imaginary composition of indeterminate duration, 2020.

Commission: Decolonial Imaginings series produced by of-the-now with the Vancouver Foundation and the Canadian Music Centre BC region, October 2020

Excerpt:

“Come with me to the edge of the tracks, through the rotting wood and rusting metal of the train turntable, where under the Manitoba maples and aspens grow deadly nightshade and goldenrod, mulberry, Queen Anne’s lace and wild rose. The fence has been knocked down in places and what’s left of the freight yard buried in trash. In the middle of the night, people pull up at the bottom of the Rona car park, dumping whatever it is they want to forget: a red glove, McDonald’s wrappers, a red Tim Horton’s coffee cup, yellow plastic strapping from shipping pallets, a Harvie’s Canadian coffee cup, dog poop in a knotted black plastic bag, white styrofoam cups, empty antifreeze jugs, window cleaner bottles, and plastic bags.

Walk a little further, past a shopping cart with a squirrel perched on top, to the old transfer table. Sit down and rest on one of the plywood bar stools, discards from someone’s kitchen island. There’s an old toilet in the long grass, a white sneaker without laces, blue surgical masks (used once), and plastic bottles — Pepsi, Gatorade, Naya, Polish Spring.

On the other side of the train tracks once stood the Heintzman piano factory. Now a non-descript brick, concrete and glass condo looms over rows of Victorian brick terraces and a Tibetan Buddhist temple. In 1890 they made 1,000 pianos each year, sending them by rail to Sudbury, Thunder Bay, Kenora, Winnipeg, Regina, Moose Jaw, Swift Current, Medicine Hat, Calgary, Banff, Kamloops, and Vancouver.

Twenty years later the factory was still busy, wood hanging to dry in the central courtyard and workers arriving every morning to build pianos. William Fell was one of those workers — a piano action finisher. He’d connect everything together like a see-saw so that the hammers hit the strings in just the right place, so the keys felt not too heavy and not too light, and the pedals muffled the strings or allowed them to ring on and on… William lived with his wife Inazetta in the same house I now live in. The last trace of William that I find is a military record: “Previously reported Wounded and Missing, now for official purposes presumed to have died in the vicinity of Avion on or since July 23rd 1917.”

piano action finish

finish piano action

This introduction is nearly finished.” 

for flute, clarinet, electric guitar, percussion, violin, cello, choir & video projection [20′] 2020.

Commission: Continuum Contemporary Music with funds from the Ontario Arts Council
Premiere: Christine and the Element Choir with the Continuum Ensemble, February 9, 2020 at the Music Gallery, 918 Bathurst, Toronto

Choreography of Trauma embraces the virtuosity and emotional extremes of the Trauma Bay. Listening and observing one Saturday evening in March 2018, I was mesmerized by the complex choreography of the trauma team working to bring patients back from almost certain death. Choreography of Trauma is my musical homage: an intermingling of the hundreds of small gestures, strings of numbers, unexpected sounds and words that save a life.

The verbatim text is excerpted from observation at Sunnybrook’s Trauma Bay, March 10, 2018 and a follow-up interview with Trauma Team Leader Dr. Bourke Tillmann.

Choreography of Trauma was commissioned by Continuum and funded by The Ontario Arts Council. Thanks to Drs. Avery Nathens and Bourke Tillmann for welcoming me into the controlled chaos of Sunnybrook’s Trauma Bay during my Ontario Arts Council residency. An extra shout-out to Bourke for sharing his musical passion as a drummer.

for violin, shamisen, voice, bass koto, percussion, piano & & video projection [28′] 2019.

Funding: The Canada Council for the Arts
Premiere: Thin Edge New Music Collective & Urbanvessel.  Ongaku Festival, September 22, 2019 at 918 Bathurst, Toronto

Ukiyo, floating world is a poetic contemplation of the detritus of our disposable economy, inspired by improvisations with marine plastic pollution in Japan.

“Ukiyo” or “The Floating World” was the name given to the pleasure quarters of 17th century Edo, Kyoto and Osaka. For over 250 years, beautiful volumes of woodblock prints celebrated this world. “Ukiyo can also mean “sad troublesome world.” Wading knee deep in the plastic trash of our contemporary “floating world”, sadness is hard to resist. But “Ukiyo” can also mean “going with the flow”, sparking the transformation from a perception of abandonment to one of beauty. Playing the ocean’s garbage, we were enthralled: from the sonic boom of plastic fishing floats, the screech of styrofoam buoys, and the rippling ridges of packing crates, to the rattle of gaudy plastic cigarette lighters and the resonance of hollow pipes.

Ukiyo, floating world creates a dialogue between live musicians and video footage of this new “floating world”. Many thanks to Thin Edge New Music Collective for joining us as we enter unknown waters. 

Credits:
Composer & Artistic Director, Urbanvessel: Juliet Palmer
Designer: Sonja Rainey
Video Editing & Projections: Sonja Rainey
Videography: Sonja Rainey & Juliet Palmer
Violin: Ilana Waniuk
Shamisen & Voice: Aki Takahashi
Bass Koto: Miyama McQueen-Tokita
Percussion: Germaine Liu
Piano: Cheryl Duvall
Cultural consultant: Yo Utano

for solo vocalist, choir, audio tracks, multiple video projections, 3 televisions, and turntable [45′] 2018.

Commission: Western Front with funds from the Canada Council for the Arts
Premiere: Laura Swankey with DB Boyko and the VOICE OVER mind Choir, February 8, 2018 at the Grand Luxe Hall, Western Front, Vancouver
Recording: Laura Swankey, Christine Duncan & The Element Choir, February 9, 2020, presented by Continuum and Urbanvessel, Toronto’s Music Gallery

Inside Us presents ten stories gathered from “the edges of life” — moments of awareness of heartbeat and breath. These sung stories are punctuated by two interludes, improvisations by the soloist using diagnostic ultrasound recordings on a custom cut disc, giving voice to the rhythms of the body’s veins and arteries. The video connects inner and outer worlds in a visual diary which ripples, flutters, bubbles, drops and flows.

Inside Us was commissioned and premiered in 2018 by DB Boyko with the VOICE OVER mind Choir at Vancouver’s Western Front with funding from The Canada Council for the Arts.

Production Credits
Video, music & sound: Juliet Palmer
Backing track vocals: Laura Swankey
Recording engineer: Jean Martin
Original stories: Diana Stewart-Imbert, Ayelet Rose Gottlieb, DB Boyko, Soressa Gardner, Donna Lytle and Carol Sawyer (ed. Palmer)
Ultrasound diagnostic recordings: Paul Sheeran, Peter Burns and Caroline Maloney (Sunnybrook Research Institute)
Artistic residency, Sunnybrook Research Institute: funded by The Ontario Arts Council

Performers (2020)
Laura Swankey, vocal soloist
Christine Duncan, conductor, with singers: Brooklyn Bohach, Emma Cava, Meghan Gilhespy, Sylvo Frank, Andrea Kuzmich, D. Alex Meeks, Olivia Shortt, Lieke van der Voort, Jackson Welchner

fl, cl, pf, perc, vn, vc + narrator [14′] 2010.

Commissioner: Continuum Contemporary Music
Funder: The Toronto Arts Council and The Ontario Arts Council
Premiere: Continuum Ensemble & RH Thomson, The Music Gallery, Toronto, May 21, 2010.
Text: Thomas King from the 1993 novel Green Grass, Running Water

Program note:

“In the beginning, there was nothing. Just the water.”
“But where did all the water come from?”

Throughout Thomas King’s novel the character of the trickster Coyote reappears, hopelessly bamboozled, trying to learn what really happened when the world began. Who knows the Real Story? Coyote would like to think he does, but then there’s Coyote’s Dream – “gets loose and runs around. Makes a lot of noise“. Coyote’s Dream has his own idea about things: “I’m in charge of the world”. 

for 2 percussionists [10’] 1998.

Premiere: Les Percussions de Strasbourg, Voix Nouvelles, Royaumont, France, September 26, 1998.
Text: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
Program note:

Blood Shower is based on the poetry and polemics of Filippo Tomasi Marinetti, author of the Futurist Manifesto. Nourished by “fire, hatred and speed”, the futurists exulted in a Utopia of technological violence. In conflict with this ideal of a “heroic hygiene”, Marinetti’s work is pervaded by a passionate sensuality: love becomes both sadistic and voluptuous. Blood Shower juxtaposes and blends sounds from daily life with ‘normal’ percussion sounds, while weaving an enigmatic relationship between the two musicians.

for voice, tape, food blender, electronics, grapefruit & slides [25’] 1993.

Commissioner: Richard Dale
Funder: Creative New Zealand
Premiere: Juliet Palmer, SoundCulture Japan, Tokyo, January 27, 1993.
Ars Electronica: honourable mention, 1994
Voices: C. Bryan Roulon, Matt Wuolle, Mark Zaki, Josefina Calzada-Garza, Christoph Erlenkamp, Jeffrey Fourmaux, Juliet Palmer, Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez, Janet Parker

Program note:

Beginning with a photograph I hold dear of my grandparents proudly displaying bunches of home-grown grapefruit, I set out to make this image resonate through my obsessive expression of this personal icon. I wanted to turn the grapefruit into sound.

Grapefruit.

I searched for texts using the words pulp, juice, juicy, grapefruit, squeeze, peel… Then I found and recorded people who seemed ‘right’ for the scenarios and characters these texts evoked. I recorded the fruit themselves: cut into pieces, sucked, juiced and drunk. I listened to the recordings and found that the most interesting moments were when the tape recorder caught people off-guard in their attempts to assume the new identities the written texts suggested. Not only did these ‘found’ words take me to a place apparently far from my family and the fruit, but my friends’ voices and personalities tapped into tones and emotions I had not expected. I wanted to stage an intense physical interaction with the fruit itself. A cadenza for blender and 75 grapefruit was born and is now the fulcrum of the entire performance piece. During the first 10 minutes I feverishly chop as many fruit as possible into segments which the audience devour before I deal the final electric blow to the remaining fruit. In the end, all that remains is to drink deeply and to sing.