Events
Upcoming Events
Upcoming events that ACTOR members are presenting at:
The Analysis, Creation, and Teaching of Orchestration (ACTOR) Project is pleased to announce our second Timbre and Orchestration Summer School (TOSS2), held at the University of British Columbia’s School of Music in Vancouver, Canada, July 12–15, 2024.
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.
Dates TBD/subject to change. Year 7 Workshop 2025, Geneva, Switzerland, TBC
Past Events
Past events that ACTOR members have organized, attended, and/or presented at:
The Timbre and Orchestration Analysis Workgroup will be meeting via Zoom from 10:00 to 11:30 (EDT) on April 5. All ACTOR members with an interest in music analysis are welcome to attend. The agenda for this meeting will include planning for our session at the Y6 workshop in Vancouver and lightning talks on ongoing analysis-related projects by ACTOR members—anyone who'd like to present should contact Robert Hasegawa (robert.hasegawa@mcgill.ca).
Zoom Link https://mcgill.zoom.us/j/2632309272.
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).
We are pleased to announce that the first ever Summer School on timbre and orchestration organized by ACTOR. This event is open to all, not just members of ACTOR, and no pre-existing knowledge of the topics is required.
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.
Hi All! The Voice Timbre Group will be meeting on Monday 29 May at 11am EST. We’d like to catch up, hear about ongoing projects, and decide how to structure our session at Y5.
CORE workgroup meeting on Monday May 29 at 11:00am EDT.
Concert du séminaire « Composer, interpréter et analyser l’orchestration contemporaine » et présentation des projets de l'Ensemble de recherche en orchestration contemporaine — EROC 3 (2022-2023) à l’Université de Montréal
On April 14th, the FluCoMa Workshop will take place at CIRMMT in collaboration with the ACTOR project and the support of composer Pierre Alexandre Tremblay, one of the developers of the library. The aim of the workshop is to bring together creative practitioners currently working with FluCoMa and to exchange ideas in a constructive and collegial environment in order to learn about different approaches and uses of the library through the presentation of ongoing projects. Participants can apply to present their projects, to address some potential problems or issues, and find solutions and alternatives.
The Sub-Saharan Africa/Diaspora Subgroup of the Analysis, Creation and Teaching of Orchestration (ACTOR) project and the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT) invite all for the sixth talk of the Speaker Series: Afrological Perspectives on Timbre and Orchestration. Presented by Joel Smith (Tufts University).
The East Asian Music subgroup will organize a finishing guest talk on Mar. 23rd for this term, inviting German composer, Prof. Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf (Hochschule für Musik und Theater “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy” Leipzig) to talk about his recent composition “Zhōng” (2020) scored for traditional Chinese ensemble, a piece with extensive exploration on extended timbral possibility of different Chinese instruments and on notational practice.
The Analysis, Creation, and Teaching of Orchestration (ACTOR) Project and the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT) will be co-hosting a hybrid symposium on orchestration research.
Timbrenauts: Creative Explorations in Timbre Space
Speech as Timbre Models for Orchestration – a Comparative Study Between Cantonese and Québécois French
Masque de Fer
An investigation of choral blending through soundfield capture, acoustic evaluation, and perceptual analysis methods
The Sub-Saharan Africa/Diaspora Subgroup of the Analysis, Creation and Teaching of Orchestration (ACTOR) project and the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT) invite all for the fifth talk of the Speaker Series: Afrological Perspectives on Timbre and Orchestration. Presented by Andile Khumalo (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg).
The Timbre Semantics Workgroup will be holding a meeting on Zoom on February 27 at 10am EST. All ACTOR members are welcome to join, whether or not you have been to previous semantics events!
The Sub-Saharan Africa/Diaspora Subgroup of the Analysis, Creation and Teaching of Orchestration (ACTOR) project and the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT) invite all for the fourth talk of the Speaker Series: Afrological Perspectives on Timbre and Orchestration. Presented by Marvin McNeill (Emory University)
The Sub-Saharan Africa/Diaspora Subgroup of the Analysis, Creation and Teaching of Orchestration (ACTOR) project and the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT) invite all for the third talk of the Speaker Series: Afrological Perspectives on Timbre and Orchestration. Presented by Kevin C. Holt (Stony Brook University, SUNY)