Tectonics 2025 Artist Profile
Barbara Monk Feldman
Ms. Monk Feldman studied composition with Bengt Hambraeus at McGill University in Montréal from 1980–83, where she earned her MMus. She then studied with Morton Feldman, to whom she was later married, at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York from 1984–87 and there earned her PhD, on the Edgard Varèse Fellowship.
Her music has been performed at the Ferienkurse in Darmstadt, the festival Inventionen in Berlin, the festival Nieuwe Muziek in Middelburg, the festival Other Minds in San Francisco, and elsewhere.
She is also active in other positions. Her research into music and visual art has led to collaborations with numerous artists, including Stan Brakhage, whose hand-painted film Three 蜜芽传媒rics was created for use with her work Infinite Other. She founded the Time Shards Music Series at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 2001 and served as its artistic director. Her article Music and the Picture Plane appeared in the journals RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics (1997) and Contemporary Music Review (1998).
She taught at the Ferienkurse in Darmstadt in 1988, 1990 and 1994, has given guest lectures at the Universität der Künste Berlin and has lectured and taught at universities in Canada and the USA. The composer gratefully acknowledges the generous assistance of The Music, Art & Architecture Library of the University of British Columbia which was of great help for the revision of ‘The Northern Shore for Percussion, Piano and Chamber Orchestra.
The Canadian Music Centre and Frog Peak Music are the distributors of her music.
The Northern Shore for Percussion, Piano and Chamber Orchestra
I have always been interested in regarding musical timbre, or color, as one of the most significant elements of music. Color and silence are for me the tools for the ‘breathing’ of the music. My thinking about timbre is closely allied with musical time: time is a blank canvass waiting for the color to be applied. For color to work in a formal way, which is what I aspire to, I think of an ‘evaporation’ process, rather than a construction.
‘The Northern Shore’ was originally composed as one piece with two possible orchestrations: I composed a trio for piano, percussion and violin, and simultaneously, I composed an orchestra part that could substitute for the violin. My idea was to have the same music in the piano and percussion in both versions. This meant finding the right weight in the piano and percussion colors that could match the intensity of either the violin or an orchestra. In some sections I wanted a weightlessness in the timbre reminiscent of the floating weightlessness of a dream.
For many years I was not content with the orchestral version. Finally in 2018 I decided to revise the piece, with changes in the piano and percussion and newly composed sections for the orchestra. The result is the work which is being premiered in tonight’s performance.
The form of this new version is similar to a concerto, with a dialogue occurring between the orchestra, piano and percussion. One normally associates dissonance in terms of harmony. An important intention was to experiment with chromaticism in the musical timbre as well as in the harmony.
The title of the work is drawn from an ocean landscape in the eastern part of Quebec. -Barbara Monk Feldman, 2025
