Chit-Chat

For Saxophone and Piano

PREMIERE: MARCH 15, 2024 - Harrington/Loewen Duo - NORTH AMERICAN SAXOPHONE ALLIANCE CONFERENCE

Imagine a lyrical conversation between two master musicians. Starting in close alignment, then breaking into long soliloquies, and even descending into the playful babble of a pair of toddlers trying out their first words and phrases.

Chit-Chat uses these conversational metaphors to weave two quite different instruments into a single unit. As the piece unfolds the unit splits into a clear duo, in debate, and elsewhere splinters further to create cascading multiplicities of gestures that build rich, complex textures.

By turns exuberant and austere, the language of the piece is indebted to the modes and machinations of Olivier Messiaen, Franco Donatoni, Enno Poppe and Christophe Bertrand. The composer acknowledges, with much appreciation, the Harrington/Loewen Duo for taking on this project.

Manifold

For orchestra

CURRENTLY IN REVISION

We are time travellers, place shifters, moving from one plateau to another. Imagine yourself in the city: chaotic, busy, interrupted. There can be a beauty when you step back but you must plod forth. Nine-to-five is the grind. Your soul feels an ever present weight. Then, perhaps, direct your thoughts to a walk in the country, in a field, through a poplar bluff, following an old wagon track. Then up and out, perhaps to thousand-foot cliffs abutting a vast ocean. Cliffs that have withstood a billion slow waves crashing in and up their ruddy flanks. Then onwards, to an unknown destination.

These might be metaphors to help navigate the musical textures and spaces you will traverse in Manifold.

Biography

Neil Middleton writes colourful and intense instrumental and electronic music that has been performed by ensembles including Harrington/Loewen Duo, Portmantô, Ensemble In Extensio, the GEMS ensemble, Trio Arabesque, the McGill Contemporary Music Ensemble, the McGill Wind Symphony, the Saskatoon Composers’ Performance Society, the Scherzo Saxophone Quartet, and members of the Saskatoon Symphony Orchestra.

After pursuing an initial career as a composer, Neil moved into arts administration working with new music ensembles and orchestras including the Société de Musique Contemporaine du Quebec, Soundstreams, The Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra and most recently as VP of Marketing & Sales with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. During the COVID crisis Neil developed a deep need to return to making music and started composing full-time again in 2022. 

Current projects include a new work for symphony orchestra, Chit-Chat for saxophone/piano duo, a piece for string quartet and a new electronic part for my successful clarinet duet As Rock Fades to Earth.

Neil holds a MMus in composition from McGill University and BMus from the University of Saskatchewan. He is past composer-in-residence for the McGill Wind Symphony. His principal teachers were Robert Lemay and Brian Cherney. Neil has participated in workshops and masterclasses with Cornelis de Bondt, Pascal Dusapin, Luca Francesconi, Denys Bouliane, and Jean Lesage. His current influences include the music of Franco Donatoni, Enno Poppe, Christophe Bertrand, Georg-Friedrich Haas, and Jamaaladeen Tacuma.

 As an offshoot of his compositional work, Neil contributed a chapter on Brian Cherney’s “Die Klingende Zeit” to Compositional Crossroads (McGill/Queens University Press, 2008) and co-authored “The Musical Significance of Clarinetists’ Ancillary Gestures” in the Journal of New Music Research (2005).