Minimalism for Modular #2: Ann Southam's "Rivers"

I’ve been playing Ann Southam’s exquisite pieces on the piano for a few months, and have been discovering lots of ideas in them that could be applied to a modular system.
This video is also a tribute to a composer who should be as much a household name as Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and Terry Riley are.

0:00 Introduction
1:07 Rivers 1st set
4:22 Rivers 2nd set
7:18 Rivers 3rd set

Previous video in this series:    • Minimalism for Modular #I: Additive S...  
Earlier video on polychords on the Subharmonicon:    • Generative ambient on the modular (Su...  

A great starting point for those curious about Southam is Christina Petrowska-Quilico’s recording – amazingly, the only recording – of Rivers:
Christina Petrowska-Quilico, Ann Southam (Centrediscs’ Canadian Composers Portraits series, 2012); disc 1 is a documentary about Southam; discs 2 and 3 features Rivers.

Another favorite of mine is Eve Egoyan's recording of Southam's late work, Simple Lines of Enquiry:
https://eveegoyan.bandcamp.com/album/...

To listen to Southam’s electronic music, get Seastill (Furiant Records, 1999), available from Canadian Music Center:
https://cmccanada.org/shop/cd-fmdc-46...

Southam’s sheet music is also available from Canadian Music Center:
https://collections.cmccanada.org/fin...

My video draws on some excellent studies of Southam:

Amelia G. Yates, “Ann Southam's Solo Piano Music: A Performance Guide” (doctoral thesis, The University of Western Ontario, 2021):
https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/8181/

Sarah Feltham, “Middle Power Music: Modernism, Ideology, and Compromise in English Canadian Cold War Composition” (doctoral thesis, Stony Brook University, 2015):
https://repo.library.stonybrook.edu/x...

Tamara Bernstein, “Isn’t That Life, in a Way: Trying to Accommodate Dissonance?” Reflections on Lesbianism and the Life and Music of Ann Southam,” Circuit: Musiques contemporaines 31, no. 1 (2021)
https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/ci...

On Southam’s earlier, electronic music, I recommend Andra McCartney, Creating Worlds for my Music to Exist: How Women Composers of Electroacoustic Music Make Place for their Voices (MA thesis, York University, 1994): 43-53:
https://www.academia.edu/194482/Creat...

Gear used:
Expert Sleeper’s Disting EX
ALM’s Pamela’s New Workout
ALM’s MFX
ALM’s Pip Slope
Tesseract’s Step Fader II
Tesseract's Sweet Sixteen
Qu-bit’s Bloom
Doepfer’s A151 sequential switch
Acid Rain’s Junction
Dnipro’s Metamorph

Terry RILEY, 1972 photograph credit: © Bernard Perrine. All rights reserved 2023/Bridgeman Images

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