EL MAHBOOB

expressing black mood

  • ex aliis matres (live)

    I’m very happy to announce an encore performance of my second quartet for strings, ex aliis matres (2024), by Katya Poplyansky, Julia McFarlane, Caitlin Boyle, and Rebecca Morton as part of the program “Sounds of Resilience,” for 5 at the First Chamber Music Series. The concert will also include selections from Dvořák’s Cypresses and Shostakovich’s iconic and timely String Quartet No. 8. First Unitarian Church, 170 Dundurn St S, Hamilton, Ontario, January 31, 2026, 3 pm.

    ex aliis matres (“from other mothers”) is an autobiographical dedication, a thematic embodiment of my origin story, and a spiritual sequel to my first quartet, Madra. It was commissioned by the Isabel Quartet with generous support from the Ontario Arts Council and premiered at the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts at Queen’s University in February 2025.

    The second movement, “The Soo,” references the nickname for Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Canada, where I was raised by my adoptive family. It’s the most complex movement, a dreamscape evoking feelings of spiritual alienness and loss from my childhood. A six-note motif is developed extensively through canonic layering (i.e. canon chorales) and chordal variations. The harmony is sometimes systematic, generally modal, and sometimes intuitive and nostalgic.

    The audio of this movement is excerpted from the live recording of the premiere.

    The Isabel Quartet:
    Katya Poplyansky, violin
    Julia McFarlane, violin
    Caitlin Boyle, viola
    Wolf Tormann, cello

    Image: Isabel Quartet, screenshot, February 2025

    Music and composer’s notes copyright Bruce A. Russell 2026

  • ex tempore (live)

    ex tempore, for small ensemble (2024) 9′
    Commissioned by Arraymusic with support from SOCAN

    Premiered February 1, 2024 at the Array Space, Toronto
    This is an excerpt from the concert recording made by
    Matt Legge, House & Production Manager

    The Array Ensemble:
    Stephen Tam, flute
    Colleen Cook, clarinet
    Aiyun Huang, marimba & vibraphone
    Sheila Jaffé, violin
    Lydia Munchinsky, cello
    David Schotzko, conductor

    With just over two weeks to go before the world premiere of my newest work blood of infinity at Arraymusic’s upcoming New Encounters concert, I present an excerpt from an earlier commission by the Array Ensemble.

    ex tempore premiered in the first of three New Encounters concerts that I curated, alongside works by Hanna Benn, Anthony R. Green, and Kathryn Patricia Cobbler. The work is dedicated in memory of Ann Southam, a pioneer in Canadian composition and for women in this field. During a radio interview in 1999, I asked her if she had advice for young composers to which she responded, “Don’t get pushed around by influences, just listen to your own voice as much as you can.”

    I intend neither to be pushed around by influences and expectations of so-called new music, nor to avoid influences altogether but rather incorporate them in a way that represents me. Much of Canadian composition occupies a rigorous, expansive and rarefied sonic space, often in a singular and compelling way. I feel contemporary concert music can also be diasporic, folksy, terse like pop, and still sometimes exploratory.

    The title is meant to suggest several possible meanings, including something improvised, a snap judgement, and the temporal expansion characteristic of Southam’s minimalist works.

    Image: Array Ensemble, screenshot from video by Matt Legge

    Music and composer’s notes copyright Bruce A. Russell 2026

  • blood of infinity – World Premieres at New Encounters

    “Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.” — Assata Shakur, 1987, 139. While sketching ideas for what would be my only composition of 2025, Shakur passed away in Havana. Her words became instruction, a history to reflect upon while seeking an intention. On January 31, 2026, David Schotzko of the Array Ensemble will give the premiere of blood of infinity, a mallet percussion solo in memoriam to this iconic freedom fighter, who died in exile without justice. This concert, New Encounters III, will be the final program I’ve created for my composer-curator residency with Array.

    The concert will include the world premiere of Palestinian Canadian composer, pianist, visual artist John Kameel Farah‘s By the Side of the Road, a special Arraymusic commission and performance collaboration. It will also mark the first concert to feature incoming co-composers in residence Bekah Simms and Monica Pearce, programming their exploratory works alongside Louisiana native Courtney Bryan‘s powerful Elegy, a response to Abel Meeropol’s composition “Strange Fruit.” Tickets for in-person or livestream are available here.

    Black Lives Matter. End Empire. Free Congo. Free Palestine. Free Sudan.

  • For Celine 1995+30

    For Celine (1995) was composed for my niece. It’s an early microcosm of my work. Happy birthday, Celine!

    The slow opening section is based on a rising and falling figure in stacked fifths, layered in parallel sixths, and layered again in close canon with the second part a dotted quarter behind the first. Zigzag bass notes in this section return at the end.

    The fast middle section presents a rhythmic variation of the stacked-fifth figure again in canon, this time with the second part two quarter notes behind the first, in a sequence that moves around the circle of fifths in A-flat major.

    The final section includes short variations on earlier material. The circle of fifths bassline from the fast section returns in diminution as a right-hand melodic pattern, on top of the zigzag bassline from the beginning in the left hand.

    Audio: post-premiere performance by Adam Sherkin, Artists in Conversation, Arraymusic, Toronto, November 2024

    Image: Adam Sherkin rehearsing for the premiere at Arts & Letters Club, Toronto, November 2024

    Music copyright Bruce A. Russell 2025

  • Double Bar

    It’s a rare treat to get to the end of a to-do list. I have no gigs or commissions pending for 2026, and hopefully some space for some necessary personal work and growth. A five-year chapter as a composer has concluded. I had a wonderful chance to share my work broadly and be recognized for the first time. To finally be able to believe that the music I make is good.

    While I didn’t compose more frequently than I had prior to this chapter, a small handful of commissions and performances came my way. The gates definitely didn’t fly open. I still feel like an outsider, it’s not easy to shake my early experiences of exclusion and wariness of the cultural politics of classical music and organizations. But I had meaningful access to platforms that I didn’t before, and rewarding collaborations; it was proof of concept.

    I find myself needing to focus once again on survival. I’ve been working to pay the rent since I was 21 and that hasn’t changed, the bills are just much bigger with three kids, years of single parenting, and a ballooning wealth gap. And the gaps in academic training, a peer group, industry network and career experience I faced diving back into music during the pandemic made it infeasible to hustle for gigs on a level that would allow me to leave behind a 9-5 job. I’ve worked for a quarter century as an executive assistant, stuck under a glass ceiling, and those bills are no longer getting fully paid, I’m afraid to say.

    I’ll admit that as I approach 60, it’s tiring to talk about balancing: I don’t have time for a music career. I never had a music career in the first place. I can hold the idea of being an active, working composer lightly, and it will be enough. I want to compose, full stop.

    I ask myself whether I have the strength and courage to keep going as an artist. I’m composing less in recent years. I’m disinterested in aesthetic and technological flexing. It’s not the fear of failure anymore but the burning desire to take a long holiday and recharge after decades of being in survival mode.

    There are things I still want to focus on. I’ve wanted to make a professionally recorded album forever, probably more than anything else. I want to write an orchestral piece, one that sounds like me. I’ve never attended an artists’ retreat or an out of town residency; that may have to wait until I’m not juggling a day job and kids.

    I cherish the connections with performers the most, with those who have premiered my work or who I’ve performed alongside. Those who showed up to concerts. Musicians will always be my people.

    The moment in 2020 when it seemed the arts world had woken to its own anti-Blackness has long passed. I’m still here, and there are many more, incredibly gifted, queer and trans, neurodivergent, BIPOC creatives living with disabilities with us in the stream. It’s important for me to hold what came out of that moment with its full weight. I have the strength for that.

  • 1995+30 líthos klásma

    líthos klásma (1995) was commissioned as the acousmatic score to the dance piece “Meshing” by Dave Wilson and the Parahumans. It premiered as part of the show Coded in October 1995. Part composition, part soundscape, it was a self-contained production on the Korg 01/WFD workstation, which was a convenient and affordable way for me to work.

    The score is typical of my style at the time, incorporating modified factory patches, ambient synth drones, drums, metallic percussion, canonic loops, and digital noise gestures. The waveform shaping, automated mixing, panning, and precision reflect several years of exploration using the above device and its predecessor, the Korg M1. 

    The workstation is set to a just intonation tuning as follows (in cents deviation from equal temperament): C -16, C# -31, D -12, D# 00, E +39, F +4, F# -33, G -14, G# -2, A -49, A# +2, B +41.

    Composed and recorded September-October 1995

    Korg 01/WFD, live transfer to CD-R, August 2000, unmastered

    Image: my birthday, January 1995

    Music and composer’s notes copyright Bruce A. Russell 2025

  • Kool & the Gang: Middle Years 74-78

    These are the years of Kool & the Gang you may not know as well. They’re just as monumental in shaping Black dance music, hip hop and sampling history as the early or peak years.

    Between the release of funk anthems culminating in the gold-certified Wild and Peaceful album and the start of a chart-topping, mainstream run with the platinum-certified Ladies’ Night, the band created some of their most refined, eclectic and inventive self-produced music. Sometimes they innovated; often, they borrowed from their contemporaries or leaned heavily on referencing earlier work, and they began to struggle for traction. Some critics didn’t get it. Throughout, the band’s work remained expertly crafted, soulful, joyous and stanky, with a positive spiritual message, all without a lead singer.

    While not easily defined as a style period, the middle years are fully evidenced in the six albums represented here. The band’s sound is saturated with influences, presenting new variations on other styles already in the air, then resolving back to their core jazz and funk roots. Virtually all of the music is driven by Robert “Kool” Bell’s bass, Ronald Bell’s (Khalis Bayyan’s) arrangements, tenor sax and spacy synths, George Brown’s solid, often-sampled drumming, and those signature horns.

    Everybody’s Dancin’ (excerpt) | Everybody’s Dancin’ (1978)
    L-O-V-E | Open Sesame (1976)
    Mighty Mighty High | The Force (1977)
    Universal Sound | Love & Understanding (1976)
    Ride the Rhythm | Spirit of the Boogie (1975)
    I Like Music | Everybody’s Dancin’
    Ancestral Ceremony | Spirit of the Boogie
    Gift of Love | Open Sesame
    Just Be True | The Force
    All Night Long | Open Sesame
    Summer Madness | Light of Worlds (1974)
    Here After | Light of Worlds
    Free | The Force
    Sunshine | Open Sesame
    Peace to the Universe | Everybody’s Dancin’
    Love & Understanding (extended version) | Kool & the Gang Spin Their Top Hits (1978)
    Spirit of the Boogie | Spirit of the Boogie

    All albums released on De-Lite Records

    Kool & the Gang: Middle Years 74-78

    Compiled 2021-22
    Lightly mixed tempos and keys, retaining original long fades
    August 2025

    Ibrahim El Mahboob

  • 1990+35 Study for Two Pianos and Tape

    Study for Two Pianos and Tape (1990) is a collaboration with Garnet Willis. We were electronic music students of Philip Werren and composition/music history students of James Tenney at York University. The piece was recorded live at a student recital, where both Werren and Tenney were in attendance. This is a single mic recording that has survived several stages of media storage.

    I created the tape by layering synth lines, drones and homemade samples, varying the tape machine speed during mixing to create glissando effects. I then added a series of very quick cuts with a razor blade and blank leader tape.

    Garnet is playing a grand piano, and me a partially prepared upright, which he later detuned while I played to create further glissando effects. The piano parts are semi-improvised around a D-flat extended/microtonal tonic centre. A classmate volunteered to mix the tape around the room speakers during the performance. There were random pans and fade ins and outs, to which we responded with active gestures, minimalism and a hint of romanticism.

    Garnet is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist, audio engineer, composer and instrument builder. I highly recommend exploring his groundbreaking work. He’s also one of the first friends I made in Toronto.

    Note: this recording is dynamic, beginning quietly and becoming loud in several segments.

    Recorded in concert, April 5, 1990, DACARY, York University
    Two pianos, reel to reel tape (Yahama DX-27, Roland S-50, DEP-5 effects)
    DAT recording transferred to cassette in 1990, transferred to CD-R in 2003

    Artwork: sketch for the concert program, artist unknown

    Music and composer’s notes copyright Bruce A. Russell 2025

  • Interview with Linda Catlin Smith

    On August 29, 1998, composer, educator and former Arraymusic Artistic Director Linda Catlin Smith walked up to the attic studio of CIUT 89.5 FM on St. George St. and gave a brilliant, illuminating, live interview on Radio Music Gallery. I was a year into hosting the show, brash and awkward, and yet made space for Linda to speak expansively about her work and ideas. She was gracious in correcting my on-air mispronunciation of her name. I was fortunate to have made this early connection, and be present for what in retrospect felt like a composition lesson.

    The source audio is an aircheck recording on cassette, digitized in July 2025. The release of this interview was authorized by Linda Catlin Smith.

    Recordings referred to during the interview:

    The Surroundings (1995), performed by Barbara Pritchard

    The View from Here (1992), performed by Barbara Pritchard

    Versailles (1988), performed by Les Coucous Bénévoles

  • 78, for piano

    For Ash (2019-21) is a short, three-movement work for solo piano dedicated to my friend, Ash Mistry. In contrast to some of my earlier piano music, there is greater focus on melodic design and variations in harmonic voicing and less on structural symmetry, balancing lyrical and systematic aspects.

    Each of the three movements explores a melodic line in two parallel voices, mostly in intervals of a third in the first movement and fourths in the other two. In the third movement—”78″—a three-note pattern rotates through pairs of notes then is layered upon itself, expanding as the harmony develops.

    The movement titles reference years in the late 1970s, evoking nostalgia for my childhood and the popular emergence of minimalism and electronic dance music. The opening chords of the first movement—the fourth, fifth and sixth degrees in the key of G-flat major, which recur in this movement—are also callback to the era.

    The music of For Ash and its main idea of two parallel voices was later used as the basis for “dyad,” the first movement of my piano trio we have lived before (2021). The material is explored differently in each instance.

    Composed March 2021, recorded March 2025, Roland digital piano

    Photo: 5:48 a.m., June solstice, 2021, Toronto

    Music and composer’s notes copyright Bruce A. Russell 2025