EL MAHBOOB

Tag: music

  • 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.

  • 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

  • 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.