March 3, 2023

March 7-9, 2023

David Braid – Multi-Juno Award Winning Canadian Composer and Pianist

Dr. Lee Tsang – Baritone, Writer, Head of Classical Music Performance at the University of Liverpool

Schedule:

Tuesday, March 7

11:45 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Room A318
Open to all students

Dr. Lee Tsang, Interactive lecture: 'On qi in musical performance' looking at theoretical/educationally practical model which links to concepts of arousal and the Dalcrozian anacrusis

2:30 - 3:30 p.m.
Room A223
Open to all students

David Braid – Improvisation class (all genres)

If you want to perform, please email jkaplanek@wlu.ca
First come, first serve

4 – 6 p.m.

Open Rehearsal
Room A315
Open to all students, limited space, please email jkaplanek@wlu.ca if you are interested to attend.

Wednesday, March 8

11:30 a.m. – 12:50 p.m.
Room A431

Dr. Lee Tsang, Voice MC, Open to voice students

8:15- 9:30 p.m.
Room A221
Open to all students

David Braid: Composition Seminar, "An introduction to writing dramatic music for screen, and how composers can collaborate with film makers: a practical approach for extracting musical form and motifs from screenplays"

Thursday, March 9

Noon– 12:50 p.m.

TA, Music@Noon

Nine Dragons - Performance in collaboration with the Penderecki String Quartet

In this inspiring collaboration with multi-Juno winning Canadian composer David Braid, Lee Tsang expresses his dual heritage through legends, folk and contemporary practices, and redefines the role of poet as a vocal and physical performer.

Nine Dragons Fantasy is an intriguing hybrid work – a kind of dramatic electroacoustic concerto reimagined for Poet-Baritone, String Quartet, and Logic Pro. The work draws on Kowloon/Jiulong Mountain Songs and is an artistic contemplation of hybridity itself, with tuneful and mysterious transformations occurring across time and space.

Join our artists as they learn to ‘sing’ once more, as they discover what Black Fish can tell us, as they experience Elevation, as they respond to the Sounds of Butterfly Wings.

Experience the joy of the Bamboo Dragon in Dark and Light, be entranced by the tales of Orchid Moon and of a Beloved Ten Thousand Times Missed.

Listen to the Drum with its Mountain Song, heed the Guardian of the Dragon Skin, and perhaps you too can discover the Way of the Ninth Dragon.

Biographies:

David Braid

"Sophisticated authenticity" – New York Observer

"Refreshingly uncategorizable" – Paris Transatlantic

Hailed in the Canadian press as "one of his country’s true renaissance men when it comes to music" (The Ottawa Citizen), composer and jazz pianist, David Braid is a nine-time nominee, and three-time winner of Canada's highest music prize (Juno Award). His first classical composition was nominated for Classical Album of the year, and his first film score won two Screen Awards for Best Original Score, and Best Original Song. He is also a recipient of the Ontario Foundation for the Arts’ prestigious prize: ’Paul de Hueck and Norman Walford Career Achievement Award for Keyboard Artistry’.

David Braid is a Steinway Artist, Composer-in-Residence for Sinfonia UK Collective, and Adjunct Professor at the Danish National Academy of Music.

Concertizing throughout the UK, Scandinavia, Europe, Russia, Central Asia, Japan, Australia and Canada his original music is described as: "brilliant" (Montreal Gazette), "enchanting" (The Age, Australia), "une force poétique" (Le Soleil) and "hauntingly beautiful." (The Globe & Mail)

His arrangements and compositions were an integral part of the Chet Baker-inspired film, "Born to Be Blue" and his jazz score received praise for its "contemporary patina without sacrificing period authenticity" (The Times, UK).

"Braid’s tone, touch, chord voicings and imagination make him one of the most interesting new pianists I’ve encountered in a long time." – Doug Ramsey, recipient of Jazz Journalists Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award (USA)

Dr. Lee Tsang

Head of Classical Music Performance, is an academic with a difference. On the one hand he trained as a music analyst and has diverse research interests that embrace the timbral and the filmic; on the other, he is an impresario with an insatiable passion for creating, curating and performing new work. His organisation Sinfonia UK Collective, since its inception in 2004, championed the work of major living composers from across the world, and enabled him to pursue research concerns about creative agency in music performance contexts. These concerns often involved him creating new texts and contexts for new music, e.g. animation/film, multi-composer collected editions, theatricalised concerts/productions, performing translations, lyric writing, or exploring musical spaces where classical, jazz and the indigenous may meet. Much of his work over recent years has focused on collaborative crossover music, with particular reference to the projects and post-jazz ecology of Canadian composer-pianist David Braid. His work with Braid has featured on BBC, CBC, Apple Music, and at major festivals, including Ottawa International Chamberfest, Festival International Hautes-Laurentides and the Festival of the Sound; he has performed across Europe, Asia and North America and contributed as researcher/producer/editor/writer/vocal consultant to two albums that have received Juno nominations (K52 and Steinway labels). As well as an active conductor, baritone and poet working with Braid, he has collected and curated artefacts for the Sinfonia UK Collective Leginska Archive, which he founded and has featured on BBC Radio 3’s Music Matters, for UK City of Culture and the Women of the World Festival. Lee's current projects relate to innovative approaches to developing poetic narratives, Zeng Studies, and digital hybrid instrument design.