Arraymusic has shifted its artistic leadership model away from a single Artistic Director to a group of specialized curators, while still providing the experienced artistic, production, and administrative oversight necessary to successfully create and execute compelling and coherent artistic programming consistent with Array’s organizational vision over the short- and long-terms. The new structure features three curators with staggered three-year terms. Each curator will program an annual series that Arraymusic will produce through the course of their term.
Array Music Curators
Bruce Russell (Composer-in-Residence)
Series: The Array Ensemble
Bruce A. Russell aka Ibrahim El Mahboob (he/him, b. 1968) is a composer and self-taught pianist living and working in Toronto (Tkarón:to, the traditional territory of many nations including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat). He studied at York University with James Tenney and Phillip Werren. His early years were spent playing in bands and releasing DIY cassettes of art pop and experimental music, as well as composing predominantly electronic scores for dance, theatre and interdisciplinary productions.
Frustrated by systemic racism, personal struggles, and a lack of interest in his work, he stopped seeking a career in music. He continued composing in private, however, sometimes sharing his work through social media. Interest in his work increased in 2020, resulting in performances by Second Note Duo, Prism Percussion, the San Juan Symphony, Idaho Falls Symphony, Grant Park Orchestra and Regina Symphony Orchestra. Arraymusic presented the first full concert of his music in November of that year, and he will be Composer in Residence at Array for three seasons from 2022 through 2025.
He has composed new works for Gryphon Trio, the Madawaska Quartet and Thin Edge New Music Collective. He is currently creating music for Ian Kamau’s live multi-media work Loss. He was the host of Radio Music Gallery and has written for Musicworks and I Care if You Listen. His interests are in 20th and 21st century concert music especially postminimalism, and music of the African diaspora.
THE ARRAY ENSEMBLE has been bringing cutting edge contemporary chamber music to audiences since 1972 and in 2022|23 celebrated its 50th Anniversary! One of the founding members of Canada’s new music scene, Array’s Ensemble is foremost a virtuosic chamber group that exists to take risks and push the boundaries of musical expression.
The Array Ensemble is widely recognized for its innovative, eclectic repertoire and for consistently virtuosic performances. The Ensemble is also prized for commissioning composers young to old, new to established, from all cultures, and working with them to create the ultimate performance experience.
Array’s group has premiered hundreds of works by notable Canadian and International composers who have written for them, including Jo Kondo, Walter Zimmermann, Christian Wolff, Terry Riley, James Tenney, Claude Vivier, Gerald Barry, Raven Chacon, Dai Fujikura, Nicole Lizee (and former Artistic Directors) Linda Catlin Smith, Martin Arnold, and Allison Cameron. Arraymusic’s members have studied the rich patrimony of classical music, as well as many other traditional and emerging musics but, collectively, are fully contemporary, open and unorthodox in their approach.
Tours have included appearances at the Athens, Huddersfield, Belfast, and Vienna Modern Festivals, Festival Musiques en Scène in Lyon, New Music America, and the North American New Music Festival. Arraymusic has released 5 compact discs under its own name – Strange City/Ville Étrange, Chroma, New World, Music from Big Pictures, 25 Miniatures, Arraylive! and Array Legacy – all acclaimed for their artistic excellence and high production values; other performances are available on compilation discs.
At its heart, this ensemble is full of wit, humanity and imagination in possession of a distinctive vigour that makes it one of Canada’s true, if under-discovered, national treasures.
WHAT THEY SAY…
“One of Canada’s finest new music groups.” — Glen Hall, Exclaim
“One of North America’s more astonishing founts of new music…” — The Village Voice
“Some of the most exciting performance works of this century…” — The Globe and Mail
“… a virtuoso display of timing and technique.” — The Toronto Star
“… leaves the audience speechless before they stand to break into applause. This ensemble is a model for all musicians — ‘contemporary’ or not.” — Bulletin de Collectif et Cie, Annecy
“… this sophisticated and refined septet of first-rate players from Toronto would compel and fascinate any pair of ears… Arraymusic’s sound was radiant.” — The Mail-Star, Halifax
“Their ensemble playing is of enviable precision…they function like a music machine, but above and beyond this they prevail and breathe life into the performance. … Arraymusic’s musicians… seduce with expansive, sensuous sounds.” — Basel (Switzerland)
“A serious ambassador of the [North] American avant garde.” — Mannheimer Morgen
“I want to thank and congratulate you on a fine performance yesterday in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre. It was the perfect program for that crowd and, judging by the audience response, you won over some new supporters for the contemporary cause. The combination of your artistic integrity and the warm, insightful, entertaining commentary with the obvious joy of your music making made for a really dynamic and engaging hour.” — Nina Draganic, Former Programming Director, Canadian Opera Company’s Noon-hour Series
Duo Cichorium
Series: Playscape Emporium
Duo Cichorium is the collaborative identity of Jaz Tsui and Louis Pino. Hailed as “truly multi-faceted artists, skillful in a dizzying array of media”, they blend musical performance, custom electronics, visual art, theater, puppetry, and more to present multimedia works rooted in play, absurdity, and abstraction. Tsui and Pino hold Masters degrees in percussion from the University of Toronto, specializing in improvisation, music technology, and percussion theater. The duo began at the University’s Technology and Performance Research (TaPIR) Lab, where their contributions included six international conference presentations, seven new works, and a peer-reviewed publication.
Their artistic practice integrates a wide range of non-musical abilities—such as computer programming, circuit design, painting, sewing, animation, and sculpture. Noteworthy creations include a two-player synthesizer controlled by paint on a canvas, audio-reactive lighting built into upcycled instruments created from discarded furniture, promotional video games, and a 6-foot paper tree sculpture for video projection mapping.
The duo’s commitment to their community has manifested both in academic leadership and concert production. In the Spring 2024 Semester, they led a student group at Toronto Metropolitan University, working to increase awareness and accessibility to non-generative AI-based artistic tools. During their residency at Toronto’s Tranzac Club, they produced seven concerts pairing improvised music with local artists from different fields including poetry, puppetry, animation, and film. Now, as curators at ArrayMusic, they are producing six more concerts over the next three years, highlighting storytelling in different artistic media through new co-created interdisciplinary works.
Louis Pino:
Louis Pino is a percussionist, electronicist, and software engineer, working in a wide range of musical genres and other media. His performative and compositional practices are mostly influenced by cyclical time, neural entrainment, and the sound of his cat’s purr. Pino prefers to work on music incorporating multiple forms of media and technology, regularly creating works and producing concerts to reflect these interests. More recently, Pino has been applying these ideas to his ensemble, Duo Cichorium, along with fellow percussionist and interdisciplinary artist Jasmine Tsui. Pino is an active chamber musician, acting as both percussionist and Technical Director of Toronto based chamber ensemble, The Happenstancers. Pino is also a founding member of The Black Fish Ensemble, and is featured on their Juno nominated album, The Black Fish. As an orchestral player, Pino maintains an active performance schedule with The Canadian National Arts Centre Orchestra, Thunder Bay Symphony, and Kingston Symphony among others.
In addition to performance and composition, Pino is an avid educator and researcher. He gives regular masterclasses on snare drum performance at the University of Toronto, along with additional workshops on the visual coding language Max/MSP. From 2021 to 2023, Pino was Research Associate and Lab Manager at the Technology and Performance Integration Research Lab at the University of Toronto, focusing on musical biofeedback, collaborative multimedia composition, and pedagogical live electronics. His contributions to the lab’s output included five international academic conference presentations and a peer-reviewed paper publication.
Jaz Tsui:
Jaz Tsui is an interdisciplinary artist specializing in percussion performance, contemporary improvisation, and visual art. Their artistic output usually incorporates bright colors, noise, theatrics, and electronic processing. As an art-maker, Jaz takes great joy in blending art forms — drawing from their background of drawing, musical performance, and dance — and exploring the multitude of ways these practices can influence, inspire, and interact with each other. Having a colourful and versatile musical background, Jaz has had various performance opportunities spanning orchestral and chamber music to noise-based free improvisation. In their free time, Jaz likes to bake focaccia and take care of isopods.
Jaz holds a Masters Degree in percussion performance as well as an Advanced Certificate in performance from the University of Toronto, studying under the tutelage of Aiyun Huang, Beverley Johnston, and Charles Settle. She is a co-founder of Duo Cichorium with friend and collaborator, Louis Pino
Enter Duo Cichorium’s Playscape Emporium, a six-part series built around storytelling through cross-disciplinary collaboration. Each event in the series will feature a distinct artistic medium, blending music, dance, theater, visual art, poetry, puppetry, and video games. Duo Cichorium and their guest artists will craft unique narratives that blend their creative styles, resulting in unpredictable and engaging performances.
OF DANCES AND DREAMS explores the surreal nature of existence through choreography in Angela Blumberg’s The Great Dream, followed by an improvised dance and music set featuring Duo Cichorium and the ensemble Teething. ARCADE-PALOOZA merges gaming with live music, with sets by Toronto gaming and music ensemble Render File, culminating in the premiere of Duo Cichorium’s interactive multimedia work, The Sylvan Legacy. THEATRICS showcases theatrical chamber music with Rzewski’s Fall of the Empire and the premiere of Domenic Clarke’s Adore, concluding with Raymond Luedeke’s whimsical Garbage Delight featuring Hee-Soo Yoon and the Toronto Saxophone Collective. PAINT, PLAY focuses on improvisation driven by visual art, including Duo Cichorium’s Canvas Conductor and interactive installations, featuring the work of Constant Yen, Rowan Campbell, and the duo’s own Jasmine Tsui. PUPPET ZONE highlights the collaboration between puppetry and music, featuring Mabel Wonnacott’s Paper Man and the premiere of Cheyenne McLean and Mark Terrett’s Puppet Musical with live foley and music by Duo Cichorium and guest musicians. Finally POETRY GALACTICA presents co-creations between Duo Cichorium and two Toronto-based poets, including a poetry play by Nicci Pryce and poetry opera by Nevada-Jane Arlow, blending theatrical narratives, structured improvisation, and poetic expression.
Zoma Madueke
Series: Behaviours
Zoma is a sound and installation artist and new media instructor. She uses experimental technology and practices to create personal, intuitive and didactic experiences with sound production and performance. She explores the digital and electronic tools used to create and experience sonic artwork, conducts research in music technology, and designs and builds interfaces for digital media production. Zoma currently teaches graphic design and new media at OCAD University and TMU.
“Behaviours features artist-musicians who boldly integrate digital technology and interactivity into musical production and performance. Each installment aims to uncover new practices in both creating sound work and relaying new discoveries via performance and presentation. In this series, I will question the traditional performance space and the conditions it creates for listening experiences, challenge those conditions, and create new experiences.
As an artist, I’m greatly inspired by the community and innovation built through the development of collaborative technology. Computer programming and interactive media software, for example, have provided many of us with a more in-depth perspective on the quality and science of sound. These tools have also given us infrastructure to co-create with other musicians and with audiences. In programming, “behaviours” are tasks that are performed based on a given input. They take in information and transmit a corresponding result. They are inherently interactive and function on a user-defined logic.
With or without digital technology, I’m fascinated by artists who are able to create personalized systems of logic in which their sound works exist, and create connections with others.
In my time at Array, I look forward to working with musicians in the fields of sound installation & sculpture, computer programming, sound toys & games, invention, and traditional performance that centers interactivity. In softening the barrier between artist and performer, Behaviours will present novel and impactful sound art performances.”
Zoma Maduekwe
Zoma is a sound and installation artist and new media instructor. She uses experimental technology and practices to create personal, intuitive and didactic experiences with sound production and performance. She explores the digital and electronic tools used to create and experience sonic artwork, conducts research in music technology, and designs and builds interfaces for digital media production. Zoma currently teaches graphic design and new media at OCAD University and TMU.
Bekah Simms (Co-Composer-in-Residence)
The music of composer Bekah Simms possesses an enormous sonic palette: timbrally vibrant and ranging from superabundant electronic grotesquerie to lush microtonal waves of sound, their varied musical output has been heralded as “cacophonous, jarring, oppressive — and totally engrossing!” (CBC Music) and praised for its “sheer range of ingenious material, expressive range and sonic complexity” (The Journal of Music.) Propelled equally by wonderment and terror toward the universe, Bekah’s music creates instances of sonic fascination that focus on the raw compelling power of abstract sound, often interweaving the muscularity of metal; formal abandon of prog; tenderness of folk; and extracted fragments of other popular musics.
The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Barlow Prize, and a JUNO Award for Classical Composition of the Year (alongside two additional nominations in the same category), Bekah is one of the most lauded Canadian composers of their generation. They have been a finalist for the Gaudeamus Prize and commissioned by and performed at major festivals across Europe and North America including Wien Modern, Time:Spans, Gaudeamus Newmuziekwrek, ACHT BRÜCKEN, Music on Main, and New Music Dublin, premieres at the latter which were twice described as “highlights of the festival” by the Journal of Music in 2021 and 2024. She has worked with some of the top interpreters of contemporary music internationally, including Crash Ensemble – with with whom she was artist-in-residence from 2022-2024 – Nikel, Riot Ensemble, Quatuor Bozzini, Eighth Blackbird, the Zöllner-Roche Duo, and Nouvel Ensemble Moderne. Their chamber orchestra + electronics album Bestiaries was released in 2022 to critical acclaim and was included on several year end best-of lists from the US, Canada, Italy, and the UK. Their music has thrice been included in the Canadian Section’s official submission to World Music Days (2016, 2019, & 2021) and in 2023 and 2024 was chosen for inclusion in the World New Music Days in the Faroe Islands and Portugal respectively as an independent submission. In 2016 the CBC included them among their annual 30 hot classical musicians under 30.
Bekah is a Lecturer at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, following previous academic positions at the University of Toronto and University of Western Ontario.Their principal teachers during academic studies were Gary Kulesha and Andrew Staniland, alongside significant private study with Clara Iannotta and Martin Bédard.
Monica Pearce (Co-Composer-in-Residence)
Monica Pearce, originally from Prince Edward Island, is a Lansing, Michigan-based composer of new classical/contemporary music with a particular affinity for solo and chamber music, opera, and works for toy piano. After completing her Bachelor of Music at Mount Allison University with a focus on piano and composition, Monica completed her Masters of Music in Composition at the University of Toronto.
Pearce’s work has been performed and commissioned by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, International Contemporary Ensemble, New Music Detroit, Chamber Cartel, Array Ensemble, Talisker Players, Essential Opera, Bicycle Opera Project, New Fangled Opera, TorQ Percussion Quartet, junctQín keyboard collective, Thin Edge New Music Collective, Ryan Scott, SHHH!! Ensemble, among others. She won the Harry Freedman Award for her harpsichord work toile de jouy, commissioned by Wesley Shen. She was named winner of the Heliconian Choir and Orchestra’s New Music Competition for Emerging Female Composers for her piece You Know Me. She also received the Canadian Music Centre’s Toronto Emerging Composer Award Honourable Mention for her project it plays (because it plays). She received the honourable mention for her toy piano solo work clangor, which was premiered by Margaret Leng Tan at the UnCaged Toy Piano Festival in New York City. She was the composer-in-residence for the O.K. Quoi?! festival in Sackville, New Brunswick, where she created a community soundscape project entitled Sounds of Sackville. Her work The Flag was chosen as winner for the Creative Women at the End of the First World War Composition Competition. She had been featured on I Care If You Listen for her works chain maille and damask.
Her operas have been performed across Canada and the United States, and toured across Ontario, and her toy piano works are frequently played internationally. In October 2022, she released her debut album Textile Fantasies, a multi-work piece that includes eight works inspired by textiles and patterns. Called “vivid,” “pleasantly intricate,” “imaginative and meaningful,” by reviewers, this recording features performances by leading Canadian musicians such as keyboardists Cheryl Duvall, Wesley Chen, Barbara Pritchard, and Joseph Ferretti, tabla player Shawn Mativetsky, as well as renowned ensembles TorQ Percussion and SHHH!! Ensemble.
Monica co-founded the emerging composer collective the Toy Piano Composers in 2008 with Chris Thornborrow. From 2008 to 2018, the Toy Piano Composers presented over 120 new works and released their debut album Toy Piano Composers.
In addition to her work as a composer, she is also active as a librettist and has worked with composer Cecilia Livingston on a Dora-nominated opera on the life of Anne Frank entitled Singing Only Softly. Her written works have been performed by Essential Opera, Loose Tea Theatre, Bicycle Opera Project, Opera Nova Scotia, Vocalypse Productions, Caution Tape Sound Collective, and the Toy Piano Composers.