As part of its composer concert series, the UBC School of Music held a concert at Roy Barnett Recital Hall to spotlight new contemporary works by UBC composition students. The composers presented four original works which varied in instrumentation, technique and theme.
Composer Nathan Racey opened the concert with “Meditations,” a work for guitar and electronic components in four movements. Each movement corresponded to a natural element; earth, fire, water and air. Racey sat on the floor in the centre of the stage, positioned inside a conifer wreath with twinkle lights woven through the branches and a pink Himalayan salt lamp turned toward the audience. A light wrapped around his neck allowed him to see the guitar as the lights in the hall dimmed.
In a brief introduction before the piece, Racey mentioned its run-time — roughly 10 minutes — and encouraged the audience to close their eyes if they wished. The first movement began with recorded birdsong and a voiceover repeating the words “I am home,” over which Racey played the guitar, often mirroring the repetition. As one movement bled into the next, the recorded sounds shifted; from birdsong to footsteps, windstorms, rain, a stream. As the piece reached the end the soundscapes faded, leaving a single melodic guitar line until that too turned to silence.
Following this was an improvised violin duo incorporating a live looping device by composition student Kelk Jeffery and performance student Grace Alexander. Titled “Crackling Knapweed” after the invasive thistle found in parts of North America, Jeffery and Alexander said they sought to convey the idea of this noxious weed spreading like wildfire through playback loops.
In an interview with The Ubyssey, Alexander said she encountered knapweed while growing up in the Rocky Mountains region of Montana. She was affected by the plant's simultaneous beauty and ability to deeply root itself in the grasslands, killing species and destroying ecosystems in its wake. Like the knapweed, she said, looped melodies “can be really beautiful on the surface, but it can also really get ingrained in your mind … Looping gives you that ability to to have a melody stuck in your head in perpetuity.”
The performance began with Jeffery creating the titular crackling sound by drawing her bow across the violin’s strings in a slow, repetitive motion. This was one of the motifs that remained consistent throughout the performances — an allusion to wildfires, which are also consistently on Alexander’s mind thanks to her work in forest conservation.
The piece itself was something of a new challenge for Jeffery and Alexander. “Crackling Knapweed” began as an assignment in a course for loop medals and string instruments. Jeffery described the class as “small and intimate” — with only six students in total. They typically study and perform classical repertoire, and had hesitations around working in electronic elements. “I had very little experience or even really desire to do anything with electronics. It really stressed me out,” Jeffery said. Having the expertise of their professor, Ryan Davis, who was on hand during performances, helped ease some of those anxieties — “if I encounter a problem, it's not going to derail everything,” she said. They’ve used other “non-traditional techniques,” such creating rhythm by knocking directly on the body of the violin, which Jeffery said “has been really rewarding and enriching.”
The concert’s third piece, When in Silence, by composition student Aisha Tishall-McPhee consisted of a string trio written by composition student Aisha Tishall-McPhee and performed by Ouwen Huang (violin), Galland Chan (violin) and Judah John Williams (cello). The composer hoped to convey some of the “melancholic aspects of living abroad” in the music. An extended pizzicato passage seemed to conjure some of the anxieties associated with a new environment.
For the fourth and final presentation, doctor in musical arts of composition candidate Marko Marinic presented three tracks from his 2025 ambient album Night Owl (released through Redshift Music), with accompanying visuals. All three components — “Go Gently” “Blue Iris” and “Laku Noć” (‘Good night’ in Croatian) — featured guitar among other electronic elements. As the recording shuffled through the three pieces, a projector displayed Marinic’s visuals on a screen — shades of green and blue, purple and pink oscillated with accented notes. During “Laku Noć,” the screen showed an inky magenta spiral turning in and outside of itself, then migrating to either side of the circle, coming to resemble a labyrinth.
