What inspires young composers to write?
What is this generation of composers writing about?

A conversation between Lawrence Cherney, Canadian composer/ conductor Brian Current, and emerging composer Nick Storring about the opportunities and challenges that emerging composers in the 21st century face. 

A graduate of McGill University in Montreal and U. C. Berkeley, Brian Current writes music that is brimming with energy – sometimes with the propulsive rhythms of so-called minimalist music, sometimes with a more delicate sense of flux, but almost always with a sense of motion and playfulness about the treatment of time and texture. These features have won him numerous honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Barlow Prize for Orchestral Music, and Italy’s Premio Fedora for his new chamber opera Airline Icarus.
http://www.briancurrent.com/

Nick Storring is a Toronto-based composer, cellist and music journalist with a wide palette of interests, ranging from skewed pop to electroacoustics. Winner of the 2011 Canadian Music Centre's Toronto Emerging Composer Award. His work has recently been performed by the Esprit Orchestra, the Madawaska String Quartet, and Quatuor Bozzini. His debut album of abstract electronic works, Rife was released this past September on UK imprint Entr'acte.
http://www.nickstorring.ca/ 

The performers for the Salon are:

Ilana Waniuk, is a versatile violinist and contemporary chamber music addict. She has held an artistic residency at the Banff centre for the Arts, and has attended several summer workshops and festivals throughout Canada, the USA, and Italy which have provided her with the opportunity to study with members of the Vermeer, Tokyo, Cavani, and Orford string quartets. In 2002 as a participant in the NUMUS Pan-Am Chamber Competition her chamber ensemble the TEDUWA piano trio was the recipient of the Audience Award sponsored by the Kitchener Waterloo Chamber Music Society, and the Canadian Music Center Award for best performance of a Canadian work.
Ilana's passion for new music has led her to co-found The Thin Edge New Music Collective along with pianist Cheryl Duvall. This July Ilana will be participating in the Bang on Can Summer Music festival at Mass MoCA.


Violinist Suhashini Arulanandam is an active performer and teacher based in Southern Ontario. As well as working on her ongoing chamber music projects, making random herbal concoctions, and gardening, she is completing her tenth season with the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra, and her sixth season with the Windsor Symphony Orchestra. In 2010, she completed a Master's degree from the City University of New York, Queens College, in the studio of Burton Kaplan, who has profoundly influenced her approach to performing and teaching. Prior to that, in 2002, she completed a Performance Diploma from the Glenn Gould School in the studios of Annalee Patipatanakoon and then Erika Raum. 

This event will highlight some of the next generation of Canadian composers to look out for, and we'll present be a mixture of discussion, audio and video clips, music performance and dialogue with the audience.