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Enchanted by the vocal music of Serbian-born Canadian composer Ana Sokolović, Tamara Bernstein visited the composer at her home in Montreal. Sokolović’s music draws on several sources, including the theatrical world and the culture of the Balkans. The extended vocal techniques in Sokolović’s music are rooted not in the avant-garde music of the twentieth century, but in the oral traditions and poetic voice of Serbia. It seems that the more the composer returns to her cultural roots, the more she embraces the universality of the human soul.

Composer Ana Sokolović divided her instrumental work Géométrie sentimentale into large sections inspired by pure geometric shapes — Triangle, Cercle and Carré — describing these sections as three contrasting perspectives of the same musical materials. This article uses a narrative analytical approach as a lens through which to understand these distinct sections and the materials populating them. Inspired by Sokolović’s employment of musical objects in her compositions and by the extra-musical concepts inspiring many of her works, this analysis uses a collection of colourful robot toys as metaphors for the work’s materials. Three unique perspectives of these toys are described: in Triangle, the robots interact as characters on a dramatic stage; in Cercle, they peacefully coexist in slow motion; and in Carré new combinations of robot elements are abruptly juxtaposed against each other. The characteristics and interactions between these toys, as well as the various harmonic ‘masks’ that the composer has them wear, are helpful in understanding Sokolović’s harmonic structure, variation/transformation techniques, formal organization and rhythmic characteristics. The Serbian kolo is also shown as influential on the work, relating directly to the physicality and kinetics of the metaphorical robots.

Addressing the international emergence of electroclash at the turn of the millenium, this article investigates the distinct character of the genre and its related production practices, both in and out of the studio. Electroclash combines the extended pulsing sections of techno, house and other dance musics with the trashier energy of rock and new wave. The genre signals an attempt to reinvigorate dance music with a sense of sexuality, personality and irony. Electroclash also emphasizes, rather than hides, the European, trashy elements of electronic dance music. The coming together of rock and electro is examined vis-à-vis the ongoing changing sociality of music production/distribution and the changing role of the producer. Numerous women, whether as solo producers, or in the context of collaborative groups, significantly contributed to shaping the aesthetics and production practices of electroclash, an anomaly in the history of popular music and electronic music, where the role of the producer has typically been associated with men. These changes are discussed in relation to the way electroclash producers Peaches, Le Tigre, Chicks on Speed, and Miss Kittin and the Hacker often used a hybrid approach to production that involves the integration of new(er) technologies, such as laptops containing various audio production softwares with older, inexpensive keyboards, microphones, samplers and drum machines to achieve the ironic backbeat laden hybrid electro-rock sound.

Hildegard Westerkamp's (1990) composition École Polytechnique is an artistic response to one of Canada's most profoundly disturbing mass murders, the 1989 slaying of fourteen women in Montreal, Quebec. Using the theoretical model, derived from Haraway, of the cyborg body, and analyzing the import of the mixed media (voices, instruments and electroacoustic tape) incorporated in the music, the authors examine the impact this work has had on some of those who have heard it and performed it, based on the responses of choristers and listeners in several studies. The authors explored how those who engaged significantly with the music, (including those who had no personal association with the actual events of the 1989 massacre), were able to make relevant connections between their own experience and the composition itself, embrace these connections and their disturbing resonances, and thereby experience meaningful emotional growth.

La compositrice québécoise Ana Sokolović est d’origine serbe et plusieurs de ses oeuvres font référence à son pays d’origine, que ce soit par l’utilisation de mélodies et de rythmes traditionnels ou par des références culturelles. Pour approfondir son héritage serbe, l’auteure s’est entretenue avec la compositrice en mars 2012. L’article relate les paysages de son enfance et de son adolescence, l’environnement musical, culturel et politique de ses années d’apprentissage. Le portrait de sa vie familiale et de son quotidien nous permet de saisir des éléments constituants de sa personnalité d’artiste en devenir. Sa décision de s’établir à Montréal est explorée et elle raconte comment elle a pris conscience de son héritage slave.

Lors d’un entretien réalisé par la compositrice Isabelle Panneton, Ana Sokolović discute de ses inspirations, de ses méthodes et de son rapport avec les interprètes de sa musique.

The Judeo-Spanish song tradition has experienced many changes in recent years as it enters the 'world music' scene. Change, however, can be seen as a constant feature of the many aspects of Judeo-Spanish song and performance practice. Here, various genres are examined, together with some of the changes they have undergone in repertoire, style and context, and a selection of reactions to changes on the part of Sephardi Jews interviewed over several years. To a large extent, the repertoire has moved from the home to public representation, and is performed more by professional artists with no Sephardi background than by people from Sephardi communities, raising questions of appropriation and representation.

Sous forme d’entrevue, la compositrice se remémore les moments importants des cours d’analyse de Gilles Tremblay, plus particulièrement sa manière d’aborder le rapport de la poésie et de la musique, ainsi que son souci du traitement vocal, une approche qui se démarque par son caractère instinctif et sa vision organique des oeuvres. La compositrice parle également de sa propre approche de la poésie et présente quelques-uns de ses projets.

Defining the differentiated semantics of new and novelty, reversing the dictum non nova sed nove into non nove sed nova, the author of the chamber cantata „Give me Aladdin’s lamp” is based on the rich experience of leading myriad of mid-century modernism. The investigation of the paradigms of new relationships between vocal and instrumental in creation of Dora Cojocaru, is directed in present at the chamber cantata for mezzo-soprano, brass quintet and percussion on lyrics by Emil & Dan Botta, Georg Trakl, Rainer Maria Rilke and Ady Endre (1998). The relations text - melody by their phenomenological reduction to fruitful combinations between poetic word - musical sound in Dora Cojocaru’s cantatas represent a stylistic-rhetorical subsumption of autochthonous and foreign experiences in promoting new compositional and interpretive skills meant for adaptation of appropriate musical expression in portraying contemporary aesthetic message. They are designed on the wide range of contemporary aesthetic values from the grotesque in nascendi to the absurd in morendi. As long as the Cantata Galgenlieder in der Nacht with lyrics by Christian Morgenstern (1995) is conceived at the grotesquely pole on the axis of the field of contemporary aesthetics, the Cantata Give me Aladdin’s lamp is designed in the sphere of the tragic. In the composer’s vocal and instrumental creation (and not only in them) the experiences of today’s musical composition and interpretation are rethought creatively, suggesting in perspective the permanence of modern horizons.

Defining the differentiated semantics of new and novelty, reversing the dictum non nova sed nove into non nove sed nova, the author of the chamber cantata „Give me Aladdin’s lamp” is based on the rich experience of leading myriad of mid-century modernism. The investigation of the paradigms of new relationships between vocal and instrumental in creation of Dora Cojocaru, is directed in present at the chamber cantata for mezzo-soprano, brass quintet and percussion on lyrics by Emil & Dan Botta, Georg Trakl, Rainer Maria Rilke and Ady Endre (1998). The relations text - melody by their phenomenological reduction to fruitful combinations between poetic word - musical sound in Dora Cojocaru’s cantatas represent a stylistic-rhetorical subsumption of autochthonous and foreign experiences in promoting new compositional and interpretive skills meant for adaptation of appropriate musical expression in portraying contemporary aesthetic message. They are designed on the wide range of contemporary aesthetic values from the grotesque in nascendi to the absurd in morendi. As long as the Cantata Galgenlieder in der Nacht with lyrics by Christian Morgenstern (1995) is conceived at the grotesquely pole on the axis of the field of contemporary aesthetics, the Cantata Give me Aladdin’s lamp is designed in the sphere of the tragic. In the composer’s vocal and instrumental creation (and not only in them) the experiences of today’s musical composition and interpretation are rethought creatively, suggesting in perspective the permanence of modern horizons.