Stephanie Moore

Stephanie Moore

Composer Stephanie Moore is equally at ease in the worlds of instrumental and electroacoustic music, with a special interest in “mixed music” combining the two. Since arriving in Montreal in 2009, her creative palette has expanded to include recorded sound (instruments and everyday objects), environmental soundscape, sampled recordings and electronic sound, in addition to standard Western instruments.

Previous commissions include: Ensemble Paramirabo, New Adventures in Sound Art, Cluster Festival + Plumes Ensemble, Ensemble In Extensio, Voces Boreales + Bradyworks, among others. Her music has been featured in the Sound Travels festival of New Adventures in Sound Art (Toronto), and twice in both the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival and the Cluster New Music and Integrated Arts Festival (Winnipeg). Stephanie has also done composition and sound design for theatre, most notably I’m Not Here (SummerWorks Performance Festival in Toronto) and Zoom-Boom-Boom, co-created with writer Alexis Diamond and commissioned and co-produced by les Jeunesses Musicales du Canada. This latter work, a 35-minute theatrical concert introducing very young audiences to electroacoustic music, was performed at Place des Arts (Montreal), the National Arts Centre (Ottawa) and multiple times throughout the Montreal region from 2019-2023.

In recent years, Stephanie has turned her focus uniquely to electroacoustic music composition and the creation of a pop-style concept album of acousmatic music, with support from the Canada Council for the Arts. Her work with Andrew Yankiwski of Precursor Productions, mastering engineer of the album, dates back to 2017 and a Quebec-Manitoba residency grant from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. He has been a consultant on the album throughout the creation process and once the stereo version is finalized, they plan on creating a separate Dolby Atmos immersive audio mix of the album in summer 2025.


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Program

This concert is a preview of five acousmatic pieces comprising a pop-style concept album to be released later in 2025. Inspired in part by Bernard Parmegiani’s seminal acousmatic work De Natura Sonorum (1975) and in part by techniques translated from avant-garde cuisine, this project was created with support from the Canada Council for the Arts.


1) Are You Ready? / Changing Texture and Function (16:00)

Influenced by notions of turning watermelon into tuna, sour into sweet and cheese into foam, this track features musical textures morphing from one to another (e.g. metallic into airy) and sound materials transforming function (i.e. pitch into rhythm, non-pitched into pitched) in varying layers of density. Sound sources include many non-musical instruments, some musical instruments, environmental soundscape and synthesis.


2) WaiMoRightTheforMentting / Dematerializing (6:00)

The entirety of the source material for this piece is taken from the archival recording of a reading of a chamber orchestra piece of mine from many years ago: Waiting for the Right Moment. Originally a piece commissioned for string quintet in 2008, I created a chamber orchestra arrangement of it in 2009. This recording had been in my personal archives for some years, ripe to be “dematerialized”, chopped up, manipulated into something new. I took some inspiration from avant-gardist chef Homaro Cantu’s procedure of transforming sushi into a picture of sushi printed on edible paper that tastes like sushi… I have a dream that one day, the two versions (orchestral and acousmatic) and will be performed live back-to-back.


3) Replicating (12:00)

Replicating happening as an imitation game between left and right in a stereo sound field and also as successive translations of the initial food-related sound sequence (using, for example, percussion instruments, synthesis and software instruments). Like the game of telephone, certain original features or meaning may get lost along the way and the question of how close we end up to where we started might be up to individual interpretation. In my view, we end up somewhere both very similar and very different to where we started…

A culinary example of replicating is the phenomenon of “mock desserts” in post-war Britain: e.g. apricot flan replicated using a carrot and plum filling with a mashed potato pie crust.


4) Reconfiguring (7:00)

This piece explores the tension between a continuous line and interruptions, as a soloist analog synthesizer background competes with an active fragmented foreground. This foreground consists of a panoply of short snippets from an archival recording of my chamber orchestra piece Waiting for the Right Moment, which are progressively processed and reconstituted using a heterogeneous collection of samples. Chef Homaro Cantu talks about “note-by-note” cooking, which uses pure compounds instead of composite materials and this way of repurposing and reconfiguring my orchestral material seemed analogous to it.


5) Simulating, Parts I and II (7:30)

In my work with recorded sound, I have always been drawn to what I think of as “soundalikes”: recordings of a sound that upon listening, and not knowing what the original sound source was, could easily pass for something else. For example, a piece of paper brought towards and away from an electric fan, reminiscent in timbre and pitch contour of a small aircraft. Foley design in cinema often relies on this kind of perceptual ambiguity. An illusion cake would be analogous in avant-garde cooking, for example an Adidas leather handbag made out of cake…

This piece makes use of a collection of recorded sounds that are all ambiguous to my ear - sounding both what they really are also like something else. I have montaged these sounds to tell a story, in two consecutive parts, using these imaginary sound origins.