NB Contemporary Music Festival 2024

November 22-24, 2024 in Fredericton

Now in its sixth year, the NB Contemporary Music Festival brings new, ground-breaking experimental music to New Brunswick audiences. This three-concert collection explores new music from women composers at the intersections between classical and contemporary idioms.

This year’s theme, Echoes, touches on the overlapping ripple effects of cyclical world events and personal displacements. It asks:  How can contemporary composition and performance convey the isolation, grief, and chaos of loss, while offering hope for community and a better future?

Concert 1 “Hidden Presence” at Memorial Hall, UNB Fredericton, capstones a year-long community-engaged project where sounds and images gathered by the public on artist-guided nature walks structure an improvised work addressing biodiversity and climate change. Works by Canadian composers Juliet Palmer and Hildegard Westerkamp round out the program.

Concert 2  “Offrande” at Christ Church Cathedral, presents an intimate program of works for organ alongside cello, violin, piano and flute by the late composers Kaija Saariaho (1952-2023) and Rachel Laurin (1961-2023), interweaving the personal/introspective with the public/interpersonal across theme, setting, process and performance.

Concert 3 “Women of the North” at Memorial Hall, UNB Fredericton, features a new commissioned work by Yellowknife composer Carmen Braden for violin, piano, voice, audio track and video, drawn from personal experiences of displacement in the 2023 NWT wildfire season. Works by Canadian composer Cassandra Miller and Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldottir complete the program.

The NB Contemporary Music Festival is supported by funding from artnsnb, GNB Arts in Communities, University of New Brunswick and the Shaw Foundation.