Concerts

New music for accordion by David Jaeger

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Saturday evening at 8 Eastern, concert accordionist Joseph Petric will be presented performing on Vimeo Live. One of the pieces he’s playing is the World Premiere of a work David Jaeger was involved in co-composing, Spirit Cloud for accordion and electronic sounds. Here’s the link: https://livestream.com/accounts/15801205/events/9559455

This piece began its life as a ‘cello solo, and many of you have heard Constable’s Clouds performed by one of more of several ‘cellists who play the work. Spirit Cloud is an outgrowth of that earlier ‘cello composition.

CEE Residency at Carnegie Mellon University School of Music

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It was an intense, eye-opening, tremendously satisfying four days, beginning with rehearsals with the Exploded Ensemble in the magnificently equipped Media Center and ending with a concert in the equally well-equipped Kresge Theatre.  A great treat was the addition of the brilliant improvising violinist Pauline Kim Harris (whose concert with Jesse Styles, guru of the EE, packed the club where they performed the previous evening. Pretty cool scene in Pittsburgh). We were very pleased that the concert included, as well as our collaborations with the EE, beautiful performances of Larry Lake’s Psalm for oboe and tape with Hannah Senft as soloist and David jaeger’s Sarabande for viola and live delay processing with violist Sara Frankel.  Along the way, we collectively presented the Steiner Lecture in Creative Inquiry and four workshops:

              Rose Bolton: Electronic Music making for Women and non-binary Individuals

              John Kameel Farah: Approaches to Piano Improvisation

              David Jaeger and Jim Montgomery: Composing with Electronic Instruments

              Paul Stillwell and David Sutherland: Modular Synthesis 101

The CEE concert performances and our collaborations with the EE are being prepared for release. We’ll let you know.

Announcing a Residency at CMU

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It’s been a loooong time since we posted anything… But that doesn’t mean we’ve been silent! 

We have begun an intense rehearsal schedule in preparation for a 4 day residency at Carnegie Mellon University! While there we will be performing and working with students sharing our techniques on composition, improvisation, synthesis and more.

We are grateful and excited for this opportunity and are looking forward to meeting the faculty and students at CMU!

We will be posting selected tracks from our rehearsals over the next little while. Here’s the first one which is actually the second one from our January 10th rehearsal:

Another October performance

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October 13 was such a good time we can’t wait to get the new band at it again. This time we’re “at” the Southern Cross Room of the Tranzac, 10PM, Tuesday, October 24. PWYC. If you haven’t been to the Tranzac, this is a great chance to experience one of Toronto’s staunchest supporters of serious improvised music. As an example, the Tranzac hosts the Toronto Sound Festival, November 26 and 27, a  can’t-miss for Electro-heads. Great beer, too.

Info here: https://www.tranzac.org/

Or see their FB page: https://www.facebook.com/tranzac/

For TSF: https://www.torontosoundfestival.com/

Concert Announcement – October 13

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The Canadian Electronic Ensemble was founded in 1971. It is the oldest continuous live-electronic group in the world. As we begin our 46th year, there are some new faces, and some older ones. Here’s a chance to get acquainted and re-acquainted with the CEE.

Friday, October 13, at 8:30PM, at the Canadian Music Centre, 20 St. Joseph Street. This will be the first appearance of the Quintet in Toronto, or in fact, anywhere. Get in on some history being made in the up-close-and-personal Chalmers Performance Space.
Tickets: $10 in advance, $15 at the door.

The CEE is: John Kameeel Farah, David Jaeger, Jim Montgomery, Paul Stillwell, David Sutherland.

CEE Performing at the Arts & Letters Club March 28, 2017

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We are very happy to announce that we will be performing at the Arts & Letters Club Music Salon on March 28, 2017!  Joining us will be the amazing Andréa Tyniec – solo violin, and Jonathan Krehm – Clarinet.

Beginning at 8 PM with Andréa Tyniec, followed by Jonathan Krem at 8:20 and The Canadian Electronic Ensemble at 8:30 it promises to be an amazing evening of diverse works and sounds.

Hope to see you there!

CEE to Perform at The Toronto Sound Festival

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We are very happy to announce that we will be performing on September 19 at the Toronto Sound Festival!  We will also be conducting a panel discussion on our method of live electronic instruments along with the instruments we use.

The Toronto Sound Festival is Canada’s premiere 2 day festival of synthesized sound!  There are workshops, talks, vendors, a Synthesizer Petting Zoo, Synthesizers, DIY projects, etc.  The evening concert is free, however, tickets for the two day conference are  available here.

CEE to Perform at Norma Beecroft’s Book Launch

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Conversations with Post World War II Pioneers of Electronic Music

Date: Saturday, September 26, 2015, 4-6pm
Location: The Canadian Music Centre, 20 St. Joseph Street, Toronto
Admission: Free

Join the Music Gallery’s Artistic Director David Dacks in conversation with Norma Beecroft as she discusses her book and her exchanges with various composers from John Cage, Pierre Schaeffer, and Iannis Xenakis, to her Canadian counterparts including Barry Truax, James Montgomery, and Bill Buxton. The launch event will include an archival exhibit displaying images and news clippings from Beecroft’s career and the Canadian Electronic Ensemble will present a special performance.

July 29th at the Arts & Letters Club, Toronto

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Hi everyone – Paul here… just a little recap of how the show went from our perspective.

Unfortunately, John and Rose weren’t able to perform with us this time.  Their cool sounds were missed!

For me personally, this was a big night.  The debut of new additions to my performance rig.  I have begun to use some of the wonderful synthesizers available for the iPad and also started using a new network based MIDI protocol in order to use it to control my soft-synths running on my laptop via a wireless connection.  About a year ago I started learning to play the Chapman Stick and this was my first time using it in a performance.  Yes – I was a bit nervous!

We waited in the bar and started the show from there (a great way to start a show BTW!) using my new iPad setup.  After a few seconds of the audience wondering what was going on (in the recordings you can hear some talking at the beginning), I wandered in trying to play and make sure the audience could see what was going on on my iPad while at the same time trying not to drop it and shatter the screen into a million pieces!  This went well, and the rest of the band along with our guest (Farhad Nargol-O’Neill – Piano & Cello) eventually followed me onto the stage and began to play.

We played 5 completely improvised pieces which were well received by the audience and had a great time.

Follow this link to find some recordings of the event.  Unfortunately, there is quite a bit of distortion at times.  We are reasonably certain that the distortion is as a result of the recording feed coming off of the A&L’s equipment.  It did seem a bit under powered for our style of playing.  This is too bad, because there are some very tasty bits in there and the distortion is very distracting.