Who or what inspired you to take up composing, and pursue a career in music?
I wanted to make my own music from my earliest memories. I went crazy for Bach as a child, and I begged my parents for piano lessons, and kept on trying to blindly emulate Bach, with no idea what I was doing. I made a tape recording in grade four where I tried to imitate swimming dinosaurs by recording the sound of bubbles in the sink, alternating with stomping piano chords (I played it for my class and they burst out laughing).
I also wanted to improvise, even though I had no improvisation teacher. But I was impatient, so I just improvised for years on my own, trying to incorporate elements from the classical pieces I learned, and slowly I developed my own improvisational vocabulary. I think for many artists, it’s clear at an early age that you’ll spend your life in the arts creating, even though that might be well before you’re old enough to even know what a “career” really is.
Who or what were the most significant influences on your musical life and career as a composer?
Every few years, I would discover a composer or type of music that would be like a musical earthquake. The first and biggest was Bach. Then came Gould, Wendy Carlos, and Heavy Metal (I grew up in the suburbs of Toronto). Discovering Schönberg and atonality was like eating my first olive: at first I wanted to spit it out, but then I wanted more.
My roommate in university was listening to electronic music, Aphex Twin and Squarepusher – that blew my mind open. As I was studying composition, I started trying out ways to incorporate these electronic sounds into the “classical” approach to composing. The keyboard of William Byrd expanded my concept of counterpoint, it’s so quirky and ornamental that it suggested new ways to bridge over into Middle Eastern music, and mix counterpoint with Arabic scales and rhythms.
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