eFlash! 2024-09

2024 AGM — Annual General Meeting / AGA 2024 — Assemblée générale annuelle

President’s Report / Rapport du président

Index & Agenda | Treasurer’s Report

President’s Report for the CEC’s 2023–24 Fiscal Year

The audio recording of this year’s AGM is available here in M4A format.

[9:35] First I’d like to thank all of the Board members for everything that they have done for us over the last years. And I would also like to thank all the Board members for stepping up for the coming year, we really appreciate your contributions.

Overview of Activities

JTTP

[9:55] The cornerstones of the annual President’s Report are the same from year to year, more or less. Starting with JTTP, the results of which are intensely hot off the press.

JTTP Prizes

1. Dominic Sambucco — re.azioni (2023 / 5:48)
2. Mikael Meunier-Bisson — musicfriend (2024 / 8:18)
3. Michael Lukaszuk — Obsession (2024 / 6:32)
4. Alejandro Sajgalik — Novae I (2024 / 10:48)
5. Alex Matterson — Firmament (2024 / 9:00)

JTTP Thematic Awards

The Hildegard Westerkamp Award for soundscape and sound installation
Findlay Sontag — Pushpull (2024 / 7:35)

The Micheline Coulombe Saint-Marcoux Award for self-identified female or non-binary electroacoustic artists
Marie-Andrée Pellerin — Close Conversations of Other Kinds (2022 / 11:00)

The Jean Piché Award for videomusic, new media and creative coding
Dominic Sambucco — re.azioni (2023 / 5:48)

The Martin Gotfrit and Martin Bartlett Award for live electroacoustic practices
Nicolas Bourgeois — Nœuds au ventre (2024 / 9:47)

The Barry Truax Award for Environmental or Ecological Audio Practices
Rob Gill — HPB9 — composition2 (2024 / 19:12)

The Yves Gigon Award for the Most Outrageous Electroacoustic Work
Philippe Macnab-Séguin — Gone for Eggs (2024 / 23:30)

The jef chippewa Award for Indigenous Cultural Background
sylvi macCormac — Brother Bear: Russell Wallace Qekiyeksut (2024 / 8:06)

JTTP 2023 Residencies

Since 2021, the CEC partners with institutions in Canada and abroad who offer minimum two-week residencies to a JTTP prizewinner or thematic award recipient. For the 2023 edition, CMMAS — Centro Mexicano para la Mùsica y las Artes Sonoras hosted the Hildegard Westerkamp thematic award recipient Kristian North in late May through early June 2024, and the Akademie der Künste hosted Jules Bastin-Fontaine from 2–16 June 2024, in a collaborative residency with Lily Koslow.

JTTP Concerts

As is tradition since 2014, Akousma presented the first prize work in October last year, Julie Delisle’s Pipa aura Suichi (2023). Additionally, all prizewinners and thematic award recipients had their JTTP 2023 works presented at the Sound Days festival in Liepaja (Latvia). Many thanks to the CEC’s Treasurer Shawn Pinchbeck for helping set that up! This initiative helped the CEC connect with artists from the Baltic states and several other European countries with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts (CCA; Representation and Promotion), allowing Shawn and CEC Administrator jef chippewa to attend. Mikael Meunier-Bisson has just been selected to present his JTTP 2024 second-prize-winning work musicfriend (2024) in the upcoming edition of Akousma (October 2024).

eContact!

[16:35] The CEC’s long-running journal, eContact!, is currently in a production pause due to ongoing and accumulated limitations and challenges in its financial and human resources. The decision was made in order to avoid having to compromise the quality of scope and content that the readership has grown to expect after 25 years of publication in which 81 issues have been published online. We will reassess the situation of the journal later in the year and inform CEC members at that time.

Strategic Plan

[17:13] The CEC will be transitioning from our current four-year Strategic Plan (2020–2024), to a new plan covering the coming years. More info to follow in an upcoming edition of the bi-monthly online newsletter for CEC members, eFlash!

CEC Patron

[17:40] Al Mattes has stepped down as CEC Patron after many years of service to the community in this role. We are very grateful to Al for his many years of participation with the CEC and everything that he has offered to us and to the community over the years. Thanks to a Focus Group assembled specifically for the task of selecting a new CEC Patron, we able to find a successor for Al. Please welcome the new CEC Patron, a person most of us are familiar with and many of us have known, met or certainly been influenced by his work, Barry Truax. [Applause]

[18:52] Barry Truax spoke a bit about his career and thanked the CEC for the honour.

We also wanted to invite Kevin Austin to say a few words about Barry, who is an Honorary member since 2019–20 and founding member (1986) of the CEC, and that will follow the President’s and Treasurer’s Reports. 1[1. This was in fact done following the Treasurer’s Report as that began immediately after the President’s Report without pause.]

In Memoriam

[27:00] This year saw the passing of two of the most important figures of Canada’s “founding generation” of electroacoustic composers and pedagogues: Francis Dhomont (d. 28 December 2023) and alcides lanza (d. 17 July 2024). Both are losses that are deeply felt across the community.

On a personal note, both Francis and alcides have had a significant impact on my musical development over the years, both directly (I was fortunate to have been taught by alcides during my undergraduate degree at McGill in the early 1990s), and indirectly: it was my early encounters with the music of both Dhomont and his students that first inspired my passion for electroacoustic music.

They will both be deeply missed and it’s a real loss for the community.

Conclusion

[28:28] In closing, I would like to thank a number of people who helped the CEC get this meeting in place: Eldad Tsabary, the Music Department and AV Department at Concordia University for hosting and providing technical assistance for the CEC’s 2024 AGM; the Ontario branch of the Canadian Music Centre and its Regional Director Joseph Glaser for hosting the CEC’s first satellite AGM venue in Toronto; and Steven Webb for his essential role in coordinating the satellite event.

I would also like to thank all CEC members for their continued support of the association, and thank you to those in attendance or listening in for their presence at the CEC’s 2024 AGM.

I would now like to invite Shawn Pinchbeck to present his Treasurer’s Report for the 2023–24 fiscal year.