EL MAHBOOB

Category: Toronto

  • 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.

  • 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

  • Arraymusic New Encounters II

    On Saturday, February 15, 2025, Arraymusic presents the second in a concert series I’ve titled New Encounters. In-person and livestream tickets available here. I curated this program, and it’s wonderful to assist in bringing these composers to a new audience.

    Curator’s Note: The idea of the New Encounters concert, in contrast to its older cousin Four New Works, is that the pieces on the program are previously unheard by Arraymusic audiences if not all world premieres. This year, we’re fortunate that all four works will indeed be premieres, two of them arrangements by Pouya Hamidi and Morgan-Paige Melbourne of their existing music, and two freshly minted compositions by Maria-Eduarda Mendes Martins and Eldritch Priest. These creators are from very different sound worlds, and I’m excited for those to align in one evening with the Array Ensemble.

  • In Conversation with Stephanie Chua and Adam Sherkin

    On Thursday, November 14th, I will be part of Artists in Conversation, discussing my piano compositions in person with junctQín keyboard collective‘s Stephanie Chua and Piano Lunaire‘s Adam Sherkin, and listening to them perform solo selections of mine that they are also playing in concerts during November. Questions and input from those in attendance are welcome. Details are below.

    Date & Time: Thursday, November 14th, 7:30 pm (doors 7:00 pm)
    Location: Arraymusic, 155 Walnut Ave, 2nd floor, Toronto
    Admission: Free
    Duration: 1 hour
    Register your attendance in advance: info@pianolunaire.org

    Go to my Events page to see the concerts related to this event.

    There is also a Facebook event page.

  • World Premiere of For Celine by Piano Lunaire

    On Sunday, November 10, 2024, Piano Lunaire will give the world concert premiere of For Celine (1995, dedicated to my niece). “Fourths + Fifths” (2012, from Children’s Suite) will also be performed. These two short pieces are part of Composers in Play XII: Still Reeling, an expansive program that highlights world premieres by Charlie Piper, composer and pianist Christopher Mayo, and composer, pianist and Piano Lunaire co-founder Adam Sherkin, as well as music by Allison Cameron, David Sawer and Sean Shepherd. The concert will take place at 3 pm at Arts & Letters Club, Toronto. Doors open at 2:30 pm.

    On Saturday, November 23, 2024, the same program will be performed, with songs by Emily Hall sung by Nathaniel Sullivan in place of the Cameron work. This concert will take place at 8pm at the Tenri Cultural Institute, New York City.

    I performed For Celine several times in the late 90s in informal settings, always from memory with a variable duration and improvised details. I’m excited to have it played for the first time in its notated form by an expert performer in fine settings. This will also be the first time “Fourths + Fifths” has been performed as a standalone work, and its second appearance on a program since Stephen Clarke premiered the complete Children’s Suite at Arraymusic in 2020.

    I’m grateful for the opportunity to have my work presented by Adam and Christopher, two wonderfully accomplished artists.

  • Perhaps Bells: New Piano Music by Bruce A. Russell

    Perhaps Bells: New Piano Music by Bruce A. Russell

    On November 16th, 2024, my second portrait concert “Perhaps Bells” will take place at Arraymusic, with much anticipated performances by the adventurous and multi-talented junctQín keyboard collective. This is a special program I’ve been hoping to hear since the start of my Array residency. It’s all piano solos and duos, all world premieres of work composed in the 90s and 00s when there were few audiences or concerts if any, and includes a new arrangement of Madra (originally for variable instrumentation). These pieces relate directly to my recent ones written for Array and other ensembles. They were created under the influence of American and Canadian minimalists, popular music in general, and a more expansive list that includes Wally Badarou, Harold Budd, John Cage, Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, Henryk Górecki, Kraftwerk, Arvo Pärt, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Erik Satie, Ann Southam, Linda Catlin Smith, and James Tenney.

    On the same weekend, Freesound will present their season opening program in the Array Space (“Music for Piano Quartet II,” November 15th and 17th), making for an exciting mini-fest of contemporary concert music.

    Stay tuned for another piano announcement (November is my piano month) and more.