly affected by the Lebanese Civil War and Armenian Genocide, she uses a sonic palette that draws on her heritage, in...
Composer/librettist Rachel J. Peters (she/her, b. 1977) writes all manner of works for the stage. Her operas include Lesson Plan (On Site Opera/Caramoor), Companionship (Virginia Arts Festival, Fort Worth Opera), Rootabaga Country (Sarasota Opera, Seattle Opera), Sketchbook for Ollie (Lyric Opera of Kansas City);The Wild Beast of the Bungalow (O...
Matt Marks (1980-2018) was a composer of darkly comic opera-theater works and instrumental/electronic music that experimented with narrative and pop idioms. A founding member of Alarm Will Sound, he also performed as a French hornist, vocalist, and keyboardist with such acclaimed new music ensembles as the International Contemporary Ensemble (IC...
Ricky Ian Gordon was born on May 15, 1956, in Oceanside, NY and raised on Long Island. After studying piano, composition, and acting at Carnegie Mellon University, he settled in New York City, where he quickly emerged as a leading writer of vocal music that spans art song, opera, and musical theater. Mr. Gordon’s songs have been performed and or...
Composer Paola Prestini has cultivated a uniquely expansive and humanistic musical voice, through pieces that transcend genre and discipline, and projects whose global impact reverberates beyond the walls of the concert hall. Far more than just notes on a page, Prestini's works give voice to those whom society has silenced, and offer a platform ...
A natural musical storyteller with “a knack for overturning musical conventions” (The New York Times), composer David T. Little is known for stage, concert, and screen works permeated with the power of the unexpected. Little probes the deep corners of human psychology, invoking political, historical, spiritual, and social themes as pathways for ...
Mikael is a composer who specializes in dramatic music for dance, ballet, opera, theater and for singers, and writes concert music for orchestras, chamber ensembles and solo instrumentalists. His works often make extensive use of live electronics in surround sound multichannel format running parallel with (acoustic) orchestras and ensembles. His...
Recently deemed “one of the more consistently inventive, surprising composers now working in New York” (NY Times), “Brooklyn’s post-millennial Mozart” (Time Out NY), and praised for her “apocalyptic imagination” (Alex Ross, The New Yorker), Missy Mazzoli has had her music performed by the Kronos Quartet, LA Opera, eighth blackbird, the BBC Symph...
Du Yun, born and raised in Shanghai, China, and currently based in New York City, works at the intersection of opera, orchestral, theatre, cabaret, musical, oral tradition, public performances, electronics, visual arts, and noise. Her body of work is championed by some of today’s finest performing groups and organizations around the world.
Ashley Au is a Winnipeg-based bassist, composer, sound artist, arranger, music educator, and queer creative. A multifaceted musician, Ashley specializes in the upright and electric basses—performing, touring and recording extensively. As a composer and sound artist, Ashley’s work can be found behind various theatre, opera and dance productions a...
Tenor Keith Klassen has emerged to become one of Canada’s busiest vocal artists. Since graduating with honours from the Opera Division at the University of Toronto in 2002, he has performed over one hundred roles from the standard and new operatic repertoire. He has been engaged across Canada, as well as in Scotland, Ireland, Germany, the United...
Chinese-Canadian composer Roydon Tse creates music that speaks across cultures, drawing from shared human experiences and reflecting on the challenges of climate change, the depths of grief, and the ever-evolving fabric of our world.
In the 2024/2025 season, Roydon’s works were heard internationally, with premieres by the Philadelphia Orchest...
Rebecca Gray is a soprano, composer and improviser passionate about performing and creating both classical and contemporary repertoire, always seeking to bring queerness and feminism to everything she does. Rebecca’s creativity, energy and perfect pitch are sought after in the creation of new work, and she has performed with Pacific Opera Victor...
John Estacio has served as Composer in Residence for the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, Pro Coro Canada, Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra, and Calgary Opera. These residencies yielded several orchestral and choral works including his opera Filumena. He has also written scores for productions of Othello and Twelfth Night at the Citadel Theatre.
Harry Somers, O.C., (1925-1999) was born in Toronto, Ontario, and showed an interest in music only in his early teens. He engaged in intensive piano studies, which were so productive that at the age of 16 he entered the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, where he studied piano with Reginald Godden and Weldon Kilburn and composition with Joh...
Ramona Luengen (b.1960) is a well-respected Canadian composer, choral conductor and educator. She has composed extensively in the choral genre and her works have been performed by both amateur and professional choirs in North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. Performances of her music have been broadcast on CBC, BBC, WDR (German...
Born in Montréal, Québec, Leslie Uyeda is a composer, pianist, and conductor.
Leslie studied piano with the late Dorothy Morton at McGill University and with William Aide at the University of Manitoba. She has played chamber music and accompanied singers since her student days and continues to perform her own music with her colleagues.
During ...
A key figure in contemporary music, composer Ana Sokolović was born in Belgrade, Serbia and is based in Montreal since 1992. With a background in the rhythmic universe of Balkan folklore, her music is coloured with playful images and inspired by differing artistic disciplines.
Her vast repertoire is regularly performed both in Canada and inte...
Cecilia Livingston specializes in music for voice. She is composer-in-residence at the Canadian Opera Company (2022-) and was composer-in-residence at Glyndebourne (2019-2022). Her music is driven by melody, mixing styles to create work that is lyrical and unsettling, and her work has been performed at Glyndebourne, Teatro Colón, Teatro Carlo Fe...
Saman Shahi is a JUNO-nominated composer, pianist, and conductor based in Toronto whose music has been described as “Inspired and spontaneous” (The Indie Source), “Lucid and dramatic” (Musicworks) and “Endlessly rewarding” (I Care If You Listen).
Saman's compositions have been championed across North America, Europe and Asia by groups such as...
James Healey Willan (1880-1968) was a composer, organist, choir director, and educator. A dominant figure in Canadian musical life for over half a century, Willan influenced several generations of composers, organists, choir directors, singers and audiences through his teaching and example. After immigrating to Canada in 1913 he taught at the To...
Glenn James is a songwriter, composer, and pianist. He holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of British Columbia. When he's not writing music, he builds things out of wood. He currently lives in Vancouver with his beautiful wife and two clown beagles and is working on his first solo album.
Brian Current’s music has been broadcast in over 35 countries and awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Barlow Prize (USA), a Premio Fedora (Italy), a Jules Léger Prize and a Selected Work (under 30) at the International Rostrum of Composers. In 2016, he won the inaugural Azrieli Commission for Jewish Music. Brian’s pieces have been programmed by a...
Born in Canada in 1977, William Rowson holds a Doctor of Music degree in composition from the University of Toronto and is a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music. His composition teachers include Ned Rorem, George Tsontakis, Peter Paul Koprowski and Gary Kulesha.
William Rowsons’s works have been performed by orchestras and ensembles acr...
David Ogborn is an artist programmer and artist researcher, committed to unfolding the potential for algorithms and computation to be sites of play, curiosity, and collaboration. This work takes the form of solo and ensemble performances of live coding and network music, the development of software to be used by artists, students, teachers, and ...
Anthony Young graduated from the University of Auckland with a Masters Degree in composition in 2004, and has had works performed by the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra, the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, the Auckland Chamber Orchestra, the Karlheinz Company, The Committee, Gate7, Tapestry New Opera Works (Toro...
Melissa Hui is a Chinese-born composer from Canada. She was born in Hong Kong and raised in Vancouver. She received her D.M.A. from Yale University and M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts. Her mentors include Jacob Druckman, Earl Kim, and Mel Powell.
Initially inspired by the haunting music of the African pygmies and Japanese gag...
Katya Pine composes original music for for film, television, stage and concert. Trained at the University of Toronto with postgraduate studies in London, England, Katya is a recipient of the prestigious Floyd Chalmers award.
Her projects range from Documentaries, Sci-fi, Indie film, and TV to art songs, opera, and more. Katya is passionate a...
Ian Cusson is a Canadian composer of art song, opera, and orchestral work. Of Métis (Georgian Bay Métis Community) and French Canadian descent, his work explores the Canadian Indigenous experience, including the history of the Métis people, the hybridity of mixed-racial identity, and the intersection of Western and Indigenous cultures.
Juliet Palmer’s music has come to life under a highway off-ramp, in a swimming pool, in the plastic flotsam of a remote beach, and in concert halls across North America, Europe, and Oceania. Originally from Aotearoa New Zealand, Juliet makes her home in Toronto where she is artistic director of Urbanvessel, a platform for interdisciplinary colla...
Composer and librettist Dean Burry is a storyteller. In addition to his extensive work in the opera and concert music fields, he has become one of the world’s leading composers of children’s opera, his works receiving performances across Canada, the United States, Europe, China and Brazil. At over 600 performances, his opera The Brothers Grimm i...
Jana Skarecky is a Canadian contemporary classical composer of vocal and instrumental music – for solo instruments, chamber groups, solo voice, choir, and orchestra.
Jana was born in Prague, in the Czech Republic, on November 11, 1957. She came to Canada with her family in 1968. In 1980 she received a Bachelor of Music degree in Honours Compo...
Based in San Francisco, composer Aaron Gervais works with ensembles and presenters across North America and Europe. He is particularly interested in humour, found materials, quotation/collage, and the sociological aspects of how people use music. As such, Aaron’s output ranges from the introspectively sombre to the irreverently slapstick, and cr...
Composer Abigail Richardson-Schulte was born in Oxford, England, and moved to Canada as a child. Ironically, she was diagnosed incurably deaf at 5. Upon moving to Calgary, however, her hearing was fully intact within months. Her music has been commissioned and performed by major orchestras, presenters, music festivals, and broadcasters, includin...
Fucked Up have had one of the most unpredictable career arcs of any band of this century, let alone any course run by a scrappy hardcore outfit from Toronto. What started as a ragtag group of people learning their instruments together and releasing searingly confrontational seven-inch singles, quickly expanded to something much bigger as soon as...
Fucked Up have had one of the most unpredictable career arcs of any band of this century, let alone any course run by a scrappy hardcore outfit from Toronto. What started as a ragtag group of people learning their instruments together and releasing searingly confrontational seven-inch singles, quickly expanded to something much bigger as soon as...
John Harris is a composer and Artistic Director of the Red Note Ensemble. His undergraduate degree is from the University of Oxford, where he was Organ Scholar at Trinity College, and he took his Master’s degree in composition at the RSAMD in Glasgow. He has extensive experience as a composer for film and theatre, including the Edinburgh Interna...
Benjamin Pesetsky is a composer and writer. His music has been performed by the Albany Symphony Orchestra, the American Symphony Orchestra, New England Conservatory’s Jordan Winds, Tapestry Opera in Toronto, WordSong and the Shakespeare Concerts in Boston, and Guerrilla Composers Guild and the Phonochrome Collective in San Francisco. Current pro...
Omar Daniel has composed extensively in solo, chamber, electronic and orchestral idioms, and was the 1997 recipient of the Jules Lèger Award for New Chamber Music. Other composition awards include the 2007 K.M. Hunter Arts Award, the SOCAN National Competition for Young Composers and the CBC National Radio Competition for Young Composers. He has...
Royce Vavrek is a Canada-born, Brooklyn-based librettist and lyricist who has been called “the indie Hofmannsthal” (The New Yorker), a “Metastasio of the downtown opera scene” (The Washington Post), “an exemplary creator of operatic prose” (The New York Times), and “one of the most celebrated and sought after librettists in the world” (CBC Radio...
Praised by The San Francisco Chronicle as “hauntingly lovely and deeply personal,” Lembit Beecher’s music combines “alluring” textures (The New York Times) and vividly imaginative colors with striking emotional immediacy. Noted for his collaborative spirit and “ingenious” interdisciplinary projects (The Wall Street Journal), Lembit has served th...
Twice winner of the Juno Award for Best Classical Composition, Chan Ka Nin’s works have been performed by ensembles and artists such as the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, National Arts Orchestra, CBC Vancouver Orchestra, Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra, Esprit Orchestra, Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra, Manitoba Chamber Orchestra, Orchestra London C...
Originally from Cracow, Poland, Norbert Palej has been recognized for his “first-rate and genuinely original work” (American Composers Orchestra), and a musical language that generates “visceral excitement” (The Boston Globe). “Palej eclipses Lutoslawski,” writes Montreal’s La Presse, while The Gazette calls his work “riveting” and Musical Toron...
Elisabeth Mehl Greene is a composer/writer working in the Washington DC area, with a doctorate from the University of Maryland. Her opera Hajar won a commission by the University of Maryland. Her scenes written at Tapestry Opera’s Composer-Librettist Laboratory receive performances around the US and Canada. DC area choir Six Degree Singers premi...
A two-time Canadian Screen Award winner and International Film Music Critics Association Award nominee with over 100 composition credits to his name, Darren Fung is a highly influential composer who is well-respected in the TV and Film scoring worlds. His work on Niobe Thompson’s The Great Human Odyssey and Equus: Story of the Horse has received...
Born 1950 in Los Angeles, 'Dick' started playing guitar in Fullerton, the home of Fender Guitars, at age 10. He began performing popular music at age twelve, moving through folk, surf, rock, R&B, blues and soul bands. He began writing songs for his group Northern Sound, recording two singles in ’64 and ’65. Richard picked up double bass in h...
Dr Afarin Mansouri is an award-winning composer and musicologist whose works have been performed in Canada, the United States, England, Iran, and South America. She is the recipient of many awards including a Canada 150 Medal for her artistic contribution, and a nomination for the Louise Applebaum Composition Award for Young Audience. Afarin has...
René Orth is a composer whose music critics have praised for its dramatic force and immediacy. Classical Voice North America describes her as a “master composer” with a “sophisticated sound world,” while The Washington Post has noted the “unexpected immediacy” of her musical voice.
Orth recently completed a three-year tenure as Composer-in-Re...
Linda Catlin Smith grew up in New York and lives in Toronto. She studied music in NY and at the University of Victoria (Canada). Her music has been performed and/or recorded by: BBC Scottish Orchestra, Exaudi, Tafelmusik, Other Minds Festival, California Ear Unit, Kitchener-Waterloo, Victoria and Vancouver Symphonies, Arraymusic, Tapestry New Op...
Stephen Andrew Taylor composes music that explores boundaries between art and science. His first orchestra commission, Unapproachable Light, inspired by images from the Hubble Space Telescope and the New Testament, was premiered by the American Composers Orchestra in 1996 in Carnegie Hall. Other works include the chamber quartet Quark Shadows, c...
Rodney Sharman teaches composition at the VSO School of Music. He has been Composer-in-Residence of Early Music Vancouver’s “New Music for Old Instruments," the Victoria Symphony, National Youth Orchestra of Canada, Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, and Composer-Host of the Calgary Philharmonic’s New Music Festival, "Hear and Now." In addition to co...
Originally from Northern Ireland, Gareth Williams is a Chancellor’s Fellow at Edinburgh College of Art. His compositions seek to find new participants, collaborators and audiences for new opera and music theatre, to shed light on stories and communities that have been overlooked, and to explore ideas of vulnerability in vocal writing.
Theater is that collective experience in which participants gather to understand both the richness and injustice of human experience; it is where together, we mourn and celebrate. Chen's work strives to inform and engage, and to bring forth the reinvention of our expectations for our society.
Always fascinated by the expressive possibilitie...
From scoring films, to researching rap, to running a concert series dedicated to new Canadian music, to hauling percussion around southern Ontario, to helping an entire class of students collectively compose a piece for symphony orchestra, composer August Murphy-King has worn a wide array of hats throughout his musical career.
Toronto composer James Rolfe has been commissioned and performed by ensembles, orchestras, choirs, theatres, and dance and opera companies in Canada, the USA, Europe, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. His work has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, the K. M. Hunter Music Award, the Louis Applebaum Composers Award, the Jules Léger Priz...
Christiaan’s love of music began at an early age and has been a part of his life since he can remember. His goal is to write expressive and uplifting music that excites both audience and performers.
Christiaan received his Bachelor of Music in Composition from the University of Calgary (2005) where he studied composition and clarinet. His com...
Composer and pianist Jack Perla is active in opera, jazz, chamber and orchestra music. His music is widely performed, and he has played in the U.S., Europe, India and Japan. Beginning over twenty five years ago in New York with his group Music Without Walls, and continuing after moving to San Francisco, Jack has steadily forged a reputation for ...
Kevin Morse is a composer based in Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada, where he is an Associate Professor in the Department of Music at Mount Allison University. His diverse portfolio includes solo, vocal, and chamber music, several short operas, and works for orchestra. In addition, he has created audio installations and works that incorporate el...
Described as a “new music visionary” (National Arts Centre), composer Andrew Staniland has established himself as one of Canada’s most important and innovative musical voices. His music is performed and broadcast internationally and has been described by Alex Ross in the New Yorker Magazine as “alternately beautiful and terrifying.” Important ac...
Iman Habibi, D.M.A. (University of Michigan), is an Iranian-Canadian composer and pianist, and a founding member of the piano duo ensemble Piano Pinnacle.
Hailed as “a giant in talent” (the Penticton Herald), “whose technical mastery is matched by his musical and cultural literacy” (Hudson-Housatonic Arts), Iman has been commissioned by The B...
Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, Ivan Barbotin began playing guitar at 10. Within a couple of years, he formed the rock band Sphinx which soon won the “Soviet Union’s Best Youth Band” competition. At 16, he joined Russia’s celebrated rock band Forum as lead guitarist, where he was half the age of the other musicians. With Forum he toured the coun...
The music of composer Benton Roark (he/him) has been described as “visionary” (The Vancouver Sun), “ardent and soaring” (The National Post), and “an experience of deep and darkling beauty” (The Austin Chronicle). In recent years much of his work has focused on new opera, with full productions including Tapestry Opera’s Tap:Ex Augmented Opera (“g...
Chris is a composer & arts educator. Chris writes chamber and orchestral works, film-score, and opera. He is also an arts educator, bringing the voices of young people into focus through collaborative creation of new operas and instrumental works.
His music has been described as “urgent, masterful” (NOW Magazine), and “powerfully virtuosi...