ANDREW STANILAND, Composer
Composer Andrew Staniland has firmly established himself as one of Canada’s most important and innovative musical voices. Described by Alex Ross in the New Yorker magazine as “alternately beautiful and terrifying”, his music is regularly heard on CBC Radio 2 and has been performed and broadcast internationally in over 35 countries. Andrew is the recipient of the 2009 National Grand Prize in EVOLUTION, presented by CBC Radio 2/Espace Musique and The Banff Centre, top prizes in the SOCAN young composers competition, and the 2004 Karen Keiser Prize in Canadian Music. As a leading composer of his generation, he has been recognized by election to the Inaugural Cohort of the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists Royal Society of Canada in 2014.
Andrew has been Affiliate Composer to the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (2006-09) and the National Arts Centre Orchestra (2002–04), and has also been in residence at the Centre du Creation Musicale Iannis Xenakis (Paris, 2005). Recent commissioners include the Gryphon Trio, Les Percussions de Strasbourg, the Toronto Symphony, cellist Frances-Marie Uitti, and American Opera Projects. Andrew is the lead composer/educator with the Gryphon Trio’s Listen Up! education initiative, created and produced in collaboration with the Gryphon Trio and music educator Rob Kapilow. Andrew also performs himself, both as a guitarist and working with new media (computers and electronics). Andrew is currently on faculty at Memorial University in St John’s Newfoundland.
The SSO opens their 86th Season with Andrew’s Voyageur – from the composer:
‘Voyageur was commissioned for the TSO’s Northern Residency Tour in 2007 as part of a program to also feature Beethoven’s venerable 5th, penned in the early 1800s in Austria – a time and place that was producing what we now call the classical canon, but also a point in time at which Canada was so young we had yet to traverse it by water. In Europe, composers were defining and exploring the symphonic form; in North America, voyageurs were searching for a water route over the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean – an interesting comparison. I was inspired by the adventurous, boisterous spirit that these early voyageurs must have had. Composers at their best embody this very spirit: exploring the new and unfamiliar, charting new courses of statement and expression.’