Composer Suba Sankaran has been announced as the recipient of the 2024 Kathleen McMorrow Music Award. The Award comes with a $10,000 prize, and was established to support contemporary classical compositions by Ontario artists.
The Award was given this year to aid in the production of Sankaran’s upcoming work titled Blue Skies, Red Earth, Tall Pines. The piece is being developed in collaboration with Jumblies Theatre’s Gather Round Singers, City Choir and Autorickshaw.
The innovative multimedia project brings artists and community members together, incorporating poetry, theatre, music and stories about borders and border crossings — as a concept, as a barrier that can be literal, linguistic, metaphorical, emotional, racial, and take on so many other parameters. What are borders, and how do we get past them? Western and Eastern musical traditions come together in the composition.
The project is set for performances and exhibitions in Toronto and the GTA in the summer of 2024.
Suba Sankaran
The musician, composer, educator, choral director, and sound designer is based in Toronto.
As a vocalist, Suba’s music blends musical genres and traditions, and she has performed around the world with the acclaimed ensemble Autorickshaw. Suba has sung for Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Tutu, and Peter Gabriel, and has shared a stage with Bobby McFerrin, the Swingles, and other artists.
Sankaran has composed music for dance, theatre, film and radio, including collaborations with the Stratford and Shaw Festivals, the CBC, and Deepa Mehta.
Her early music training in South Indian classical voice and percussion came through her father, master drummer Trichy Sankaran. She continued to study classical Indian vocal and instrumental music while expanding to include Western music in the form of piano, vocal and composition studies, including jazz theory.
Suba turned her focus to choral work during her time in the Claude Watson Arts Program at Earl Haig high school, and composed and arranged music for choir, as well as making her conducting debut. She toured as a soloist with the Canadian Dance Tapestry, a performance of folk music and dance, in the US and Europe.
Her training in classical piano began at the Royal Conservatory of Music at age six, and continued at York University, where she graduated in 1997. In 2002, she earned a Master of Arts degree in Ethnomusicology.
Suba has returned to teach at York University, as well teaching at the University of Toronto and Humber College, and has conducted many workshops in vocal technique for educational institutions and arts organizations throughout the Toronto area.
Recognition includes a DORA Maver Moore Award for sound design/composition for Bombay Black, and winning the John Lennon Songwriting award for the composition Heavy Traffic (co-composed with Ed Hanley, Autorickshaw).
She co-created City Choir, a global community choir in Toronto, and is currently the artistic associate with Confluence Concerts. Suba was recently awarded a 2023 Johanna Metcalf Performing Arts Prize.
“My deepest gratitude to Kathleen McMorrow and the Ontario Arts Foundation. I’m honoured and thrilled to be recognized for my artistic achievements through this award, which gives not only a boost in confidence, but also affirmation for my chosen path as an artist and creator,” says Suba Sankaran in a statement. “My compositions are an expression of, and search for, deeper understanding of my identity as a hyphenated-Canadian with a South Indian background, and I aspire to continue creating, collaborating, and building community through my compositions.”
The Kathleen McMorrow Music Award
The Kathleen McMorrow Music Award was established in 2015, named after the former head of the Music Library at the University of Toronto, Faculty of Music. McMorrow served in that role from 1974 to 2013.
The award she established is managed via an endowment by the Ontario Arts Foundation, and the Ontario Arts Council manages the selection process. The recipients are chosen from the list of applicants for the Ontario Arts Council Music Creation Projects program deadlines.
Congratulations on a well deserved award.
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