eFlash! 2007-10

Assemblée  générale  annuelle 2007 Annual General Meeting

Mot du président / Word from the President

Sunday October 14, 2007, Green Room, Oscar Peterson Concert Hall, Concordia University. [The following report addresses CEC activities for the 2006–7 fiscal year, as well as some activities underway in the current fiscal year, June 1 2007 through May 31 2007.]

CEC Board

The CEC Board remains unchanged from last year:

President: Ian Stewart (2004–2008) Vice President: Laurie Radford (2004–2008) Treasurer: David Ogborn (2006–2009) Secretary: Jean Routhier (2001–2009) Member-at-Large: Kevin Austin (1998–2009) Member-at-Large: Shawn Pinchbeck (2006–2008)

The past year has been an enormously successful one for the CEC. In particular, the CEC has had unprecedented success in obtaining funding for certain special initiatives, detailed below, while continuing to improve its core activities.

eContact!

The CEC has published a further four editions of eContact!, focusing on the 2007 Jeu de temps project, Electroacoustics in The Prairies, Hearing Loss, and Mastering in Electroacoustics. While many design improvements have been implemented over the past two years, the scope and depth of content has also improved dramatically. This is largely due to the editorial commitment of jef chippewa, and to the invaluable contributions of the many members of our community who have written for the journal. http://www.econtact.ca

Sonus

Sonus now contains over 2000 electroacoustic works. The site is receiving nearly 10,000 unique visits per month, and continues to receive positive feedback from listeners and educators. The electroacoustic archiving project, summarized below, will introduce to Sonus a wealth of Canadian electroacoustic work from the 1970s and 1980s, a period which is currently underrepresented in the library. Sonus has at times experienced technical difficulties over the past year, and the CEC is committed to ensuring greater stability in the future. http://www.sonus.ca

Jeu de temps / Times Play

This year, forty-six young and emerging sonic artists contributed work to Jeu de temps / Times Play, the largest number of Canadian submissions in the project’s history, and nearly double the number from the 2006 edition. It is encouraging to hear such a high standard of work from a new generation of Canadian composers. I extend my congratulations to all participants, and particularly Dominic Thibault, who received the first prize from the jury for his work Nuit noire, Nuit grise. The project is documented in eContact! 10.1, and the top works will be available on the next edition of the Cache CD series. https://cec.sonus.ca/jttp

Funding

I am especially pleased to report on the CEC’s success over the past year in obtaining funding for a variety of special initiatives:

• The CEC received a project grant from the Creators’ Assistance program of the Canada Music Fund, administered by the SOCAN Foundation to fund a series of eight educational seminars and concerts across Canada. Led by Dominique Bassal and Jean-Luc Louradour, these seminars will address sound quality, monitoring, and mastering in electroacoustic production. Each seminar will conclude with a concert of Canadian electroacoustic work. The seminars will run from October 17 to November 3. Further information is available at https://cec.sonus.ca/education/workshops2007.
• An application to the Langlois Foundation for a Strategic Grant for Organizations to cover remaining costs in the Seminars project was unsuccessful. The Foundation indicated that the CEC had made a strong application that fell completely within the Foundation’s mandate, but all new funding for the remainder of 2007 and for all of 2008 has unfortunately been frozen.
• An application to the Canada Council's Audience and Marketing Development Travel Grant programme for the shipping (cargo) and travel costs of the Seminars project was judged to not correspond well enough to the programme mandate for it to be supported through this programme. However, the officers who assessed our application felt it was a very strong project that deserves to be supported by the Canada Council and forwarded it on to the Music Section to see about funding possibilities. At the time of this report, a decision is pending.
• Heritage Canada, through its Canada Culture Online program, has provided a substantial grant, the largest in the CEC’s history, for a project to restore the collection of historic Canadian electroacoustic work housed in the Concordia electroacoustic music archive. These works, currently stored on decaying analog tape or other obsolete formats, will be transferred to digital format, and composer permissions will be sought to make as many of these works as possible available through Sonus. The project will also form the basis of eLearning educational modules about the historical development of Canadian electroacoustics, and the entire project will be documented in an upcoming special issue of eContact!. Further information is available at https://cec.sonus.ca/education/archive.
• An application to the Canada Council’s Supplementary Initiative for funding a promotional campaign for core CEC activities was successful. The grant will be used to produce and distribute promotional materials for eContact! and Sonus.

In addition, the CEC continues to receive funding for its core projects. Unusually, the Cache 2005 CD project did not receive funding, but I am pleased to report that an application to the Canada Council for the Arts for Cache 2006 was successful, and Cache is again receiving financial support. eContact! continues to receive funding from the Canada Council for the Arts Publishing Section, at a level consistent with past years, and is now funded through edition 11.4 (Spring 2009). The CEC also continues to receive core funding from the SOCAN Foundation.

Other Projects and Issues

CEC Treasurer David Ogborn served as the CEC’s representative to the ISCM Canadian Section jury. Frank Koustrup’s electroacoustic work Nasal Beat was among the six works selected, as was Jean Routhier’s interactive installation IN[]EX.

David was also the key person in the coordination of the August 2007 Toronto Electroacoustic Symposium, co-produced by the CEC, the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto and New Adventures in Sound Art. Composers and sound artists from Toronto, across Canada and the United States discussed their work in paper sessions, and an evening concert gave the opportunity to the symposium participants and guests to perform electronic, live electronic and improvised music. https://cec.sonus.ca/events/tes

I note with some concern that there have been no new applications to the CEC Board this year. I consider it vital for the long-term sustainability of CEC activities to have some renewal among board positions, and particularly to involve younger Canadians in CEC activities. I intend to initiate discussions with the board about what the CEC can do, in addition to the Jeu de temps / Times Play project, to encourage the next generation of Canadian composers to become involved with CEC decisionmaking.

With my very best wishes,

Ian Stewart
President of the CEC Board
Saturday, October 13, 2007