Festival Artists
Meredith Bates
Meredith Bates is a distinguished violinist and composer, known for her unique contributions to the Canadian music scene as both a solo artist and collaborator. With a strong focus on artistic exploration, she has gained recognition through her versatile performances and innovative projects, including her work with acclaimed ensembles such as Pugs and Crows and Gentle Party.
Bates’s dedication to musical growth is evidenced by her studies with notable musicians, and her participation in various creative workshops and residencies. She founded Like the Mind, a collaborative group of female improvisers, and Sound Migrations, blending soundscapes with visual art. Her leadership roles in organizations like the Improvised Arts Society, Seagrass Music Society, and the Canadian New Music Network demonstrate her commitment to fostering artistic communities.
Her solo albums, particularly If Not Now (2020) and Tesseract (2023), received critical acclaim, with Tesseract being nominated for a JUNO Award for Best Instrumental Album of the Year and featured on Bandcamp’s Best Experimental Music List. Her latest album, The Observer Effect, is now available and will be launched on May 21 with a special performance.
John Cage
John Cage (1912-1992) was an American avant-garde composer whose inventive compositions and unorthodox ideas profoundly influenced mid-20th-century music.
Cage’s early compositions were written in the 12-tone method of his teacher Schoenberg, but by 1939 he had begun to experiment with increasingly unorthodox instruments such as the prepared piano. Cage also experimented with tape recorders, record players, and radios in his effort to step outside the bounds of conventional Western music and its concepts of meaningful sound.
Cage came to regard all kinds of sounds as potentially musical, and he encouraged audiences to take note of all sonic phenomena, rather than only those elements selected by a composer. To this end he cultivated the principle of indeterminism in his music.
Among Cage’s best-known works are 4′33″ (1952), a piece in which the performer or performers remain utterly silent onstage for that amount of time; Imaginary Landscape No. 4 (1951), for 12 randomly tuned radios, 24 performers, and conductor; and the Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48) for prepared piano.
Brian Desjarlais
Brian Desjarlais is a Canadian guitarist, based in Victoria, BC. He holds a Bachelor of Music in Performance from the University of Windsor, where he studied under acclaimed Michigan guitarist Steven Dearing. After several years teaching and performing throughout Southwestern Ontario, Brian relocated to the west coast of Canada to study with the internationally renowned guitarist Dr. Alexander Dunn at the University of Victoria, completing his Master of Music in Performance in 2014. He's remained on the west coast ever since. In addition to classical guitar solo, duo and ensemble performances, Brian can be found performing as the lead guitarist in the rock cover band Worried Minds, and on the cello in the cello octet Pancellica.
David Eagle
David Eagle composes chamber, orchestral and electroacoustic music, and explores computer applications in composition and sonic arts. Active as a composer and interpreter of interactive works, he has developed various approaches focusing on sonic transformation through gesture. He is a Professor in the School of Creative and Performing Arts at the University of Calgary and in 2013 he was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Performances in Canada and abroad include the Turning Point Ensemble, Aventa Ensemble, Vancouver New Music, Trio Fibonacci, New Works Calgary, Ensemble Resonance, New Music Concerts (Toronto), Musicacoustica in Beijing, Winnipeg New Music Festival, the Cantai Festival in Taipei, Tessera Festival in Tokyo, and the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe. Two of his more recent recordings are Passages on light blue records, available at electrocd.com and Secret of the Seven Stars, Music of Hope Lee and David Eagle, Centrediscs.
Marina Hasselberg
Boundless inquisitiveness sits at the very heart of award-winning cellist Marina Hasselberg’s rich artistic practice. Over the past decade, she’s traveled a distinctive route that has variously led her through early music, free improvisation, the fringes of pop songcraft, electronics, contemporary chamber music, and an array of interdisciplinary collaborations that resist classification.
Hasselberg’s deep and meticulous explorations have culminated in a solo practice that blends disparate elements from various musical realms. Her album Red (Redshift Records) sees her insightful interpretive vision colliding with her improvisatory prowess. Recorded by violinist and JUNO and Polaris-winning producer Jesse Zubot, the disc leads listeners through an eclectic, electronics-infused, and deeply personal collection that weaves compositions by everyone from Domenico Gabrielli to Linda Catlin Smith, together with spontaneous performances that feature Hasselberg amidst a cast of her frequent collaborators: Aram Bajakian, Kenton Loewen, Giorgio Magnanensi, and Zubot.
Peter Hatch
Composer and music curator Peter Hatch has composed works in a large number of genres, from orchestral and chamber music to instrumental theatre, electroacoustics and installations. Hatch's compositions are both heady and playful, profound and humorous. Peter has been very active as the artistic director of new music ensembles and festivals. He founded NUMUS Concerts and the Open Ears Festival of Music and Sound, served as Composer-in-Residence with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony and as Arts and Culture Consultant with the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Peter is Professor Emeritus at the Faculty of Music, Wilfrid Laurier University, where he was Professor from 1985 to 2017.
Sam Howard
Sam Howard is a bassist, vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, arranger, producer, and composer based on Salt Spring Island. He has spent more than twenty years touring the globe, making music with friends, and working to sow the seeds of joy and peace.
Sam has played and sung with many of the top names in Americana/Roots music today including Grammy-winning bluegrass superstar Molly Tuttle, acclaimed JUNO-winning vocalist and songwriter Ruth Moody, Grammy-winning Americana powerhouse Joy Williams (of the Civil Wars), Grammy-winning producer Joe Henry, banjo/slide-guitar master Tony Furtado, and in the groundbreaking ensemble of genre-bending cellist and songwriter Ben Sollee and Kentucky Native.
When not on stage or in the studio, Sam stays busy keeping up with his son, playing piano, composing new music, practicing scales, listening to the birds sing, doing yoga, playing and coaching soccer, praying for peace in the world, and roasting coffee.
Sean Kiley
Sean Kiley is a musician and neuroscientist who explores sound and trance states. He recently completed his PhD in music composition and psychology under the guidance of Dr. Anthony Tan and Dr. Stuart MacDonald. As a classical guitarist, he has studied with Dr. Mark Maxwell and Edward Marks. Sean’s work in both therapeutic sound and ambient music is further informed by the work of Rick Ellis as well as his own journey and findings.
Pauline Oliveros
Pauline Oliveros' life as a composer, performer and humanitarian was about opening her own and others' sensibilities to the universe and facets of sounds. Her career spanned fifty years of boundary dissolving music making. In the '50s she was part of a circle of iconoclastic composers, artists, poets gathered together in San Francisco. In the 1960's she influenced American music profoundly through her work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth and ritual. The recipient of four Honorary Doctorates, Oliveros was Distinguished Research Professor of Music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Darius Milhaud Artist-in-Residence at Mills College. She founded "Deep Listening®," describing it as a way of listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, of one's own thoughts as well as musical sounds.
Tina M Pearson
Tina Pearson is a composer, media artist and curator living on the unceded territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən peoples on Vancouver Island. Her projects reveal a fascination with sonic phenomena and modes of interaction, and often occur in hybrid, field, and community-based settings. Her work is increasingly focused on links between ecosystems, ancestral memory, and technologies. Pearson’s work has been commissioned for dance, video, installation, and music contexts in Europe and North America. Pearson studied and worked with Pauline Oliveros for many years, and is certified by Oliveros as a Deep Listening® Practitioner. In 2023, she was commissioned by the Banff Centre’s Walter Phillips Gallery to create an onsite audio and video piece based on Pauline Oliveros’ Sonic Meditations for the In the Present Moment: Buddhism, Contemporary Art and Social Practice exhibition. Pearson has been editor of the Canadian journal Musicworks, and an instructor at OCAD University. She performs with the Experimental Music Unit and with the global collective Avatar Orchestra Metaverse.
Sarah Belle Reid
Sarah Belle Reid is a performer-composer who plays trumpet, modular synthesizer, and an ever-growing collection of handcrafted electronic instruments. Her unique musical voice explores the intersections between contemporary classical music, experimental and interactive electronics, visual arts, noise music, and improvisation. Often praised for her ability to transport audience members through vivid sonic adventures, Reid's sonic palette has been described as ranging from "graceful" and "danceable" all the way to "silk-falling-through-space," and "pit-full-of-centipedes" (San Francisco Classical Voice).
Reid holds a DMA from California Institute of the Arts. Her debut album for trumpet and interactive electronics, Underneath and Sonder, was released on pfMENTUM in October, 2019. In March 2021, she released an electroacoustic EP titled MASS, featuring trumpet, voice, electronics, and amplified objects.
She is currently Assistant Professor of Music Technology at the University of Victoria (BC), where she specializes in electronic music composition, instrument design, and human–machine interaction.
Matt Robertson
Matt Robertson is a British-born, Canadian-based, 3× Grammy-nominated composer, producer, and musical director. He has collaborated with artists including FKA Twigs, Björk, Anohni, Arca, and The Cinematic Orchestra, working as a musical director, orchestrator, and arranger. Robertson has released eleven solo albums blending ambient sound design, organic techno, and delicate electronics, earning praise for their cinematic scope and originality.
Drawing on early influences like Jean-Michel Jarre and Jimmy Smith, he combines electronic production with classical and filmic sensibilities. His distinctive sound—shaped through vintage and self-built synths—has led to collaborations across music and film, including Grammy-nominated work with Anoushka Shankar and scores for The New Corporation and Navalny.
Barry Truax
Barry Truax is a Professor Emeritus in the School of Communication and (formerly) the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University where he taught courses in acoustic communication and electroacoustic composition, specializing in soundscape composition. He has worked with the World Soundscape Project, editing its Handbook for Acoustic Ecology. As a composer, Truax is best known for his work with the PODX computer music system which he has used for tape solo works and those which combine tape with live performers or computer graphics.
Following his retirement from SFU (Sept. 2015), he became the Edgard Varèse Guest Professor at the Technical University in Berlin (2015-16), and guest composer at the 2016 BEAST Festival in Birmingham.
Truax is a founding member of the International Confederation of Electroacoustic Music, Bourges, France, the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology, and the Canadian Electroacoustic Community (CEC). He is a Corresponding Editor for Organised Sound, and in 1985 he was the conference organizer of the International Computer Music Conference held in Vancouver.
Arie Verheul van de Ven
Arie Verheul van de Ven is a composer, improviser, and educator whose work explores improvisation, community music, and building dynamic interactive musical systems. His compositions have been performed internationally by ensembles including Orkest de Ereprijs, the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra and the Cygnus Trio. From 2020–2022, he was composer-in-residence with Jumblies Theatre & the Gather Round Singers, creating music for In This Moment, a large-scale interdisciplinary community arts project centred on making music collectively while apart. Arie is active as a composer for film and media, working on award-winning short films including No Crying at the Dinner Table (2019) and Nanitic (2022) by director Carol Nguyen. As a violist, he has performed with Continuum Contemporary Music, NUMUS Concerts, and the Opera Forward Festival.
Hildegard Westerkamp
Hildegard Westerkamp was born in Osnabrück, Germany in 1946, emigrated to Canada in 1968, and since then has lived on the ancestral lands of the Coast Salish peoples - the Squamish (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh), Tsleil-Waututh (Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh), and Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm) Nations. After completing her music studies at UBC in the early seventies she joined the World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser University (SFU). Her involvement with this project not only activated deep concerns about noise and the general state of the acoustic environment in her, but it also changed her ways of thinking about music, listening and soundmaking. In 1993 she was instrumental in helping found the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology, an international network of affiliated organizations and individuals who share a common concern for the state of the world’s soundscapes. Her compositions draw attention to the act of listening itself, to the inner, hidden spaces of the environments we inhabit and to details both familiar and foreign in the acoustic environment.