I’m tickled to be included in the Fall Arts Preview “Who to Watch” artist feature in this week’s Georgia Straight! Here’s what they have to say:
“Thorn is poised to emerge as a radical harpist, composer, and interdisciplinary arts innovator.”
Click to read the full story here
For me, falling leaves, pumpkin spice lattes, never ending rain, and crisp air not only marks the beginning of winter, but the (near) end of wedding season. Summer 2014 marked another successful, romantic season that I am so grateful to be a part of. It is such an honour to be an integral part of one of the most important days of so many people’s lives. Reflecting on this past season, I wanted to share with you a few of my favourite things:
1. Open back dresses. Oh. My. Goodness! I saw some of the most beautiful wedding dresses I have ever seen this year. This is my favourite wedding dress I have ever seen to date. And I have seen a lot!
2. Heartfelt speeches/personalized vows. This summer was the first time I ever cried during a ceremony of a client whom I had never met before. After reading their own (beautiful) vows to each other, the both husband and wife read vows to the bride’s daughters, about how they understood it was a hard transition for the girls and how excited they were to build a new family together. It’s these deeply intimate, honest and personal moments that make a wedding ceremony so special.
3. Venues with a view. The coolest wedding I’ve been a part of was at the Vancouver Aquarium – but there are a lot of great spots around town. Capilano Suspension Bridge, Cleveland Dam Field at Capilano Regional Park, Hycroft Manor, Brock House, and Brix Restaurant are a few of my favourites.
4. Quirky, personalized wedding invites (this one came from my cousin – it’s so exciting for me to be invited to a wedding as a guest!)
5. And on that note…personalized music! Nothing makes a moment more special than having the perfect music to set the mood. It makes such a difference when couples request songs that are special to them – whether it’s the song he used to propose, the song they first kissed to, or the favourite song of a loved one who can’t be there to celebrate. I think the quirkiest request I had this year was the Indiana Jones Theme Song for the recessional. Some top requests this year were:
One Thousand Years (Christina Perri)
All of Me (John Legend)
Marry You (Bruno Mars)
Fly Me to the Moon (Frank Sinatra)
At Last (Etta James)
6. Getting to stay for the party. Don’t get me wrong – I love playing for wedding ceremonies – but as a musician it’s so much fun to get to stay and play for the cocktail hour/reception! My amplifier to gives me that needed boost to be able to be heard over chatter, and it’s great to get to stay and play more upbeat contemporary music people are often surprised to hear coming from the harp. Sometimes I even get to bring my friends along to make music with me! Check out my group Ladybird to see what I mean.
“Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights, the accumulations of a lifetime gather there.”
-Jeanette Winterson
As you may have heard, I spent part of the winter at the Banff Centre working on composing for a new project – and now that summer is upon us, little bits of and pieces of it are surfacing! Written on the Body is a collaboration between Gentle Party (harp, violin, and cello) with tap dancer Dayna Szyndrowski and vocalist Britt MacLeod. Inspired by text from Jeanette Winterson and Gao Xingjian, it is an interdisciplinary piece with visuals, dance, and music that explores our complex relationship to our bodies.
We performed a very small excerpt of it at the Bc Buds Festival at the Firehall a few weeks ago, and are very excited to perform a 15 minute excerpt of it at the next Dances for a Small Stage at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts in a few weeks! The full production will be mounted later this fall.
June 20th & 21st, 8pm
Shadbolt Centre for the Arts
Dances for a Small Stage
Buy Tickets
You can read more about the project here: www.writtenonthebody.ca
I just wanted to wish you all the most lovely Valentine’s day from one of the most lovely places in the world – Banff, Alberta! I’ve been incredibly privileged to spend the past 3 weeks here at the Banff Centre for a music residency, composing for a very exciting secret project. It truly is creative paradise here! I’ve fallen deeply and madly in love with the mountains.
(Thanks to my friend Jeremiah Marsh for the beautiful photo. I do not have a good camera. Or photography skills.)
Stayed tuned for updates what I’ve been working on here! In the mean time, here is a little Valentine’s day treat from Ladybird.
Here is a goofy little christmas treat from Ladybird, my duo with singer Britt MacLeod.
Keep us in mind if you are already planning your super fun christmas party for next year ;-)
Heather and I had a great time on Bowen Island performing at a beautiful concert hosted by the Bowen Island Arts Council and the Beaty family.
We’re looking forward to coming back again on January 12th, 2014!
The third instalment of Sound(e)scape, the multidisciplinary concert series I produce, was at the China Cloud on August 16th, featuring spoken word and movement collaborations.
In addition to producing this show – I also happened to be performing in all 3 acts (is this becoming a habit of mine?).
I’m happy to report – even with all the pressure – at the end of the night I had a huge smile on my face.
The first act was a piece conceptualized by me and choreographed by Myola Paulter called Distortion/50/10/05. It was a piece exploring the relationship between self and ego. In particular, we were exploring how distorted self image can get when the self and ego are struggling against eachother. The title represents 3 harrowing statistics – 50% of Americans have had or know someone who has had an eating disorder, 10% of people with Anorexia die from the illness within 10 years, and only 5% of American women have the body type portrayed in advertising/media.
Dancers Marilu Retana and Jennifer Aoki did a beautiful job, and as always I had a blast playing with Shanto Acharia.
The second act was the one I was super nervous about! Britt MacLeod and I co-wrote a triptych piece called Begin/End Me with spoken word, singing, looped harp, effects, and movement. There’s one part I beatbox into my soundboard and loop it to create a rhythm (read: butterflies in my stomach!) You can check out a clip of that here:
And the show was finished by a new project called Hildegard’s Ghost formed by Roisin Adams after she and the band won the Contemporary Composition Competition at VCC earlier this spring Roisin wove her compositions with spoken word by Meaghan McAneely, joined by me on the harp and Ben Brown on the drums. It was so much fun to play someone else’s music (being a front woman can be exhausting!).
The show got a nice review on VanDocument’s website. Check it out here!
Since February, drummer Ben Brown (Pugs and Crows) has been hosting a weekly dance & music workshop called Music and Movement. I’ve been priviledged to get to participate in a few of these, making improvised music and dance with some very talented colleagues and collaborating with some equally talented dancers. These workshops are also an amazing opportunity to discuss the collaborative process, using improv as composition, and finding common language between dancers and musicians. On June 17th, Ben hosted the first performance from the workshops at Barbara Adler’s Extravagant Signals festival at Gallery 1965. The night was composed of short improvised pieces between different pairings of musicians and dancers of all kinds – MCs, jazz musicians, classical musicians, tap dancers, break dancers, modern dancers – it was very exciting! Really, one of the most engaging, quality nights of entertainment I’ve had the privilege of seeing (and being part of!) in a long time. I got to perform in an exhilarating piece with Shanto Acharia (cello), Ben Brown (drums) and tap dancer Dayna Szyndrowski. It was really magical! Having the percussive aspects of both the drums and the tap made for a really driving, exciting ride. We got called up at the end of the night to do a reprise as an audience pick, and this time I was joined by not one but two (!) tap dancers as well as bassists Colin Cowan.
Here’s a little taster of how it all went down:
By far, my favourite piece to watch was a hip-hop trio (drums, bass, and MC) with an absolutely phenomenal break dancer. I’ve wanted to learn how to break dance my whole life….and I think this might have been the inspiration I needed to get over my fears. World watch out…break-dancing harpist extraordinare coming your way soon!
In February, I started producing an concert series called Sound(e)scape, featuring multidisciplinary collaborations between musicians and artists of other forms. The first concert was a success, featuring Harped Harlots, a project with live music burlesque. The band was made up of Juno-award winning Ben Brown (drums), Britt MacLeod (voice), Ben Whipple (bass) and myself (harp). We were joined by the most lovely dancers Dahlia Embers and Nite Mare to create a haunting, sexy show. It was so much fun! It was well received, so we did a reprise a few weeks later at the Kalama Collective’s Celebration of Life: Vaudevillian Vox event.
The next Sound(e)scape event was held in May at One Thousand Rivers Gallery on May 31st, 2013. The whole night was curated to include music by, or inspired by, my very most favourite composer of all time – Claude Debussy. My vision was to create a multi-sensory experience to really take the audience on a journey with the music. I know that a lot of people (and young people in particular) sometimes have a hard time connecting with instrumental/classical music, because it is a language we are less familiar with in this day and age. I don’t think our ability to understand this language has been lost – but I do think that in order for classical music to continue to fully engage audiences, it must evolve. Our world is so visually stimulated, and I believe that the musical experience could really benefit from becoming a visual and kinetic experience as well. That’s the whole idea behind Sound(e)scape! So for this show, I wanted to have a huge visual component using projections to create very integrated atmosphere.
This show was A LOT of work to organize – it was in an unconventional space with many performers, and had a huge technical aspect that my very non-tech-savvy self was quite overwhelmed by. Fortunately, I had the help from the very talented VJs from Ineo Studios to run the show! They set up the visuals to project onto all four walls and used the music to hand pick the art that was projected for all three acts of the show.
The night began with Debussy’s one and only string quartet performed by the very talented Four Strings Attached (Meredith Bates, Shin-jung Nam, Sarah Kwok and Zuzana Uskovitsova). I wish I could say I got to enjoy it as much as I would have liked to but I was still dancing around a little bit like a chicken with it’s head cut off trying to run the show! From what I heard from these outstanding musicians, it was absolutely beautiful. Next up was my project Gentle Party (I’m joined by Meredith Bates on violin and Shanto Acharia on cello). We did an experimental set of improv music using electronic effects and motivs and themes from some of Debussy music, with 3 improv dancers taking the stage (Jennifer Aoki, Jenn Dunford, and Myola Paulter). It was quite a ride!
And lastly, the Luminara Duo (myself and Heather Beaty) performed a very unusual, interesting piece called Bilitis: Six Epigraphes Antiques. I came across this piece kind of by chance as I was ordering Heather and I a bunch of flute/harp music, and as I started to take a look at it I realized it was incredibly different than most of Debussy’s popular music. It is angular, disjunct, and atonal at times, yet still recalls Debussy’s classic use of texture and modes. As soon as I heard the piece, I knew I wanted to perform it with dancers – and when I approached dancer Diane Cronmiller about it, we discovered a very interesting history of the piece that ended up being a basis of the choreography. Debussy wrote the piece as a setting of 6 erotic poems by Pierre Louys from Les Chansons de Bilitis. After further research, we learned that Louys claimed these poems were found in an ancient tomb in Cypress and were written by a woman named Bilitis – although it was later discovered that the poems were written by Louys himself. Diane Cronmiller was joined by Monica Gutierrez in a dance that explored the sensual, female energy of these poems.
It was quite a marathon to produce AND perform in this show – but it was totally worth it! It was exhilarating and exciting to create such a multi-sensory soundscape. I was absolutely thrilled to be in the hands of such a talented tech team from Ineo Studios, and can’t wait for the next Sound(e)scape!
