From May 29 to 31, New Music Concerts will present the Future Resonance Festival in Toronto, with an additional event in Montréal on June 9. The focus is, as the name suggests, the future of classical/contemporary music, and the festival offers various approaches to examining that theme.
LV talked to NMC Artistic Director Brian Current and Emily Schimp, Director of Operations and Communications, about the upcoming Festival, and what to expect.
Interview: Brian Current & Emily Schimp
The New Canon, a panel discussion (May 29)
The panel for this discussion revolving around the question What would the musical canon look like if it began today? includes:
- Aiyun Huang, Chair
- Jason Young
- Rena Roussin
- Charlie Wall-Andrews
- Rashaan Allwood
“When we say new music, we really mean the music of the future,” says Brian Current. “It’s really asking different artists what the music of the future will sound like.”
Specifically, he’s thinking about Toronto’s unique environment.
“We really felt like we have something truly special in Toronto,” he says. “There is not another city that’s exploring its multiculturalism in the same way,” Current adds.
“The panel is really about, what does that look like? What does that sound like?”
The discussion re-examines the notion of a what a masterpiece is, and what the term itself means.
“It’s a really diverse panel,” says Emily Schimp. It reflects the evolving values of the classical/contemporary music world.
Both Current and Schimp attended the Classical:NEXT 2026 conference in April in Budapest, Hungary, and came away impressed with Toronto’s leadership in navigating the future of classical music.
“It was so clear in Budapest that NMC is a leader,” Emily says. “The discussion will be how might the topic of […] a new canon [be approached], and how to create a new canon — not just in Toronto, but the world.”
“For so long, we were always thinking, classical music is in Europe — and we’re part of the new world,” Brian says. “But exciting things are happening here, and cultures are working together.”
He says Toronto has the potential “to become a hotspot like Paris in the 1890s, it could go on to become influential.”
That’s the energy they’re bringing to the panel discussion. “The new canon is really a primer for the festival.”
Both emphasize that, while the ideas that will be discussed are important, the atmosphere of the event will be fun and informal. It takes place at the Stackt Market in the studio space, surrounded by food trucks and breweries.
“Audiences should not expect any kind of academic festival,” Brian says.
Future Resonance Festival: What is the Real Sound of Toronto (Panel Discussion, 2025), with Sandeep Bhagwati — Composer, Professor; Anthony R. Green — Composer, Performer, Social Justice Artist; Parmela Attariwala — Violinist/Violist, Composer, Ethnomusicologist; Dylan Robinson — xwélmexw (Stó:lō/Skwah) Scholar, Artist, Curator, Writer; Patty Chan — Erhu Musician, Educator, Author:
Emily mentions the panel members.
“The Chair is Aiyun Huang, who is a musician, researcher, and professor at the University of Toronto,” Schimp says. “Mystery Clock was her project.
Jason Young is a Cree-Settler Composer from Northern Ontario with degrees from Carleton University, the University of Ottawa, and a Ph.D. in Composition from the University of Calgary. He is currently a dedicated member of the Canadian Music Centre’s Accountability for Change and Indigenous Advisory Councils, and an Assistant Professor of Composition at Brandon University.
Rena Roussin is a scholar who studies the relationship of classical (“art”) music’s to concepts of equity, embodiment, and social justice, both in historic and current contexts. She holds a doctorate in musicology from the University of Toronto, and is currently a postdoctoral associate at Western University. Rena is working on her first book, Identities, Indigeneities, Intersectionalities: Positioning Contemporary Opera in Canada.
Composer, educator, scholar, and creative industries leader Dr. Charlie Wall-Andrews has been recognized as a Billboard Canada Power Player. She teaches at the University of Toronto Faculty of Music and in the Professional Music Program at The Creative School at Toronto Metropolitan University. She also serves on the Board of Directors for the Canada Council for the Arts and leads the SOCAN Foundation.
Rashaan Rori Allwood holds a Bachelor’s degree in Piano Performance and a Master’s degree in Organ Performance, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Composition. As an organ soloist, he has toured Europe, and performed at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, UK, St. Nikolai-Kirche in Leipzig, Germany and St. Pierre’s Cathedral in Geneva, Switzerland. Rashaan is the New Music Concerts (NMC’s) Composer-in-Residence to the end of the 2025/26 season.
NMC will be hosting ICE — that’s The International Contemporary Ensemble of New York — and Allwood is currently writing a new piece for them. NMC will also present a performance of his third work as Composer-in-Residence in the fall of 2026.
After the panel discussion comes a reception.
“We want to hear what our audience has to say,” Current says. “It’s an open door invitation.”
The Swara Sutras Ensemble perform Group Composition for 6 Instruments (2024 World Premiere):
The Swara Sutras Ensemble in Concert (May 30)
The Swara Sutras Ensemble will perform in a special concert on May 30.
The Swara Sutras Ensemble is:
- Alyssa Delbaere-Sawchuk — Métis Fiddle
- Atish Mukhopadhyay — Sarod
- Jesse Dietschi — Double Bass
- Lasso Sanou — Peul Flute
- Lina Cao — Guzheng
- Patty Chan — Erhu
“This is really the emotional and artistic centre of the festival,” says Current. The Ensemble have been performing together for about six years. “We feel that it’s ready to go international.”
The concert will feature an hour of music with lighting and stage direction — and no breaks for applause. The musicians will be moving around the space.
“It incorporates electronic music by five Canadian composers,” he says. They include composers Steven Webb, Tsz Long (Fish) Yu, Andrew Staniland, Laurie Radford and Myriam Boucher. Some of the music, he notes, will return from the 2024 festival.
The composers were given a stipulation.
“How to recreate detailed, adventurous music, but this time not necessarily using Western notation,” Current explains. It’s about inclusion in a very broad sense. “Half the prople in Toronto come from places where Western notation was not what they grew up with,” he points out.
“How do we make sublime music without using that notation?”
It has resulted in a preparation process with some marked differences than the usual, including intense collaboration, and a great deal more rehearsal time. The concert will feature cutting edge technology that responds to the musicians and their performance.
“It’s very moving,” he says, “not just the music, but overcoming linguistic and cultural barriers for the love of music. It’s important to show the world.”
NMC has already received two invitations to bring the event to Europe.
“I think it’s something that we really want to catch on,’ Brian says, “what happens in a city when different cultures work bother harmoniously.”
At the Budapest conference and international music events around the world, Current says he meets and talks with other classical and contemporary music organization directors.
“I tell my colleagues, the world is going to look like Toronto in 20 or 30 years. I think this is a beautiful way of thinking.”
“We’re working with a stage director for the first time,” Schimp adds, “to create the right kind of atmosphere.”
“She’s a really talented director,” Brian says. “The title of it is called Passages, and it’s based on rites of passages from many different cultures. It’s very universal.”
The music and performance will reflect those elements.
“There’s a brand new piece by Steven Webb,” Current notes. Webb will also serve as media director for the project, creating sound effects. “For this, we want to give autonomy to the performers, in that they feel creative license throughout.” It diverges from the usual dictatorial model where composers and conductors run the show.
“We’d like to take that hierarchy and make it more horizontal,” Brian adds.
The music is based on improvisation, so they’ve created a visual map rather than a score.
“We’ve created a map of what’s going to happen,” he says. “We do have a score of a kind. It’s a new sort of creation.”
It’s inspired by the work of Sandeep Bhagwati. “He called this comprovisations,” Current says. For rehearsals, that visual map is projected onto a screen.
Other than Webb’s new piece, the material for the concert comes from the 2024 festival. “We commissioned them for the last iteration of the festival. And those works were very collaborative. as well,” Emily says. That includes the pieces by Tsz Long (Fish) Yu, Andrew Staniland, Laurie Radford and Myriam Boucher.
The requirements of the concert created a new process for the composers, as Current notes. “How do I create in collaboration with musicians without Western notation? What are potential other forms of communications between musicians?”
It’s not about eradicating conventional Western notation systems. “We’re not getting rid of it. It’s not an or situation — it’s an and,” Brian explains. “These are amazing non-Western musicians and composers, and they love Bach and Chopin. What they want is Bach and Indigenous music,” he says. “Both are possible.”
Beethoven and Bach, after all, wrote for the world they lived in. They would expect contemporary composers to do the same.
“Composers are trying to share what it feels like to be alive in this time and place in history,” Current says. “Toronto is special and interesting and unique right now. What is the real sound of Toronto, and even more, what is the sound of the future of Toronto and beyond?”
Black Ice (2024 World Premiere) for Nine Instruments, composed by Rashaan Allwood:
SONAXIS (May 31)
Members of the Community Music Schools of Toronto and the Canadian Chinese Youth Orchestra will be participating in a day long community workshop.
“Observers can come for free,” Brian says. “It’s really for the kids,” he adds.
“The idea is, we’ve been seeing these professional musicians — they build relationships, they don’t even speak the same language sometimes. Wouldn’t it be great to do this for a couple of dozen youth players in Toronto?”
The event will feature the young musicians of the Canadian Youth Chinese Orchestra. “They are bringing a traditional Chinese orchestra,” Current explains. “We are pairing them with steel pan players in the Caribbean tradition.”
Other student musicians from various Toronto music schools have been added to the group of participants.
“We’re looking at about 30 or so teenagers who reflect the rather magnificent cultural diversity in Toronto,” Brian says. They’ll participate in improv games, creating sounds together, and other activities designed to be fun.
Dmitri Tymoczko, a professor of composition and theory at Princeton University has created a kind of visual score that uses colours and shapes rather than conventional Western notation.
“They follow these shapes,” Current says. The group will be creating complex sounds while exploring a new way of following a score.
Note that participation is by invitation only. Interested members of the public can come to observe, but there will be no concert or performance per se.
Home《家》- composed by Tsz Long (Fish) Yu for New Music Concerts MAKEWAY 2025:
Montréal Concert (June 9)
The Swara Sutras Ensemble will be taking the Passages show east to extend the festival to Montréal. It takes place June 9 at the Centre des musiciens du mond in Montréal, and is presented as part of the 60th anniversary celebration of the Société de musique contemporaine du Québec.
“We have been building over the last three or four years, partnerships with SMCQ,” Current says.
He calls them a sister organization with a similar history and mandates. “They really are the two founding new music organizations in the country,” he says. “We’re bringing this to their series.”
The Montréal Passages concert will be similar in scope to Toronto’s. “In a similar formation, again with the same lighting and staging. This is exciting too. It brings the profile of these artists and composers to new places,” he adds.
Canadian geography makes touring difficult, but it’s still worthwhile.
“That really is the why of touring. Touring is tough and expensive, but Canadian and Toronto’s music has value. We want people in Montréal to know about these musicians.”
Beyond World Music
New music, as Current points out, moves beyond geographical boundaries, particularly in a place like Toronto where everyone in the world can find a home.
“We’re not thinking about that at all,” he says of the antiquated global music and world music labels.
The musicians may or may not be wearing traditional outfits that speak to the heritage of the instruments they play, or the traditional black of Western classical music performance, for that matter.
He points out that the composers of the traditional canon aren’t local, either. “Mozart’s world music,” he says.
Excerpt from Swara Sutra IV, “DAY” for 10 Musicians – Swara Sutras Ensemble, April 2022:
Event Details
- Find details, and get your PWYC tickets for The New Canon panel discussion on May 29 [HERE].
- Find details and tickets for the Swara Sutras Ensemble in Concert on May 30 [HERE].
- Find details of the SONAXIS event here, and donate to NMC’s education programs [HERE].
- Find tickets and information about the June 9 concert featuring Swara Sutras Ensemble in Montréal [HERE].
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