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.
Arraymusic’s Curator/Composers-in-Residence are generously sponsored by Chantal Perrot.
Array Music Curators
John Farah
Series: Sonic Archaeology
John Kameel Farah is a Canadian composer and pianist whose work embraces aspects of Baroque and Early music, Improvisation, Middle-Eastern music and forms of Electronic music.
Born near Toronto in 1973 to Palestinian parents, he studied composition and piano at the University of Toronto, where he received the Glenn Gould Composition Award twice during his studies. In 1999 he had private lessons with Terry Riley in California, and later at the Arabic Music Retreat in Hartford. He composes for ensembles, dance and film, but largely focuses on live solo concerts, using a setup which surrounds the piano with synthesizers, as well as processing the piano through computer filters and effects, referring to his approach as “Baroque-Mid-Eastern-Cyberpunk”.
He occasionally presents his side-project, “Music for Organ and Synthesizers”, looping and altering the pipe organ’s sound in combination with analog and digital synths in various churches and cathedrals throughout Canada and Europe.
Collaborations have included several scores for iconic Canadian choreographer Peggy Baker, and rising ballet star Robert Binet. He has also worked with astrophysicist John Dubinski, composing soundtracks to animations of galaxy formations and collisions in a project called “Gravitas”. In 2010 he became a member of the Canadian Electronic Ensemble, the oldest continuously active live-electronic performing group in the world. In Berlin, he frequently works with the Oriel String Quartet and the early vocal ensemble Vox Nostra. In 2016 he received a Dora Mavor Moore Award for sound design/composition for his work with Peggy Baker Dance Projects. In 2023 he was invited as guest artist to perform with the iconic electronic band Tangerine Dream in Toronto.
Also a visual artist, Farah creates intricate and detailed ink line-drawings. which draw inspiration from astronomy, sound waves, and Near-Eastern history and mythology. He has presented his artwork at solo and group exhibitions, sometimes featuring live projections of them during concerts.
Farah regularly performs across Europe, and has toured throughout the U.K and North America, as well as South Korea, Brazil, Mexico, and Israel/Palestine. He has given concert-lectures at several universities in both Canada and Germany and has performed his work in some of Europe’s most prestigious venues, such as Berlin’s Volksbühne and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the Kölner Philharmonie, Sadler’s Wells in London and the Elbphilharmonic in Hamburg, and most recently at the Berlin Philharmonic.In 2023 John performed Bach’s complete Well-Tempered Clavier from memory in Berlin, connecting each key with improvisations and electronics. He is currently doing a composition residency with the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa, Canada, writing a new work for piano and orchestra to be premiered in 2025. In 2023 he was a recipient of the Johanna Metcalf Award for the Performing Arts, from the Metcalf Foundation and Ontario Arts Council.
Stepping away from rigid, academic classical traditions, the series celebrates musicians who express their engagement with the world through original creation, live electronics, extended techniques, and non-Western modal systems—with a strong focus on West Asia, North Africa, the Global South, and Early Music reinterpretations.
This six-concert series also foregrounds composer-performers whose artistic practices are intrinsically bound to a deep ethical consciousness, and progressive political awareness. The featured artists do not need to deliver overt political speeches from the stage; rather, their commitment to global solidarity, social justice, and human dignity forms the invisible architecture of their sound.
Through free improvisation, electroacoustic experimentation, and cross-cultural dialogue, this series creates a space where musical innovation directly reflects a profound responsibility to the world we inhabit.
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.
Co-curators / Composers-in-Residence
Series: Array Ensemble
Bekah Simms
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
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.
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