Functional orchestration is an approach to orchestration (orchestration practice as well as music theory and orchestration analysis) that attempts to link orchestration techniques with perceptual effects by considering their musical and perceptual goals (functions).

The Timbre Semantics Workgroup will meet four times over the course of this semester. All are invited to attend any or all of the meetings, whether or not you have been in previous semantics meetings.

Kjel Sidolski, organist and master student in composition at University of Montréal, will perform his piece Élégies at Église Saint-Édouard in Montréal (6500, rue de Saint-Vallier), in the context of the Religious Heritage Days.

The Year 6 Annual Workshop will be hosted by the School of Music of the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, BC, Canada. It will be held in a hybrid format (online/in person). This year, the workshop will be preceded by a three-day edition of the second Timbre and Orchestration Summer School (TOSS).
The event page can be found here.

ACTOR is pleased to announce the seventh ACTOR / CIRMMT Student Symposium, held as a online event on Friday, March 22nd, 12pm-2pm.

Minister, musician, and musicologist Braxton D. Shelley is a tenured associate professor of music, of sacred music, and of divinity in the Department of Music, the Institute of Sacred Music, and Yale's Divinity School. A musicologist who specializes in African American popular music, his research and critical interests, while especially focused on African American gospel performance, extend into media studies, sound studies, phenomenology, homiletics, and theology. Shelley is the author of Healing for the Soul: Richard Smallwood, the Vamp, and the Gospel Imagination as well as the forthcoming An Eternal Pitch: Bishop G.E. Patterson and the Afterlives of Ecstasy. His research has received considerable recognition including the Alfred Einstein Prize, Paul A. Pisk Prize, the Jaap Kunst Prize, and the Adam Krims Award. He received his Ph.D. in the History and Theory of Music at the University of Chicago.

ACTOR's Training and Mentoring Committee is pleased to announce our annual Timbre Geeks Networking (TGN) event, which will be held online on January 19, 2024, from 12h-14h EST. This year's TGN is slightly different: we invite any ACTOR student who is interested in applying for the Y6 Student Presentation Award (https://www.actorproject.org/funding/student-workshop-presentations) to deliver a lightning talk on their proposed project. Fellow students and members of TMC will offer feedback on each talk in service of helping students develop competitive proposals for the Y6 presentation award. All are welcome, but registration is required if you wish to present.

Ayò Olúrántí is a composer, conductor, organist, and music theorist specializing in pre-colonial Yorùbá music and culture. Equally fluent in the fields of production and computer technology, he is also an active member of the digital and virtual pipe organ community. His cross-cultural approaches to composition and scholarship have earned him considerable international attention. He has performed and composed in Nigeria, the UK, the USA, South Africa, and Germany. Olúrántí is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards including the Morehouse College Sub-Sahara Africa Commission Award, Andrew Mellon Pre-Doctoral Fellowship, and was the winner of the Donald Sutherland Endowment Fund Composition Competition. He has published research on tonality of African languages, polyrhythm in African pianism, intercultural music composition, and orality as a compositional technique. Olúrántí received his Ph.D. in Composition & Theory from the University of Pittsburgh.

This talk will consider how the timbre of string band music has been racialized through the legacy of blackface, while recovering some of the performed histories (past and present) of Black string band musicians.

ACTOR is pleased to announce the seventh ACTOR / CIRMMT Student Symposium, held as a hybrid event on Friday, October 20th, 12pm-2pm (Eastern), A-832, Wirth Music Building (McGill Schulich School of Music). The four speakers, all ACTOR members, each presented posters at the TIMBRE 2023 Conference in Thessaloniki in July.

Combining original compositions and traditional Haitian tunes with historical broadcasts and contemporary interviews, Leyla McCalla’s remarkable new album, Breaking The Thermometer, offers an immersive sonic journey through 50 years of racial, social, and political unrest as it explores the legacy of Radio Haiti—the first radio station to report in Haitian Kreyòl, the voice of the people—and the journalists who risked their lives to broadcast it.

ACTOR’s Training and Mentoring Committee will host a workshop on Designing and Delivering Effective Research Presentations. Aimed at graduate students and early-career scholars, this event features as guest speakers ACTOR Partners Lindsey Reymore (Arizona State University) and Eliot Britton (University of Toronto) as well as Mithura Sanmugalingam (McGill University Teaching and Learning Services).

FraKCtal se replonge dans les albums de King Crimson sortis en 1973 et 1974. De Lark’s Tongues in Aspic à Starless en passant par Fracture, FraKCtal rend hommage à ce groupe fondateur du rock progressif pour célébrer le cinquantenaire de leur formation.

Year 5 Workshop 2023, Strasbourg, France