Marina Hasselberg

Marina is a cellist and the artistic director for the NOVO Ensemble.  Hailing from Portugal, Marina came to Canada in 2008 to pursue a Masters in Literature and Performance at the University of Western Ontario.  She has played in many ensembles, including Tafelmusik Baroque Summer Institute Ensemble, Victoria Baroque Players, Vancouver Pro Musica, Sound of Dragon Ensemble, Turning Point Ensemble, her own group NOVO Ensemble, and many more. She specializes in baroque music but also premieres and performs work by contemporary composers, including John Oliver, Dorthy Chang, and Rodney Sharman, to name few.

 

Playlist

Track 1:

“Berceuse” from The Sun and the Moon

Composed by Jim Hiscott (Canadian)

NOVO Ensemble

 

Track 2:

“Rambler Rose”

Composed by Michael Oesterle

Performed by Marina Hasselberg

 

Track 3:

“Andante” from Sonata in E Minor BWV 1034 for Flute and Continuo

Composed by J.S. Bach

Performed by NOVO Ensemble

 

Track 4:

“Pristine”

Performed by Marina and John Oliver at the Gold Saucer

 

Track 5:

“Brine“

Performed by Alanna Ho & Marina Hasselberg

@ the Tidal~Signal festival of experimental music and sound

 

Track 6:

“Canciones y Danzas”

Composed by Vivian Fine

NOVO Ensemble with guest Adrian Verdejo

 

 

Three… Two… One…

The Casse-Tête festival approacheth!  Don’t actually casse your tête.  We spoke to Stanley Zappa about dropping a piano, and why you too need to make your own experimental music festival!  Stanley has some serious vision, and so do the many strange and wonderful musicians about to converge on Prince George for a veritable explosion of sound – splinters and all.

In the Thicket

Rebecca Bruton is a composer, violinist and singer-songwriter hailing originally from Calgary, Alberta.  She lived for several years in Toronto, during which time she sang with the Element choir and studied music at York University.  Rebecca’s art practice often involves reinterpreting folk songs, and her arrangements incorporate modernist sounds as well.

Hidden Cyborgism

Solomiya Moroz is sometimes a musician, sometimes a superhero.  Here practice spands many cities, from Lviv to Montreal to Amsterdam to Berlin to Huddersfield.  Listen here for our conversation about capes, wired flutes and Immaculate Machines.

On Work and Warbling

Cassandra Miller comes from Victoria and firmly believes that her best work was some of her earliest, a piece called Dry Bones in which the musicians (including her) bounced chopsticks off timpani.  Since then she has written for some big orchestras indeed, and maintains a long-term relationship with triads.  She has a blog as well, and writes often and informatively about her work.  Check i’out!

Catching up with the Backlog

Greetings oh re:composition listeners/blog-readers!  In the coming days we will be catching up with a laaarge backlog of unblogged blog posts.  Stay tuned… or, er, synchronized or whatever one does to attune one’s brain to blog posts.

Sounds for the chambers / Sounds from the labs

Montreal’s Bozzini Quartet roam the full range of string sounds.  Working with composers young and old, they continue – despite being one of the country’s best-established chamber groups – to pioneer and experiment.  Our May 5th episode explores the tensions that keep their work aloft.

No Iff in Impetus

We know James O’Callaghan‘s music very well.  It often blends electronics and acoustic instruments in one of the most literal ways possible – by diffusing electronic sounds through the bodies of pianos, guitars, violins…  James and his collaborators make birds fly out of books, and we’ve heard James project his own recorded voice through a foam cup held in his mouth.  Unified, witty and sometimes sonically spectacular, this music suggests not only a different way of speaking to the world, but also a different way of hearing it.

Nothing Moves More

Beavan Flanagan‘s string quartet is beautiful.  His sonifications of NASA space data are so unapproachable they are actually hazardous to listen to for protracted periods.  In person, he speaks very softly.  Sometimes, in making art, we feel pulled in a direction, and sometimes, we throw ourselves to a new place – few composers can create instrumental textures as refined as Beavan’s, but our guest on April 7th is not one to rehash old formulas.

This Giant, Robotic Voice

He loves videogames, he has an amazing amount of energy, and the piece he’s most proud of so far is called Metatron.  You can hear him talk about it all here!

Eliot Britton’s music is punchy, overtly dynamic and laden with references to technology from past decades.  Eliot recently returned to his native Winnipeg after living the better part of a decade in Montreal, where he completed his Ph.D in music composition last year.  He is very active as a concert and event organizer as well as a musician, and co-produces Winnipeg’s spectacular Cluster festival together with the festival’s co-founders, Heidi Ouellette and Luke Nickel.  He also runs a radio show of his own, called Groundswell Radio.  You can listen to it on CKUW 95.9 Mondays from 2-3PM central time.