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eFlash! 2020-09

2020 AGM — Annual General Meeting / AGA 2020 — Assemblée générale annuelle

President’s Report / Rapport de la présidente

[ return to the index / Agenda ]

Welcome to everyone and thanks for tuning in! 1[1. The President’s Report starts at 16:57 in the audio recording of the AGM.]

Before I give CEC members an update on the association’s activities over the past year, I would like to thank all the board members for their work on behalf of the CEC.

Eldad Tsabary has stepped down after 12 years serving on the CEC Board, and on behalf of the Board I wish to thank Eldad warmly for his valuable contributions over the years. The CEC greatly benefitted from his five years as President (2013–18).

I would also like to welcome Teresa Connors as the CEC’s newest Board member — we are very pleased to have you with us! We have already enjoyed a few months of your perspectives and ideas, and we very much look forward to working with you in the coming years.

Now I would like to give an update on the CEC’s regular and ongoing activities as well as highlight some new developments.

Projects

JTTP — Jeu de temps / Times Play

I am so happy to announce results for the 21st edition of JTTP coordinated by the CEC, and in fact we have four of the winners with us online today for the AGM! Congratulations to the JTTP 2020 winners (in order of placement):

  1. Mélanie Frisoli — Le chant de la machine (2020 / 12:48)
  2. Léa Boudreau — Chaos contrôlé (ou toutes les choses qui se passent dans ma tête quand je fixe le vide) (2020 / 10:05)
  3. Simon Coovi-Sirois — Trois perspectives sur une entropie positive (2020 / 8:15)
  4. Simon Chioini — Maisons couleurs (2016 / 19:27)
  5. Jeremie Jones — Wóz no. 10 (2017 / 6:01)

Each of the JTTP 2020 winners receives prize packages of contributions by Canadian and international Project Partners, with a total worth of nearly $3000 in CDs, books and magazine subscriptions, etc. Cash prizes are also awarded to the first three winners, thanks to the generous contributions of a number of individual donors.

Webpages featuring all submissions, programme notes and composer bios, events featuring JTTP 2020 works over the coming year, the jury and Project Partners will be published online and announced to CEC members very soon.

As part of the support offered to the winners, the CEC coordinates events each year for the performance and broadcast of their works. Keep an eye on the events page on the JTTP website to stay informed about JTTP activities over the coming year. These are currently being put in place, but there are a couple things to note already that I would like to mention.

The 2020 Partner for the Special Project is the German national association for electroacoustic practices, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Elektroakustische Musik. DEGEM will present the winning works in true cinema pour l’oreille setting — in the communal cinema City 46. That concert will open their four-day festival BRRRZK! in Bremen, Germany on October 1st. Also, Akousma will include this year’s First Prize work by Mélanie Frisoli in next year’s festival (as you probably know, this year’s edition was cancelled because of Covid). Many thanks to all our partners, contributors and donors for helping the CEC support the work of young and/or emerging electroacoustic artists from or based in Canada.

Sonus

Over the CEC’s 2019–20 fiscal year, thanks to a Canada Council Sector Innovation grant, the CEC implemented a number of enhancements to Sonus. For this substantial task, which vastly improves the quality of presentation and support of the artists and works, Canadian artists were the priority. Metadata was also integrated in the entire site, which greatly improves the positioning and discoverability of Sonus content and artists in online search results. This follows an earlier upgrade (made possible with the support of the SOCAN Foundation) that involved many important interface design and programming improvements, as well as the implementation of a reporting system for improved documentation and management of royalty payments to be made to SOCAN.

Now that these upgrades have been completed, the CEC will exploit the vastly improved potential of the resource for the representation of the artists whose works are found there. Promotion will be done through widespread calls for contributions and we are placing ads in key journals our target audience is likely to read. Thanks to a streamlined submission process, a plethora of minor to extensive interface improvements, a cleaner and more attractive design, improved visibility in search results and renewed promotional activities that are more assertive than before, more significant growth in new submissions is expected in the coming years.

eContact!

In January the CEC published issue 20.3 of its online journal for electroacoustic and related practices. This exciting, eclectic issue of eContact! is titled “Shortwave Radio, CD Players, the Inner Ear and Waltzing Goldfish: Medium-specific practices in sound,” and features contributions by Amanda Dawn Christie and Lukas Pearse, Nicolas Collins, Stephanie Castonguay and Kathy Kennedy, among others.

The submission deadline and production of issue 21.1 was postponed to December 2020 to allow the CEC to focus its energies on broader plans for the renewal of JTTP over the coming years and on building a multi-year Strategic Plan for the association (more on that below).

We invite CEC members to help spread the Call for Contributions to upcoming issues! I also encourage you to keep an eye on that page for information about future issues of eContact! that you or your colleagues might be interested in contributing to:

Strategic Plan 2020–2024

I am very excited to announce that the CEC Board has just recently concluded a months-long, intensive period of reflection and discussion during which it developed and set in motion an action-based Strategic Plan. This Plan is meant to clarify, realign and reinforce the core values of the association.

The Strategic Plan was drafted in April–August 2020 by the CEC Board of Directors with the Assistance of its Administrative Team, in order to fine-tune and enhance the organization’s existing activities, define new mid-term goals and reflect on directions to take in the coming four years.

The Strategic Plan details the plans and activities of the Canadian Electroacoustic Community from its current fiscal year through to mid-2024, when the 25th edition of JTTP (project for young/emerging electroacoustic artists) and the publication of the 25th volume of eContact! will coincide.

For reasons of time, I’ll read only the Executive Summary of the four-year Strategic Plan developed by the CEC Board in 2020 for the period June 2020 – May 2024. The full version of the Strategic Plan also includes an updated “About the CEC” text, Mission, Vision and Value Statements, Strategic Orientations and a series of Operating Plans, or initiatives, that will help the CEC achieve its goals. The Plan will be published to the CEC website and I will talk more about that in the October 2020 edition of eFlash!, the newsletter for CEC members. I look forward to sharing more details about this exciting new development with you all.

Closing Remarks

Thanks to all, CEC members and anyone else listening in for your presence at the CEC’s 2020 AGM. Thanks are also due to Boca del Lupo in Vancouver for hosting the online meeting and making the AGM possible.

I would now like to invite Shawn Pinchbeck to inform our members about the CEC’s financial situation with his Treasurer’s Report.

Myriam Boucher
President of the CEC Board
Montréal. Friday, 18 September 2020

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